Apple Music hits 20 million paying subscribers

Apple Music is continuing to pick up subscribers at a strong pace, as the company confirms to Billboard that the streaming service has crossed the milestone of 20 million paying subscribers. Apple said it had 17 million subscribers three months ago, 13 million in April, and 11 million in February. Spotify is still significantly ahead with over 40 million users, but Apple Music has only been available for a year and a half.

Over 50 percent of Apple Music users are outside the US, and over 60 percent of them haven’t bought anything on the iTunes store in 12 months or more; Apple services SVP Eddy Cue says that “the vast majority are new customers.” Apple Music saw a major revamp alongside iOS 10 this fall.

“Of course we want more and we want it to go faster — we’re hungry!” Cue adds. “We can’t forget that, as an industry, we still have very few music subscribers. There are billions of people listening to music and we haven’t even hit 100 million subscribers. There’s a lot of growth opportunity.”