Iovine: ‘Spotify should have 10m paying subs in US alone’
Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine appeared unimpressed by the 10 million paying subscribers currently harnessed by Spotify, saying that the world’s leading streaming service should have that many paying customers in the US alone. Iovine’s words came alongside his new colleague Apple’s SVP Eddy Cue at yesterday’s Code conference in California. When asked about the streaming competition for Beats Music, now a part of Apple, the former Interscope boss implied that he doesn’t concern himself with other companies.
“When you’re making music, you don’t look at what’s going on in the studio next to you,” he said. “We run our race. We market our race.”
But, according to the New York Times, Iovine went on to say: “Spotify should have 10 million people in America [alone].”
When it was pointed out, however, that Beats Music itself has hardly seen a torrent of paid-up subscribers flood onto its service, Iovine said that it’s currently too early to judge, adding that “most important is that we’re getting the product right”.
Iovine also pushed against recent reports putting the Beats Music subscriber figure at around 110,000 saying that the service in fact has 250,000 with 5 million having downloaded the Beats Music app, 9to5mac.com reports.
Apple’s long-rumoured Beats acquisition was confirmed earlier this week. The deal was eventually done for $3 billion.
Source: Music Week
