Spotify might be close to reaching thirty million paying subscribers

The two largest music subscription services continue to grow at impressive rates. Spotify now has nearly 30 million subscribers around the world. While a company representative declined to comment on both the subscriber count and what constitutes “nearly” 30 million, Billboard has confirmed through a source that the information in a Financial Times’ article published today (Feb. 16) is generally accurate. The article did not cite the number of Spotify’s monthly users that combine subscribers with users of the free service. The last subscriber milestone, announced by Spotify last June, put its subscribers at 20 million. That number had surpassed 25 million by the end of the year, although the exact amount was unknown. While a hard number is still unknown, this new information suggests Spotify’s growth has accelerated since the beginning of 2016. Subscriptions are growing on a second front. A week earlier, Apple executives Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue announced Apple Music passed 11 million subscribers on John Gruber’s podcast, The Talk Show. It had 10 million at the end of the year, having gained all of them since the first free trials ended at the end of September. These updates say two important things about the growth of subscription services.