Amazon has over 55 million active users across its six different Music service tiers, “nearly all” of whom are paying subscribers.

The milestone was reported exclusively in The Financial Times—I can’t find another source for this information, including from Amazon itself—and it shatters the previous usage milestones that the firm provided. For example, in July 2019, we learned that Amazon Music was growing at a much faster clip than Spotify and Apple Music, the market leaders, and had, at the time, about 32 million subscribers. And previous to that, eMarketer said that it expected Amazon Music to close out 2019 with about 35 million subscribers.

That prediction was way off the mark: Amazon Music has 55 million active users overall, and while some are using the free tier, most of them are paying subscribers. In fact, its most successful offering is its premium Amazon Music Unlimited service.

“Amazon doesn’t talk numbers that much,” Amazon’s Steve Boom told the publication. “We felt like getting to this level of scale was something worth talking about.”

He’s right. With 55 million users, Amazon is poised to overtake Apple Music and its 60 million subscribers to become the second-biggest music streaming service in the world, behind only Spotify, which reported having 113 million paying subscribers and 248 million total monthly users last September.

While much of Amazon’s success surely comes from its ubiquitous online presence and successful Prime service, Mr. Boom credits it on the company’s diverse set of offerings, each of which is designed to reach different classes of customers. It also aggressively undercuts its competitors on pricing: Its service that competes most directly with Spotify and Apple Music costs just $8 per month for those with Prime accounts, compared to $10 for those services. And people who own an Amazon Echo smart speaker pay as little as $4 per month.

Tagged with Amazon Music, Apple Music