Why Apple Music became a success in the United States -- and how they were able to get me back as a fellow subscriber

The 'For You' section of the Apple Music app on my iPhone 6s. And yes, I listen to Jeremy Renner. In fact, today is his birthday!!

Spotify has been the crown jewel as the biggest music streaming service in the world. It had also been the most subscribed to music service in the US as well. But unfortenely, things change, and High Nobelity and Retuers reported that Apple Music had beaten Spotify in terms of paying subscribers. But this doesn't neseciarly mean that Spotify is not used as much anymore in the States. Spotify offers a free tier, which allows people to listen to their favorite music in a limited-shuffle mode, with select six daily mixes to enjoy on-demand. Apple Music doesn't offer this, and have, in past years, been agressive with record labels to take off their music on Spotify in order to sway people to Apple Music.

But Apple Music still isn't beating Spotify globaly despite the service being available in many more countries than Spotify. Apple reported about 60 million subscribers globally, while Spotify reported in 2019 that they had 248 million monthly active users, with 113 million of it's MAUs paying for it's premium services, about 45.7%.

A big part for Apple Music being popular in the States is that iPhone market share is very large, even more than all of the Android phone makers used in the US, and Complex reported that their was 101 million active iPhones in the US, which would make about 27.8% of the so-called iPhone-gang users, an Apple Music subscriber. And Apple Music is installed on the iPhone, which would be impossible to remove unless if you jailbreak your device.

Now that we have talked about Apple's success in the US, we should now talk about how they were finally able to get me back as a fellow subscriber. Here's my story, it's long, so I hope you enjoy reading:

Orginally I didn't have a cell phone at the time. I had mainly just listened to music on my computer, while listening to plain vanilla radio in my car. I became an Apple Music subscriber in December 2016, but I was forced to cancel my subscription in September 2017 as my mom decided to enforce some stupid ass censorship rules. After that, I just was stuck listening to Pandora and YouTube. Pandora has become nothing but an ad-mine now, which explains why they are losing millions of listeners every year. YouTube is great on the computer, but it's a total piece of garbage on the mobile phone, as YouTube has introduced YouTube Premium (formely YouTube Red) which offers an ad-free YouTube experience, plus YouTube Music, and with the added bonus of Google Play Music, which was scheduled to be shut down in late 2019, but appreantly this was not the case. YouTube Premium lets you listen in the background with the added benefit of YT Music and GPM. But this option would be more approiate for Android users, as all three of these apps are pre-installed on Android devices. I decided to instead pay for my music, kind of what my mom does with Netflix and Hulu to enjoy our Stranger Things and Runaways, so in August 2018, I started to pay for Spotify. Then, in August 2019, I canceled my Spotify subscription in favor of Apple Music. But why would I do this? As previously mentioned, it comes pre-installed on Apple devices, and I have recently moved over to an iPhone. The Apple Music integration on the iPhone works flawlessly well, and has made things easier for me.

Although my Apple Music library will be slightly different than my Spotify library, there are apps like SongShift that can migrate my music from Spotify over to Apple Music, so it really isn't the end of the world after all.

There is a possibility I could go back to Spotify, but Apple Music has become my new source for music, but you never know what happens. With me pre-ordering Arctic Dogs on iTunes for $15, plus paying for a VPN for $9 a month to watch the BBC, because we don't get BBC America anymore, along with a $1/month for 50 GB iCloud storage, it will be a lot to put on my plate. But hopefully, I can manage this, and I will be ordering $50 in iTunes credit in March in order to continue paying for these services. And for Christmas 2020, I plan on getting an iPhone 8 for Christmas, which will be able to run iOS 14 and more than likely iOS 15, as well. Thanks guys, but I've been swayed over to Apple. It has been great to be with Android and Google for a long-served time, but as I said, things change, and now it's time for me to move on.