According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is on track to overtake Spotify in U.S. paid subscribers, a sign that the three-year-old music service is making serious inroads in a highly competitive landscape. The report states that Apple Music has been gaining U.S. subscribers at a 3 percent higher clip than Spotify, a trend that would give Apple's music service a higher subscriber rate by the summer, assuming it continues.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. While it’s hard to know for sure how many subscribers Apple Music has in the U.S., it trails Spotify mightily across the rest of the globe. At last count, Apple had around 36 million subscribers worldwide, compared to Spotify’s 70 million. And that’s with a built-in marketing tool that Spotify doesn’t have: premier placement on the home screen of hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPads sold every year.
