Apple Music has never published its streaming numbers. In an industry where plays and listener counts get treated like quarterly earnings, that's a deliberate non-move. Oliver Schusser, Vice President of Apple Music & International Content, talked through the reasoning recently. Apple's been in music for over
Spotify's Q1 numbers were good. 761 million monthly active users, up 12% year over year. Premium subscribers at 293 million. Revenue of €4.5 billion, operating income of €715 million, free cash flow of €824 million. All Q1 records. By any normal reading, this is a company doing
Apple Music doubled its fraud penalties. The music industry's first criminal case just ended in a guilty plea. The pressure is coming from multiple directions now. The first criminal conviction Michael Smith made over $8 million streaming his own AI-generated songs to himself. Now he's facing
Suno just crossed $300 million in annual recurring revenue and 2 million paid subscribers. It got there in two years. CEO Mikey Shulman posted the numbers on LinkedIn in late February, two years after the platform launched. Over 100 million people have used Suno since then. Three months ago, the
In January 2026, X filed an antitrust lawsuit against 18 music publishers and the NMPA, claiming publishers weaponized the DMCA's takedown process to pressure the platform into industry-wide licensing deals at inflated rates. Sony, Universal, and Warner are all named. The NMPA started sending thousands of takedown notices
The example Söderström gave on the Q4 earnings call this week: an engineer opens Slack on their commute, tells Claude to fix a bug in the iOS app, and walks into the office to a waiting build. Not a demo. That's the actual workflow. The internal system is
