Apple today announced an impressive milestone – the Apple Music streaming service is now home to a library of 100 million songs – the largest collection of music in the world.
At last count Spotify has 82 million songs, YouTube more than 80 million and Amazon Music Unlimited 75 million tracks.
Apple Music’s growth to 100 million songs comes 21 years after the launch of iTunes and the release of the original iPod that had room to store and play 1000 songs.
Back then there were 200,000 songs available on iTunes.
Today 100 million songs ate more that you can listen to in a lifetime.
But Apple says the incredible growth goes hand in hand with the shift in the way music can now be recorded and distributed in the last 20 years.
In the 1960s, there were 5000 new albums released each year but today, in any of the 167 regions where Apple Music can be accessed, any musician can write, record and release a song globally.
In fact, every day more than 20,000 artists are releasing new songs on Apple Music.
That means the world’s next huge hit has just as much chance of coming out of someone’s bedroom than a prestigious recording studio or label.
Apple also prides itself on human curation which means it’s a team of humans and not computers that comes up with playlists to often bring musicians and listeners together for first time.
