• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, July 2, 2019

Streaming video and music/audio platforms have learned a lot when it comes to giving back to customers. We speak of the art of returns and/or cancellations.

The news is that Apple Music has now passed 60 million subscribers, up around 20% since May 2018. This includes paid and free trial customers.

Spotify, the global market leader in music-streaming subscriptions — has 100 million paid subscribers as of first quarter 2019, which includes free trials. Overall, it has 217 million, when including ad-supported users, up 26% year over year.

Looking at digital video platforms, Netflix also offers a free trial. Netflix now has 139 million paid members worldwide — 148 million including free trials.

Month-to-month digital media analysts continue to follow “churn” issues — entertainment consumers who drop or add services. A 2018 Parks Associates report says about 18% of U.S. broadband households cancel an OTT video service over a 12-month period — a rate held steady for the past three years.

But not everything is equal: Netflix and Hulu have the lowest churn rate of all OTT platforms, around 5% to 7%.

Overall, there is a certain level of inertia that keeps consumers. Until recently, that reality has also been true for regular pay TV services, cable, satellite and telco. Now, those traditional media services have cord-cutting issues.

In the past, pay TV providers made it difficult for consumers to leave. A noted, high-profile 2014 news story featuring a Comcast consumer-service executive gave one subscriber a hard time for wanting to drop Comcast. The good news is we haven’t heard much about these issues recently.

For its part, Comcast made a concerted effort to address such issues since then.

More good news: When it comes to new digital video services — video, music and otherwise — many services actively advertise to customers that they can leave a service whenever they like. No problem, no hassle.

All this makes sense in the new world of consumer marketing, where the overall retail world is big on easy returns. Even Amazon has recognized this. The days of looking for packing tape, stamps, postage and boxes to send stuff back to Amazon are over. Just drive to a Kohl’s store and return. No problem.

How will the upcoming new services from Walt Disney, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia address cancellations? Maybe they can riff on an old Priceline.com theme: Name your own return.