Even though Spotify has been the largest streaming service for some time, but that hasn’t slowed down their growth. The Sweden-based company announced they had 30 million paying subscriber last March, and have already nearly doubled that in a year’s time according to yesterday's tweet announcement. So much for plateauing.
Meanwhile, Apple Music announced it had 20 million paying subscribers as of December of 2016, so even if they outpaced their earlier 1 million-per-month growth rate, they’d still be way behind Spotify. Of course, Apple Music has one thing Spotify does’t: money. Spotify hasn’t been profitable any year of its existence, and while Apple Music isn’t profitable either, they have their parent company Apple’s insane cash reserves to keep them going indefinitely.
Spotify has been rumored to be preparing to go public this year, which should greatly boost their cash reserves. They recently began testing a high fidelity lossless audio option to rival TIDAL’s.
