One hundred million songs on Apple Music.
Twenty-one years after the invention of iTunes and the debut of the original iPod, we’ve gone from 1,000 songs in your pocket to 100,000 times more on Apple Music. That’s phenomenal growth by any metric. All the history, present and future of music is at your fingertips or voice command.
More music than you can listen to in a lifetime, or multiple lifetimes. More music than any other platform. Simply the largest collection of music, in any format, ever.
One hundred million songs is a number that will continue to grow and multiply exponentially. But it’s more than just a number, it represents something far more significant: the tectonic shift in the business of music creation and distribution over the past two decades.
Apple Music and the 100 million songs
In the 1960s, only 5,000 new albums were released each year. Today, anywhere in the world, in 167 countries and regions on Apple Music, any artist of any description can write and record a song and release it globally. Every day, more than 20,000 singer-songwriters submit new songs to Apple Music, songs that make our catalog even better than the day before. A hundred million songs are evidence of a more democratic space, where anyone, even a new artist making music from her bedroom, can have the next big thing.
This is not only an opportunity to reflect on how far we have come, but also a time to look forward to the work that remains to be done. At Apple Music, human healing has always been at the core of everything we do, both in ways you can see, and in our editorial playlists; and ways you can’t, like the human touch that drives our recommendation algorithms. Now more than ever, we know that investment in human curation will be key to becoming the best at connecting artists and audiences.
With such a vast range of songs, we know you need someone to guide you. Gone are the days of randomly pressing through your library – now it’s up to us to help you discover new favorites and rediscover forgotten gems, whether it’s one of our expert radio hosts lighting your way or a handcrafted playlist.
We also know that it is more important than ever that we are elevating the voices of artists and providing opportunities for them to tell their own stories and contextualize their music. It’s no longer enough to connect artists and fans, it’s about making those connections deeper and more meaningful. And just one of the many ways we’re helping provide context is through the new Apple Music Today series, where we’ll pick a new song every day and dive into its story, because we know each of the 100 million of songs in our catalog has its own history.
There has never been a more exciting time to be a music fan. With 100 million songs on Apple Music, you can explore genres you never knew existed and find your new favorite artist in places you never expected. So dive in and let us guide you.
Opinion column written by Rachel Newman, global editorial director of Apple Music. Learn more opinion articles at Technological Zoom.
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