APPLE MUSIC SUB SERVICE COULD ROCKET TO 75M SUBSCRIBERS—SURVEY

A just-published survey suggests that Apple’s forthcoming subscription music-streaming service could quickly become the biggest in the world, the Guardian reports. (And for the record, this does not appear to be a hoax.)

In February, Midia Research asked 1,000 Americans whether they would subscribe to an Apple music streaming service for $7.99 a month, and 10% said they’d be “very likely” to sign up, while another 10% said they’d be “likely” to. When it came to iOS users only, 15% answered “very likely.”

While 15% seems low, that would be 15% of a user base in the neighborhood of 500 million—or 75 million.

“Even a year-one target of a quarter of that would be transformational to the subscription market, but both numbers are far short of the approximately 250 million iTunes users who regularly buy music downloads,” wrote the report’s author, Mark Mulligan.

Since the survey was conducted in mid-February, however, we’ve learned that the base price would be $9.99, and it’s anybody’s guess how big a difference that additional two bucks a month would make, though Mulligan still believes that the $7.99 price “will happen eventually, even if it does not in 2015.”