Apple MusicAsk any musician out there today and they’ll likely agree that thanks to the rise of streaming services, music has become a game of numbers.
Each and every release is backed by anxiety as to how a song is performing on the myriad platforms, how many times it has been streamed, whether it has bettered previous efforts, and how to increase those numbers so that the artist looks more appealing to fans, bookers, and labels.
However, while ubiquitous services such as Spotify are well-known for displaying a song’s current stream count and ranking an artist’s top songs by such, fellow streamer Apple Music has long refrained from such a practice.
Speaking at the Variety Entertainment Marketing Summit in Beverley Hills on Wednesday, April 22nd, Apple Music’s Vice President Oliver Schusser joined for a chat to discuss numerous topics.
Touching on Apple Music’s lack of a free tier (“We don’t think it’s the right thing for artists to give away music for free,”), Schusser also turned his attention to harsher penalties for labels submitting AI-generated content, and the lack of stream counts on the platform.
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When pressed about why it is that – in such a statistics-based society whereby streaming numbers are valued as something of a social currency – Apple Music does not offer such a public-facing feature, Schusser explained that is plays into the company’s pure love of music.
Apple Music Vice President Oliver Schusser says the platform doesn’t include numbers or statistics “because we love music and to support artists.”
— Variety (@Variety) April 22, 2026
Variety Entertainment Marketing Summit pic.twitter.com/A8paJaXdGi
“We've been in the music business as long as Apple existed; over 50 years now,” he explained. “We love music. We make hardware for creative people, we make software for creative people, and if you look at the portfolio of music assets in Apple – I mean, most artists make and write music on our devices – they use Logic or GarageBand.
“And we've got Apple Music, we've got iTunes, we've got Shazam, we've got Beats, there's a number of music properties. And we're doing this because we love music.
“We're doing this mostly to support artists, give artists tools and flexibility,” he continued. “And our focus has always been building great products, not talking about our numbers.
“And just competing on the numbers level we think is boring and not interesting. We want to make great products. That's what we focus on.”
Though there’s nothing to say that Apple Music might one day be swayed to offer such a feature in the future, for now, they’re focused on empowering musicians to create, not to compete.
