• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, June 11, 2015

So Spotify has 20m subscribers and 70m active users, up from 15m and 60m half a year ago. Impressive stuff, but I would still be very fearful of Apple Music if I were them. Although the first thing on many peoples' minds when Apple launched "another" music streaming service was whether the world really needs another place to listen to stream songs, there are a few very strong things going for Apple Music.

The most obvious point is that Apple's reach is huge. Estimates vary, but a general consensus is that there are 500m iPhones, 200 iPads and around 100m iPods out there. Maybe not all will be recent enough purchases to support Apple Music -- that remains to be seen -- but there will still be hundreds of millions of devices that will be able to run the app. Many of these are likely to have the app appear once they installed the iOS 9 update later on this year, even if they don't choose to try out the service when it launches later this month. 

The radio part of the service I don't really get. How can you have a global radio station? Don't listeners want some interaction with presenters who are at least from the same country. If there are no presenters, then it could just become a playlist? We'll see, but I'm not convinced.

However, where the service will hit it out of the proverbial park is not just that it will automatically be in the hands of many millions of consumers -- it will also weed out those who want a free ride and are infuriating artists and record companies. Being paid a tiny fraction of a penny for streams is clearly not appeasing artists like Taylor Swift or their record companies. However, a service that quite simply says you can pay up after your month's trial or ship out is bound to be more lucrative for established artists. A really nice touch appears to be a social platform within the service through which bands and artists can reach out to fans on the same page their music can be checked out. Another obvious point is that we're talking videos here too, so it's a potential iTube Pro killer.

In essence, there's not a whole lot of new stuff with Apple Music. It's more like the brand has brought different elements together -- listening to music, viewing videos, Internet radio and social interaction with bands and fellow fans. If this doesn't develop into a platform to use Apple Pay to buy merchandise and gig tickets too, I'd be very surprised.

There is probably not enough there to make someone give up their Spotify Premium account just yet -- but when it comes up for renewal there will now be an alternative for the one in four Spotify users who pay to remove the ads. This is the only slice of the market that Apple is clearly interested in. It demonstrably has no interest in freemium, which simply annoys consumers with ads and frustrates content partners with ridiculously low returns.

So Apple won't be looking at the 70m active users Spotify can lay claim to, but rather its 20m subscribers. Giving away music to tens of millions of people for peanuts is not what Apple is interested in. If it can combat its innate sense of greed (who else would take a third of an app's sale price) and give content providers a fair deal it will be easy to see subscribers switching away from Spotify unless the Swedish company can offer a package that allows artists to only be available on its Premium service -- a current limitation that artists have publicly criticised.

The simple truth is that if Apple becomes the channel that looks after artists' interests, then they will back it and take their content there, possibly to the cost of freemium services elsewhere. If that happens, there is only one way this battle is going to go because music fans pay for content, not apps.