Apple Music’s global head of editorial Rachel Newman answers the question: What’s in a number? One hundred million songs.
Twenty-one years on from the invention of iTunes and the debut of the original iPod, we’ve gone from 1,000 songs in your pocket to 100,000x that on Apple Music. It’s phenomenal growth by any metric. The entire history, present, and future of music is at your fingertips or voice command.
More music than you can listen to in a lifetime, or several lifetimes. More music than any other platform. Simply the biggest collection of music, in any format, ever.
One hundred million songs — it’s a number that will continue to grow and exponentially multiply. But it’s more than just a number, representing something much more significant — the tectonic shift in the business of music making and distribution over these past two decades.
Back 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, over 20,000 singers and songwriters are delivering new songs to Apple Music — songs that make our catalog even better than it wasthe day before. One hundred million songs is evidence of a more democratic space, where anyone, even a new artist making music out of their bedroom, can have the next big hit.
Apple also knows that it’s more important than ever that they are elevating artists’ voices and providing opportunities for them to tell their own stories and contextualize their music. It is no longer enough to just connect artists and fans, it’s about making those connections deeper and more meaningful. And just one of the many ways Apple is helping to provide context is through the new Apple Music Today series, where a new song is picked every day and diving into its history.
With 100 million songs on Apple Music, you can explore genres you never knew existed and find your new favorite artist in places you would never expect. So take a dive, and let us guide you through.
