World's Top Music Label Claims Apple Music and Streaming Growth Slows

Universal Music Group (UMG), the world’s largest music label, has announced a downturn in subscriber growth for music streaming services such as Apple Music. While UMG points this as a temporary issue, industry analysts warn it might demonstrate a more lasting change in the market. The music industry comes across new challenges everyday as it moves away from a phase of instant expansion. .

UMG’s Statement on Apple Music and Other Streaming Platforms   

A Bloomberg report says that UMG’s CFO, Boyd Muir, stated the company had to address the problem following the declaration of disappointing revenue from streaming music services.

“Subscription revenue saw a deceleration in growth. Large partners who have been less successful in driving global adoption have seen a slowdown in new subscriber additions,” Muir explained to analysts.

This shows enough revenue in streaming service growth, with platforms owned by Apple and Amazon, in specific, struggling to attract new subscribers.

UMg’s shares have fallen by 30%, but the company has reported this decline as a short-term issue anticipated to be resolved in the coming months. To address this trend, music companies are adopting price-cutting strategies, such as layoffs and restructuring. Although labels are cheerful that the slowdown is temporary, the industry is currently looking for new income sources and strategies to maintain improvement.

New Pricing tiers for streaming music are introduced to help a boost, as labels get an important percentage of the subscription fees. However, Spotify’s long-awaited lossless tier has yet to be released, and Apple is offering it for free. 

Additionally, 9to5Mac reports that Apple Music’s subscriber numbers have not been modernized openly since 2019, when they reached 60 million. Before, the company declared milestones for every 10 million subscribers, proposing that count may still be under 70 million after five years. 

This is not unique to Apple Music, as Spotify and Amazon Music are also seeing a compressing in their development curves. Nonetheless, the music industry has not officially accepted this slowdown.