Apple Music just reached 4 countries it somehow skipped for 11 years

Apple Music is now available in Albania, Brunei, Burkina Faso, and Pakistan, bringing the service's total global footprint to 172 countries and regions. That's a meaningful jump in absolute reach, even if each individual country is a relatively small addition to a service already available almost everywhere.

Why it matters: Apple Music originally launched in June 2015 across more than 100 countries all at once, a genuinely ambitious global debut for the time. These four countries were apparently left out of that wave, and every expansion since, until now.

The catch: no official explanation has been given. Apple hasn't published a statement addressing why Albania, Brunei, Burkina Faso, and Pakistan specifically sat outside Apple Music's footprint for more than 11 years while the vast majority of the rest of the world had access.

In real life it's the streaming-service equivalent of a delivery company finally adding your specific neighborhood to its coverage map, over a decade after it started delivering to literally every street around you.

Apple didn't announce it directly. Developer Aaron Perris first spotted the change by noticing updates to Apple's Media Services support page, which tracks country-by-country availability for Apple's services. Outlets then confirmed the update by checking that same page themselves.

Why it matters: that's consistent with how Apple has handled several recent changes, quietly updating support documentation rather than issuing a press release, leaving tech outlets and developers actively monitoring Apple's own pages to catch updates as they happen.

Yes, separately. Apple also released the Apple Music 7.0 beta for Android around the same time, bringing a redesigned interface using Apple's Liquid Glass visual style to the Android app. The two updates aren't directly connected, but their timing overlapping suggests a broader wave of Apple Music changes landing in the same window.

Background: three of the four countries, Albania, Burkina Faso, and Pakistan, recently gained access to iCloud+ bundled together with Apple TV and Apple Arcade at no additional cost. That's not a coincidence limited to Apple Music alone; it points to a coordinated expansion of Apple's broader services lineup into these specific markets.

Why it matters: bundling several services together rather than rolling out Apple Music in isolation suggests Apple is treating this as a genuine market-entry push, not just patching a gap in one product's country list. Timing multiple services together also gives Apple a stronger pitch for new subscribers in each market than Apple Music showing up alone.

By the numbers: the timing aligns with Apple's broader effort to grow its Services division in markets it has historically underserved, reportedly a response to a slowdown in Services revenue growth in more mature markets where Apple's presence is already deeply established. Expanding into new countries, even smaller ones, is a straightforward way to add new potential subscribers when growth in existing markets starts to plateau.

Why it matters: that broader business context is likely the real driver here. A slowdown in a major, already-mature revenue segment tends to push companies toward exactly this kind of expansion, finding remaining pockets of the world they haven't fully served yet, rather than only competing harder for the same existing customers over and over.

Apple Music's new total of 172 countries and regions puts it roughly in the same range as Spotify, whose own reported availability sits somewhere between 171 and 184 markets depending on how countries versus territories get counted. The two services are now genuinely comparable in global footprint, rather than one meaningfully trailing the other.

Background: Pakistan, the largest of the four new markets, already had an active, growing streaming audience before Apple Music arrived. Spotify reported listenership in Pakistan grew more than 750% since its own launch there, with fans creating over 15 million playlists and streams from Pakistani artists growing more than sevenfold since 2021. That's a market that's been actively streaming, just without Apple Music specifically as an option.

Why it matters: Apple Music isn't entering an untapped market with no existing streaming habits to build on. It's entering a market where competitors like Spotify and YouTube Music have already spent years building an audience, meaning Apple's task now is winning over listeners already comfortable with other platforms, not introducing the entire concept of music streaming for the first time.

Background: Pakistan also remains on the US Trade Representative's Special 301 Watch List for intellectual property protection, with piracy described as "widespread" for digital content in the agency's 2026 report, despite Pakistan launching an online system in late 2025 letting rights holders file piracy complaints directly. That watch-list status reflects ongoing, real challenges around protecting licensed digital content in the region, separate from Apple Music's own launch.

Why it matters: a market with both a genuine, growing appetite for legal streaming and persistent piracy challenges is exactly the kind of environment where adding a major, trusted platform like Apple Music could meaningfully shift some listeners away from unlicensed alternatives, even if it won't solve piracy on its own.

Albania, Burkina Faso, and Brunei are considerably smaller markets by population and existing streaming data is far less documented publicly for each. That likely reflects why these additions arrived quietly rather than with the kind of dedicated regional marketing push Apple sometimes runs for larger market entries.

• If you're in Albania, Brunei, Burkina Faso, or Pakistan, Apple Music should now be available to sign up for directly, without needing a workaround or a foreign payment method.
• Check whether iCloud+, Apple TV, and Apple Arcade are also newly available in your country, since three of these four markets got that bundle around the same time.
• No specific pricing has been published for these markets yet. Expect Apple to set subscription pricing based on local purchasing power, similar to how it prices Apple Music elsewhere.
• This kind of quiet, unannounced expansion is common for Apple. If you're tracking availability in a specific country, checking Apple's own support page directly is often faster than waiting for a formal announcement.