Is Apple Music a Money-Maker for the Tech Giant?
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Your Money Briefing. Money and Market Stories from The Wall Street Journal. I'm Charlie Turner in New York. Apple's music streaming business, Apple Music, is experiencing strong subscriber growth. But is it a profit maker for the high-tech giant? We'll explore this in a moment with The Wall Street Journal's Dan Gallagher. First, these money headlines. Want to know my salary history? Don't ask. The Wall Street Journal's Kelsey Gee writes that big companies like Amazon, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo say they've instructed recruiters not to ask about salary or benefits a candidate received in other positions as more employers shift away from using past wages as a guide for setting their future pay. The move stems from a slew of new laws around the U.S.
aimed at closing wage gaps in the workforce. The theory behind them is that using past salaries to benchmark future pay can perpetuate unfairly high or low wages that workers carry from job to job. New York City and Massachusetts passed rules in 2016 banning employers in those regions from pressing job seekers to disclose their salary history. Since then, more than a dozen other cities and states have followed with their own wage setting and wage inquiry rules for employers, including California, New Jersey, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh.
How is Apple positioning services like Apple Music as growth as iPhone sales mature?
Republicans have wanted to roll back regulations on auto loans, and critics say a Senate vote taken Wednesday will pave the way for more auto loan discrimination. The Senate approved a Senate Banking Committee proposal to repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's guidance on auto lending. It was meant to prevent lenders from giving non-white borrowers more expensive auto loans. A source says the proposal will go to the House for a vote probably sometime next week. From the Wall Street Journal's economy team, economic policymakers have been in Washington this week for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. And officials are sticking to optimistic global growth forecasts, even though trade tensions between the world's two largest economies have unsettled global stock markets.
According to the International Monetary Fund's forecast released this week, global economic output is on course to grow 3.9 percent in 2018, the best year since 2011, with every major economy poised to grow for the second year in a row. Coming up, is Apple's fast-growing Apple Music service a moneymaker for the company? You're listening to your Money Briefing from The Wall Street Journal. Welcome back, everyone. When you think of Apple, naturally you think of the iPhone, the device that has propelled the company deeper into legendary status. But with smartphones maturing market, Apple has been turning to its services business for future growth. And a key chip in the services unit is Apple Music, the company's music subscription service.
Apple Music's subscriber count has grown sharply, but is it a big moneymaker for the company? Wall Street Journal Heard on the Street columnist Dan Gallagher joins us from San Francisco. Dan, first, let's start off with this. How many subscribers does Apple Music have at this point?
Our last report has that they have about 40 million paid subscribers. Spotify last reported, Spotify expects to have around 73 million or a little more for the first quarter. So what Apple's been doing is closing that gap. They're still well below, but Apple Music's been in the market for a much shorter time. And one thing notable is that it seems to have grown at least 11% in just two months from when we last had a piece of data on what Apple's subscriber count was. So it still seems to be in a pretty good growth phase for them. It's a service that comes essentially with an iPhone when people buy it, but you still have to elect. to subscribe to it and turn it on. So it looks like they're having a pretty good rate of success getting their customers to do that.
Is Spotify the leader and is Apple second? What about ranking? Do you know anything about that? Yeah.
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