Celebrating 100 million songs – Apple

One hundred million songs.

Twenty-one years after the invention of iTunes and the debut of the original iPod, we’ve gone from 1,000 songs in your pocket to 100,000 times that in Apple Music. That’s phenomenal growth by any metric. The entire history, present and future of music is at your fingertips or at the command of voice.

More music than you can hear in a lifetime, or many lifetimes. More music than any other platform. Simply the greatest collection of music, in any format, ever.

One hundred million songs – it’s a number that will continue to grow and multiply exponentially. But it’s more than just a number, it represents something much more significant – the tectonic shift in the business of creating and distributing music over the past two decades.

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 to the world. Every day, more than 20,000 singers and songwriters deliver new songs to Apple Music—songs that make our catalog even better than it was. the day before. One hundred million songs are evidence of a more democratic space, where anyone, even a new artist who makes music from his bedroom, can have the next big hit.

It is not only an opportunity to reflect on how far we have come, but also a moment to look forward to the work that remains to be done. At Apple Music, human curation has always been at the heart of everything we do, whether it’s in ways you can see, like our editorial playlists; and ways you can’t, like the human touch that drives our recognition algorithms. Now more than ever, we know that investing in human curation will be key to making us the best at connecting artists and audiences.

With a vast expanse of songs, we know you need someone to guide you. Gone are the days of shuffling through your library: Now it’s up to us to help you discover new favorites and rediscover forgotten gems, whether it’s one of our expert radio hosts lighting your way, or a handcrafted playlist.