Apple Music burst on to the music streaming service scene last June and have since become one of the most successful streamers in the world, but this isn’t stopping Spotify’s growth.

Spotify are one of, if not the most successful music streaming service in the world with over 100 millions users and 30 million paying subscribers. In less than a year Apple have been catching up, amassing more than an incredible 13 million subscribers in less than a year – for comparison Tidal launched early last year and has around 3 million subscribers.

Though you might assume this increased competition would harm Spotify it turns out it’s having the opposite effect. A vice president at Spotify, Jonathan Forster told Reuters: “It’s great that Apple is in the game. They are definitely raising the profile of streaming. It is hard to build an industry on your own.

“Since Apple Music started we’ve been growing quicker and adding more users than before. It would be terrible if we were just taking each other’s users or to learn there was just a ceiling of 100 million users – I don’t think that is the case.”

music streaming growth Apple Music
Jonathan Forster, Vice-President of Spotify Europe

Forster went on to say that he didn’t believe the current streaming landscape was sustainable with multiple services. He said: “My internet history would tell me that there’s probably not going to be that many significant players, and then maybe smaller niche cases. It’s a hard business”

Spotify have faced criticism from the industry for its freemium model, which some artists and labels say devalues music. Spotify have remained firm on their decision to have a free platform with optional paid subscriptions for offline play, no ads and other extras. With their ever-increasing user-base Forster reported that conversion rates to Spotify Premium were still holding strong, with 25-30% of users converting to paid subscriptions.

Forster spoke on their increased growth, saying: “That should have a negative effect on the conversion rate but it hasn’t. — I think that people have really woken up to the opportunity of streaming. We can see that it is just the beginning. We’ve never grown quicker than we have.”