Tim Cook says Apple Music has 6.5 million paying users

Apple CEO Tim Cook said on the Wall Street Journal's Live Conference, Monday night, that Apple Music has more than 6.5 million paying users. The Apple Inc's new music streaming also has an additional 8.5 million people participating on its free trial.

That makes it more than 15 million users of Apple Music in total, Cook said at a technology conference organized by The Wall Street Journal in Laguna Beach, California.

"We feel fantastic about it," said Cook at the conference, as noted on The Verge. He described Apple Music as a successful debut.

Cook once again stated that human curation is the key differentiator between Apple Music and competitors like Spotify. Cook also spotted the service's ability to surface new and interesting tunes on a per-user basis.

Apple Music was launched in June, as noted in Reuters, as the company's attempt to carry its dominance in digital music through its iTunes store into the era of music streaming. The tech's giant allows users to have a 90-day free trial on this service, which the trial period elapsed for the first users earlier this month.

Apple's music streaming service was launched to compete with established players like Spotify, Rdio, and Deezer.

According to Fortune, the company was on the debate whether consumers still want to pay music streaming after the trial period is elapsed. The industry observers have been carefully watching whether Apple will be able to convince its users to pay for this music service.

Back in August, Apple said that it had 11 million people on the trial and just over half of them converted into paid users. In comparison, Spotify reported in June that it has 20 million paying users and 75 million total users.

Nevertheless, it's not a bad effort for the new service, which isn't yet available on Android and there is no free listening option.

However, the number of music streaming service users sometimes become obscure. For example, Deezer the French streaming music company claims 6.3 million paying subscribers while yet just 1.5 million are actual paying users. Apple Music may be similarly vague with its big numbers of subscribers.

On his appearance at the Wall Street Jounal's conference, Tim Cook also revealed the company's newly-revamp TV streaming box.

The new Apple TV features beefier hardware and an app store open to all developers, which should guarantee many more apps coming to the platform. The product will be available on October 26 and the company will start shipping the product later that week.