Apple Music has 13 million subscribers

The Apple Music music streaming service has 13 million paying subscribers, Apple CEO Tim Cook said on an earnings call Tuesday afteroon.

In February 2016, Apple announced that it had 11 million paying Apple Music subscribers.

So that's two million new subscribers in about as many months, which is a reasonable, but not stellar, rate of growth, given that it's an app that comes with every iPhone on the market.

It still makes Apple Music a second banana to startup Spotify, which claimed 30 million paying users in March 2016. Granted, Spotify has been around much longer.

Meanwhile, Tidal, the Jay Z-owned music service got a boost this week with exclusive streaming rights to Beyonce's new album "Lemonade" - but as of March 2016, it still only had three million subscribers, and it's unlikely that even the Beyhive has launched it over Apple so quickly.

Looking forward, Apple has a weird limited exclusive deal with Drake for his new album, "Views From the 6." The hope is that it'll attract more users to Apple Music and keep that growth coming.

On a final note, Cook also referred to Apple Music as the company's "first" subscription business which is strange considering that Apple iCloud has offered monthly storage service plans for some years now.