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Apple has over 11 million Apple Music subscribers, 782 million iCloud users

Two top-ranking Apple executives confirm Apple's software services are growing at an unprecedented rate.
Written by Jake Smith, Contributor
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Apple executives Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue announced on John Gruber's podcast, The Talk Show, that Apple Music is growing at a fast-rate, sitting at 11 million subscribers since June 2015.

The two executives essentially confirmed a report from the Financial Times from January that said 10 million subscribers were on the music service -- also available on Android.

To compare, it took Spotify six years to reach where Apple Music is at.

Apple recently shut off access to Apple Music radio stations to users on its free tier, likely pushing more subscribers. Those who subscribe pay $9.99 per month for access to curated stations, songs, albums, artists, and more.

The popularity of Apple Music, Spotify, and other competing services has put strain on Pandora, the once go-to Internet radio. While it still has the most users, Pandora's growth has been slowing, and the company is considering putting itself up for sale.

On The Talk Show, the Apple executives also announced iCloud has 782 million users. iCloud is Apple's freemium service on more than 1 billion Apple devices that allows users to organize photos, track their devices, store documents, and more.

Furthermore, more than 200,000 iMessages are sent every second, and there are 750 million transactions per week on iTunes and the App Store.

The trio's discussion, published on Daring Fireball on Friday, is an interesting one. Most notably, Gruber pressed Federighi and Cue on the quality of Apple's software.

Federighi responded (via The Verge):

You get the other side of these stories, you know some of the people, when you talk about people nodding your head if I look at some of the comments that come online when people say "yeah Apple's quality's bad," and someone will say "yeah, like when they took away my iPhoto app and replaced it with Photos, I don't like the new Photos app." And that's why they think Apple's software quality is bad.
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