In what can be viewed as a refreshed attempt by Alphabet’s Google at breaking into the streaming music industry where players like Spotify and Apple Music rule, Google Play Music has been made the default music streaming app on Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones that have started selling in stores as of yesterday.
Spotify’s 40+ million paying users and Apple Music’s 20 million user base have been mocking Google Play Music for a long time. Considering the fact that Google owns the most prolific mobile operating system in the world, Android, the performance of its music streaming service is dismal, at best.
This year, Google is picking up where it left off with Samsung on the Galaxy S7, and once again has a deal with the company to make Google Play Music the default music streaming service on Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones.
With a sales estimate of between 43 million and 60 million for Samsung’s Galaxy S series smartphones for this year, Google may well be able to get a little more traction for Google Play Music than before.
However, the biggest problem is that a lot of the great music labels and titles are already with Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Prime Music. Apple Music, in fact, recently hit a milestone of 40 million songs on its service, an achievement they used to promote iPhone 7 after its launch last year.
But the global user base for streaming music is much more than 100 million subscribers now, and that’s just for paid services like Spotify Premium, Apple Music, Sirius XM Radio and Prime Music.
And now, even the money is starting to flow. As you can see from this chart below, more than half of the US music industry income now comes from music streaming services. You will find more statistics at Statista
$2.5 billion might not seem like a lot, but it is clearly enough to incentivize tech giants like Apple, Amazon and Google to mobilize their resources and take a stab at grabbing streaming music market share while growth is still strong.
With the global streaming music market set to almost quadruple to $9.7 billion by 2022, tech companies are realizing that this is a great way to diversify their income streams.
For a devices-heavy company like Apple Inc., it’s even more critical that they stop relying on iPhone sales as soon as possible, and move into other areas like streaming music (Apple Music) and digital wallets (Apple Pay.)
Now that streaming music has overtaken traditional methods of music distribution, services like Spotify and Apple Music are here to stay, and Google Play Music wants a piece of that action while the iron is hot.
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