In early February, Apple revealed that the Apple Music streaming platform had 36 million paying subscribers to its service. Just a few months since then, Apple Music is now reporting a total 38 million paying subscribers, and 8 million trial users.

During his appearance at the SXSW conference in Austin Texas, Apple Music's SVP, Eddy Cue, revealed the new numbers to the audience.

“If you look at the number subscribers Spotify and Apple Music have together versus the number people listening to music around the world, or even the amount traffic to our App Store – we have half a billion people visiting the App Store every week – music is just ‘this big’ in the scheme things,” said Cue. There are easily two billion people in the world who can afford to pay for some level music, yet Spotify and Apple Music combined have only around 100 million subscribers globally. There’s a huge gap there… We both have to grow by a significant amount in order to get to the numbers that we should be at.”