It's no surprise that Apple Music and Spotify are being pitted against each other as two of the biggest music streaming services around. Spotify got started early almost ten years ago, while Apple Music joined the race just last June 2015. New reports reveal that while the latter is almost a decade behind, it's quickly closing the gap after hitting 10 million paid subscribers.

According to a report from Financial Times, Apple marked the impressive milestone on its sixth month, reaching 10 million at a significantly faster pace than its rival Spotify, which took six years to hit the mark. Apple Music now enjoys hordes of subscribers in over 100 countries the service is available at.

"It's good news that Apple is making streaming work but it is also going to accelerate the decline of downloads," Mark Mulligan, music industry analyst with Midia Research, told Financial Times. He added that at the company's current growth rate, it will likely be the leading music subscription service by 2017.

A report from The Verge said that Spotify hit the 20 million premium (paid) subscriber milestone lasts June, so Apple Music is about halfway to its rival's numbers at this point. While the updated figures haven't been divulged by the company, Spotify's head of PR Jonathan Prince has called the last half of the past year the "fastest subscriber growth in Spotify history."

Of course, one of the advantages of Spotify is the option to have the service for free. If the count includes the "subscribers" of this tier, the company's total active users number swells to about 75 million, which is still significantly ahead of Apple.

Because of the competition rising, there have been rumors of Spotify considering changing their business model to offer certain songs or artists available only to paid subscribers. However, Spotify Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Levick quashed the speculation in an interview with CNBC.

"It was a rumor," Levick said. "And you know we haven't made any change [to] the way we think about our model. We want all artists to be on both sides of our platform, both free and paid. And that continues to be the case."

The concern that top-tier artists would deny free streaming services of their music exists -- such as Adele not streaming her latest album on Spotify -- but the executive isn't fazed.

Levick explained, "Of course these are top artists that people love their music and want to hear it, and when they can't get that on Spotify, they'll be looking for it elsewhere. But Adele, in fact, did release a lot of her tracks before her album, she did put them on Spotify, she did put them on streaming."