Apple’s streaming music service Apple Music has hit 10 million subscribers, according to a new report.

The Financial Times (FT) quotes the proverbial people familiar with the matter and notes that it is a milestone that took its arch-rival Spotify AG six years to reach.

It’s not clear from the report if the 10 million figure is total subscribers including those on a three-month trial period or just those who are currently paying for the service; by comparison, Spotify, which offers a free-to-listen ad-supported membership tier, had 75 million subscribers, of which 20 million were paying as of June 2015, a figure that is likely to be significantly higher today.

“It’s good news that Apple is making streaming work, but it is also going to accelerate the decline of downloads,” music industry analyst Mark Mulligan told FT, before adding that Apple was rapidly gaining on Spotify, and at its current growth rate had “the potential to be the leading music subscription service sometime in 2017.”

Chill pill

While the 10 million figure for Apple, presuming they’re all paying customers, is impressive, it should be noted that, potentially, Spotify probably has somewhere around 90 to 100 million users today and something in the vicinity of 25 to 30 million paying subscribers. And it built that number up from the early days of the streaming music market, unlike Apple, which entered a marketplace where streaming services were not only well established, but with much wider consumer recognition.

The growth of Apple Music, again if the number is accurate, is significant as it comes after it failed to rate in the top 10 global music streaming services in the third quarter of 2015, but it may also signify Apple’s exclusive access to music from a number of artists, the most significant being Taylor Swift, who provided streaming access to her 1989 World Tour Live video along with her entire back catalog, one of the few advantages Apple Music has over the otherwise far better platform offered by Spotify.

No matter what the actual number of subscribers Apple has for the service, there’s no question that despite being late to the space, the launch of Apple Music has been at least successful for Apple in terms of giving it a foothold in the streaming music market at a time where digital MP3 sales, a space that Apple has dominated through its iTunes, continue to plummet, having dropped 12.5 percent to 964.8 million units in 2015 – a decline from 2014’s 1.1 billion units.

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