Apple Music Was Supposed to Kill Spotify. So How Come It's Thriving?

It's the eternal 'Hassle Factor' lesson of marketing on the net: once you lock an audience in, it's very hard for them to let go.

The emotional cost of having to switch, learn a new system and all that administrivia is just more of an intangible price than consumers want to pay. Oh, and it doesn't hurt when your service download is free. JL

Dan Frommer reports in Quartz:

(Spotify)’s still in the top 20 downloads every day in the US—a great place to live, often ahead of apps like Twitter, Netflix, WhatsApp, and Uber.

Apple Music, the company’s long-awaited streaming music service, launched one month ago. So far, two things are clear: Apple Music was a bit rushed, and Spotify, the leading independent streaming service, is doing just fine—for now, at least.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg’s Joshua Brustein smartly checked in on Spotify’s download ranks in the App Store. He noticed that the week after Apple Music’s launch was Spotify’s best in a long time, with several days in the top 10 most-downloaded free apps. Here’s an update:

Since then, Spotify’s daily download rank has fallen slightly, to an average of about no. 13 in July, according to data from App Annie, a service that tracks app stores. But it’s still in the top 20 every day in the US—a great place to live, often ahead of apps like Twitter, Netflix, WhatsApp, and Uber.

Globally, Spotify ranks in the top 10 free iOS apps in 22 countries and in the top 100 in 55 countries, based on an average of four days of App Annie data from July. Also good numbers.

Discussion about Spotify continues on Twitter, too. While tweets mentioning Apple Music spiked on its launch day, they have since declined; Spotify is ahead most days, according to Topsy, a social-media analytics tool that Apple acquired in 2013.

Of course, nobody knows the longer-term impact Apple Music will have on Spotify or the streaming market. Apple has more money, but Spotify may be too big to squash. And anyway, most smartphone owners still aren’t paying for—or using—either of them. While more than 1 billion smartphones will be sold this year, Spotify boasts “just” 75 million active users and 20 million paying subscribers.

Apple Music has plentyof opportunity to attract new streamers, but so does Spotify. (And Google’s YouTube, which is bigger than both.) So far, at least, Spotify’s brand and user-experience seem to be holding up.