A Look at Apple Music One Year After Its Launch

Is the industry moving away from single downloads?

ByABC News
June 30, 2016, 7:25 AM

— -- Apple entered the music streaming market one year ago today as a big fish in what was otherwise a relatively small pond occupied by one major player: Spotify.

One year later, and with a cleaner redesign that debuted earlier this month at the Worldwide Developer's Conference, Apple says its streaming service has 15 million paid subscribers. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek tweeted in March his service has 30 million paid subscribers.

"In the context of paid music services, it has been successful," Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told ABC News of Apple's first year. "It hasn’t been without its growing pains though."

Moorhead pointed to the "the user interface as being confusing" as one reason why the service may have turned some people off in the first year. However, he said he's noticed a positive reaction to Apple Music's new look, which debuts with iOS 10 this fall.

While Apple was late to the music streaming game, it entered the market with one huge advantage: With more than 800 million iTunes accounts, Apple Music has the opportunity to win converts who already use Apple for music.

On-demand music streaming is also growing, with 317.2 billion streams last year, according to Nielsen data. That's nearly double the previous year, which saw 164.5 billion songs streamed.

"This is the next step in the transformation of the music industry. It is going to grow and get bigger a lot quicker [in more developed areas] and that is because we have the infrastructure, meaning faster wireless services and more available Wi-Fi," Moorhead said. "This is absolutely where the industry is going, even to the dismay of some people in the music industry."