Indie artist’s guide to Apple Music
While it’s important to not focus on any one streaming service for your music promotion Apple Music, as one of the top earning streaming platforms, should not be ignored. Here we provide an artist’s guide to navigating America’s #2 streaming service.
By Greg Majewski of the DIY Musician Blog
When promoting your music, it’s important that you NOT put all your focus on a single streaming service. Your fans aren’t all in the same place; listening is fragmented across numerous platforms, including Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and Apple Music.
Any promo message you share with your entire audience should acknowledge that fact, and Apple Music should be featured alongside other popular services. That’s because as of 2020, Apple Music is second to Spotify in overall subscribers. The numbers break down like this:
- Spotify: 144+ million paid subscribers
- Apple Music: 72+ million paid subscribers
Apple Music was also one of the top revenue sources for CD Baby artists in 2020.
How can you make sure you’re making the most of your presence on Apple Music? We’ll get to that. But first, a little history.
How did Apple Music start?
As its name suggests, Apple Music is the music streaming branch of Apple, the tech company responsible for the Macintosh computer, iPhone, iPad and other various gadgets with hundreds of millions of users the world over. You might also remember an old program called iTunes. Apple Music is a spiritual successor to that too, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
The genesis of Apple Music began with Apple’s purchase of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre’s company Beats Electronics — and with it Beats Music — in May 2014. Beats Music had launched as a streaming service earlier that year and had amassed a library of more than 20 million songs.
One year after its purchase of Beats, Apple merged Beats Music’s library with its own Internet radio service iTunes Radio. Apple announced its new music streaming service in early June 2015, and officially launched Apple Music at the end of that month.
Within its first six months, Apple Music had surpassed 10 million users. By mid-2019, it had reached its latest major marker of 60 million users, beating Spotify in paid subscribers.
Why should I distribute to Apple Music?
That last milestone is significant because unlike Spotify, Apple Music only offers paid subscriptions. Any paid subscription service will pay more for streams compared to a platform that offers a free streaming option.
The other major reason to get your music on Apple Music is simply a numbers game: since it’s pre-installed on all Apple devices, Apple Music has a built-in potential user base. Considering Apple CEO Tim Cook’s report in early 2020 that there are 1.5 billion active iOS devices, that’s a lot of potential Apple Music users! Especially since Apple offers a free three-month trial to entice new users into subscribing. Don’t ignore that huge market of users. Get your music on Apple Music.
How do I send my music to Apple Music?
Okay! Now that we’ve convinced