Jimmy Iovine, the longtime recording industry mogul currently heading up Apple Music, hates free music—an idea to which Spotify, Apple’s biggest music streaming competitor, is stubbornly clinging.

Spotify, founded in Stockholm in 2006, has for a decade now offered its millions of songs via a free, advertising-supported tier as well as a paid subscription tier. Apple Music only has the latter.

If Apple Music had a free tier, we would have 400 million people on it. That would make my job real easy. But we believe artists should get paid. That’s why I went to Apple.

That’s the reason Taylor Swift and several other artists made a dramatic exit from Spotify in 2015. Critics of Spotify’s so-called “freemium” model also say the existence of the free tier is dragging down the number of people who would otherwise be enticed to join the premium tier. 

Spotify—which is slouching toward either a direct listing or an IPOwhile still not turning a profit—seems to recognize this problem itself. The company recently caved and made a deal with Universal Music Group to offer exclusive album releases on the premium subscription tier, in a clear attempt to tug people away from the free one.

Apple Music is making original content and striking record deals left and right to try and do exactly that. And even if it’s got fewer subscribers than Spotify at the moment, the fact that the platform requires every user to pay for music means the rate of its growth, at least, will always surpass Spotify’s.

Source: qz