Apple Music hits 50 million users, doubles down on original content

Apple Music is growing, and growing fast. In a recent appearance on Bloomberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed the service’s latest subscriber numbers. In total, Apple Music now boasts 50 million users, a figure that includes both paid members and trial memberships. In April, Apple declared that it had 40 million paid subscribers.

If Apple Music’s growth remains on this trajectory — which shows the service adding around 4 million paid members a month since at least January 2018 — Apple will be on track to reach 60 million paid users by the holiday season. These numbers are quite impressive, especially considering the service only launched three years ago. And considering that Spotify was founded eight years before Apple and is currently slated to reach around 90 million paid subscribers by the same time period, it seems that Apple Music is indeed quickly gaining ground.

Cook also suggested that moving forward, Apple will be investing more heavily in entertainment outside of music, including in original content.

“We are very interested in the content business. We will be playing in a way that is consistent with our brand,” Cook told Bloomberg. “We’re not ready to give any details on it yet. But it’s clearly an area of interest.”

Last year, reports suggested that Apple was planning to spend around $1 billion in original video programming, a number that pales in comparison to Netflix’s $8 billion figure. But now, it seems that Apple will blow past its original budget. Indeed, the company has suggested recently that it has already outdone Facebook and YouTube in their own original content spends, and has also outbid Netflix for some projects.

As Apple Insider notes, much of the company’s spending has happened in the last few months. Since October, Apple has signed deals to produce 12 projects, including nine “straight-to-series” orders, which mean that there was no pilot produced ahead of time. Apple is also doubling down on its content efforts by signing a lease for a new office in Culver City, California, which is slated to become the content headquarters. As per a report from Variety, this building is slated to open in late 2019, and is close to another production facility that Apple has been linked to since 2017.

So if you’re looking for a new music, television, or movie fix, soon, you may be looking straight at Apple.