Recently, Apple announced that Apple Music Live will return with a second season with a special performance by Ed Sheeran. However, the Cupertino company also accidentally revealed important information about the music streaming service that was launched in 2015.
This information is that after eight years, no artist has managed to get a billion streams on a single song. This shows the huge difference between Apple Music and Spotify. Because Spotify is constantly adding new recordings of the most listened songs. Thus proving how quickly artists can exceed one billion streams.
On Apple Music, Ed Sheeran is one of the most successful artists of all time, with over 9.5 billion streams and 240 million Shazam searches globally. The song that is closest to a billion streams is Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You. But even that is 70 million away from 1 billion rests.
Spotify made us understand the difference between the user bases of Spotify and Apple Music by offering a Blend playlist where you can combine your musical tastes with Miley Cyrus. Blend is a collaborative playlist that brings together music that you and others in the Blend playlist are listening to. It is updated daily according to your listening activities. Users who join Blend can also add their own friends.
Spotify used this list as Miley Cyrus’ Flowers song broke the record for the fastest song to reach 1 billion streams in the history of the platform. For comparison, Flowers was released four months ago and currently has over 1 billion streams. On the other hand, Apple Music’s most popular song still has not achieved this success.
According to the MIdIA report, in the first half of 2022, Spotify had about 190 million subscribers, while Apple Music had almost 85 million users. As proud as Apple Music is with its user base, it seems like the company needs to put more emphasis on popular songs to keep up with this war.
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