Apple Music Spiralling Down

Posted by Kirhat | Wednesday, October 28, 2015 | | 0 comments »

Apple Music and Spotify
For months now, Apple has tried hard and fought with all they got to pry away users from popular services like Spotify and Pandora. However, a recent study suggests that Apple Music may be fighting a far more uphill battle than many originally understood.

In the frenetic, here-today-gone-tomorrow tech sector, staying power is a rare trait, even for the most powerful companies.

Within a short period of time, the months-old rivalry between Apple Music and privately held on-demand streaming leader Spotify promises no shortage of fireworks as it progresses. Unfortunately for Apple followers who were hoping to see a quick and neat defeat of Spotify at the hands of the industry's original heavyweight, recent data suggest that Spotify might enjoy a more durable competitive position that many realized.

A few days ago, the results of a survey conducted by MusicWatch, a music industry survey and analysis firm, claimed that as many as 48 percent of Apple Music users had tried and subsequently left the nascent streaming service.

Apple officially refuted this number, claiming 79 percent of Apple Music users still used the service. Between the myriad of ways a company can define and "active" user, it is not clear whether Apple's figure or MusicWatch's might be more precise. However, since the survey results were self-reported by the end users themselves, it is doubtful that they reflect a reasonably accurate representation of real long-term usage behavior.
To arrive at this conclusion, MusicWatch reportedly surveyed over 5,000 U.S. consumers ages 13 and older, weighing the composition of those surveyed to closely resemble the U.S. population.

In addition to the above key finding, the study also unearthed several additional interesting data points, including:
  • 77 percent of U.S. iOS users knew of Apple Music and 11 percent were currently using the service at the time of the survey.
  • 64 percent of current Apple Music trial users described themselves as either "extremely likely" or "very likely" to convert to paying members at their trial period's expiration. However, in a seeming contradiction, 61 percent of trial users also reported having turned off the auto-renew option in Apple Music as well.
  • 28 percent of Spotify Premium users also reported using Apple Music. However, only 11 percent of ad-supported Spotify free users and 6 percent of Pandora users were users of Apple Music.
Viewed this way, Apple Music's reportedly strong start seems far less meaningful an indicator of the product's ultimate success than previously understood. It also begs the question of whether Apple will be able to regain the ground it lost by remaining overly fixated on its legacy digital-ownership model even as streaming redefined the industry.

Apple sought to capitalize on arguably Spotify's greatest weakness - curated content - by emphasizing Apple Music's song discovery capabilities. However, with the rollout of new discovery features like Discovery Weekly, Fresh Finds, and internally developed playlists, it appears Spotify might have effectively countered Apple's initial user-acquisition strategy. More broadly, this new data also raises the concern that Apple might be on the losing end of a phenomenon it has long used to curb competitors to its walled-garden mobile ecosystem - switching costs.

0 comments

Post a Comment