Apple Music converts 6.5m users to paid service

Tim Cook has revealed the company has converted 6.5m Apple Music listeners from the service’s free trial to paying customers, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Apple chief executive revealed the numbers at WSJDLive, the paper’s global technology conference.

He said that there are another 8.5m people still using the service’s free three-month trial.

However, it’s still a long way off from beating Spotify, with its 75m active users and 20m paid subscribers.

In August, Apple said 11m trial members had signed up in the first month.

The platform launched on 30 June, with early adopters’ trial period ending by 30 September.

Nonetheless, users are automatically billed after the free trial ends and have to proactively cancel their subscription if they don’t want to be charged, meaning some may have signed on for an extra month unwittingly.

The Wall Street Journal reported Mr. Cook said consumers are responding positively to human curation of playlists – a key difference to competitor Spotify.