Matti Robinson
9 May 2019 11:09
Google has some massive services that reach hundreds of millions or even billions of people. Whether it is the all-encompassing search or Gmail, millions upon millions of people around the world use them.
Where the Mountain View, CA, company hasn't managed to succeed yet? Paid entertainment.
Bloomberg reports that Google's and YouTube's paid music streaming services, Google Play Music and YouTube Music, have only 15 million subscribers, combined.
This is a far cry from market leading Spotify, who've just passed 100 million paid subscribers, and even from the U.S. #1 Apple Music, which is north of 50 million and racking up record profits to Cupertino.
YouTube, or Google as a whole, hasn't revealed their subscription figures officially, so this might be a little off. However, it doesn't seem that Google is even in the same ballpark with the market leaders.
What Google did reveal, though, is that they've increased their subscriptions by 60 percent since last year's March to this March. With the aggressive marketing (read: bothering, I'm sure you've been presented with the YouTube popups), you would imagine they'd get more than 5 to 6 million new subscribers from a huge 2 billion people YouTube audience.
For comparison, Spotify increased their paid subscribers between 2018Q1 and 2019Q1 by 25 million.