Apple Says A Lot Of People Are Still Using Apple Music

What’s 79% of 11 million?

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Last week, Apple gave us an early look at its subscriber numbers for Apple Music, announcing that the streaming service had amassed 11 million members as it neared the halfway point of its free three-month trial period. That's an impressive number, particularly if Apple is able to convert a significant number of those trial members into paying subscribers come October.

On Tuesday afternoon, Apple released another Apple Music metric, this time in response to a MusicWatch survey of 5,000 respondents that suggested nearly half of the service's trial members had stopped using it. Rebutting the research outfit's claim of 48% attrition, Apple said that 79% of people who signed up for the Apple Music trial continue to use the service on a weekly basis. So, extrapolating from the 11 million–member trial number from last week, Apple Music may be used by as many as 8.7 million listeners in a given week. That's a pretty big number, considering the service only launched on June 30.

Of course, these are still trial members we're counting. Apple Music's real test comes this fall when its free trial ends and the first monthly payments begin.

"We are going to work together to reconcile differences in the numbers," Russ Crupnick, managing partner of MusicWatch, told BuzzFeed News when reached for comment on the discrepancies between the two figures. "As you can imagine different methodologies and interpretation can lead to different results."

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