Market Analysis Report for Apple Music

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A Market Analysis for
Apple Music
Maxwell Longfield
Full Sail University
Project & Portfolio II: Business and Marketing
01/20/2020

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This is a market analysis report for Apple Music, a music streaming service owned by
Apple Inc, one of the largest computer companies in the world. This report will look at what
Apple Music has accomplished throughout the past 5 years since its release and what it needs to
work on to succeed in the highly competitive market of music streaming services. It will show
the different plans that Apple Music offers and how they can effectively market those plans to
prospective subscribers. At the end of the report there are recommendations on how Apple Music
can effectively grow their fanbase and subscriber count.

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OBJECTIVE
The main reason for writing this report is to help Apple Music separate itself from its
competitors and solidify itself as the best cross platform music streaming service.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The information for this report was mostly external information that came from multiple
online databases as well as news reports. All the financial information was found through the
Securities and Exchange commission database, and Yahoo Financial. Financial information was
current on the day it was sourced. The information relating to the parent company Apple Inc. was
also sourced from the Securities and Exchange commission as well as Yahoo Financial. It was
difficult to find an exact number on how much Apple Music accounts for Apple Inc.’s gross
revenue, but it is apparent that the App Store and other Apple based services account of 17.7% of
their net sales.

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RESEARCH AND KEY FINDINGS
Apple Music is currently sitting very well
financially as its parent company Apple is ranked as the
company with the highest brand value. (Business Insider,
2019). Apple Music has three different plans that it sells.
The standard Apple Music subscription which costs $9.99 a
month and allows one account to have access to millions of songs. This is meant for young
adults/adults who only need one account for themselves and aren’t in college or have a large
family. The College Apple Music subscription is half the price at $4.99 and offers everything
that the standard plan does but appeals to college students who have limited finances. Finally,
there is the family plan which starts at $14.99 and can allow up to 6 people in the same family to
use the Apple Music account at one time. It also appeals to parents as they can put parental locks
on certain inappropriate albums and songs that they don’t want their children listening to. This
plan mostly appeals to families with younger children. Apple Music is currently the most popular
music streaming service with 49.5 million monthly listeners which accounts for 20% of all the
monthly listeners on Spotify. (Statista, 2018).

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Although Apple Music is the most popular subscription service it is not as popular with
other technological platforms. It is an Apple company, so it is apparent that it works best on
Apple’s devices such as the iPhone and iPad, but that leads to users of Android and Windows
products feeling as if they are missing out because they don’t own an Apple product. Apple
Music also is also the streaming service that pays the third most money per stream for artists.
This allows Apple Music to have a better relationship with artists and it shows with their
marketing.
CONCLUSIONS
Apple Music is the most popular music streaming service, but it definitely has many
ways that it could grow as a company, and better cater to its current subscribers as well as
subscribers who are on the edge about joining. The most important thing for Apple Music to do
is to expand its reach when it comes to other devices. They also must work on their artist
relations as that will lead to marketing that many people will react to and engage with. Artists are
by far the best marketing service that Apple Music can use. Overall, Apple Music is a very
successful company, but they need to focus on bringing in new subscribers, and to do that they
must change how they market and must change their service to work better on other devices.

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RECOMMENDATIONS
Apple Music should first bring in a team of technology and software experts who
specialize in the Android and Windows software engineering. Although Apple prefers to keep
everything in house, they could benefit from allowing a team of specialists to rework their app
for these two hardware suites. This would allow for Apple to expand its reach and have even
more people subscribed to their services. If they want to bring in new subscribers, they must
change some things. I also believe they should strive to become the most “artist friendly”
platform. They are already the company that pays the 3rd best per stream compared to other
streaming companies. But if they became well known for their artist interactions, they could use
the artists as effective marketing plans. They did this very early on with making Chance the
Rapper exclusively release his third mixtape “Coloring Book” only on Apple Music. This
allowed for them to gain a good following by drawing in an artist’s fans. If they did this with
more artists, they could gain a huge following with many fans of many artists. Overall Apple
Music needs to work on outsourcing for some things to have more success.

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REFERENCES
Cite your sources. Use APA short form in the body of the paper and long form in this section.
For this section, use a hanging indent shown here, with the second and subsequent lines
of each source starting ½ inch from the left margin (Format/Paragraph/Indents/Hanging).
Apple Inc. (AAPL) Stock Price, Quote, History & News. (2020, January 31). Retrieved
from https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL?p=AAPL&.tsrc=fin-srch
Apple Inc. 10K Form S.E.C. (n.d.). Retrieved from
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000032019319000119/a10-
k20199282019.htm
Lamarre, C. (2017, March 17). Here's How Much Chance the Rapper Says He Was Paid
for 'Coloring Book' Release on Apple Music. Retrieved from
https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/7728589/chance-the-rapper-apple-
music-coloring-book-tweets
Sanchez, D. (2019, January 2). What Streaming Music Services Pay (Updated for 2019).
Retrieved from https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-music-
services-pay-2019/
These are the top 10 brands in the world in 2019. Facebook isn't one of them. | Markets
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2019-10-1028610273#1-apple-brand-value-234-2-million10
Watson, A. (2019, November 20). Top U.S. music streaming services by users 2018.
Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/798125/most-popular-us-music-
streaming-services-ranked-by-audience/