Apple Music Just Got More Expensive, and It Was Only a Matter of Time

If you pay for Apple Music, your next bill is going up. Apple bumped the price of its music service today, and it's the first time the company has touched that number in almost four years. The last increase landed back in October 2022, so if you felt like you'd been paying the same amount forever, you basically had been.

Here's the damage. Apple Music Individual moves from $10.99 to $11.99 a month. The Family plan takes the biggest hit, jumping from $16.99 all the way to $19.99. And the student plan, the one plenty of people stretch out for as many years as they can get away with, ticks up from $5.99 to $6.99. All of it takes effect today, July 17, in the US and a handful of other countries.

The Apple One bundles got dragged along for part of the ride too, though not all of them. The entry-level Individual bundle holds steady at $19.95, but the Family bundle goes from $25.95 to $27.95, and the top-tier Premier plan, the one that piles on extra iCloud storage plus Fitness+ and News+, climbs from $37.95 to $39.95.

Why now?

Apple didn't hand out a reason, which is pretty on brand. Companies rarely do more than update a support page when they raise a subscription. But the timing isn't hard to read. Spotify already pushed its own prices up earlier this year, and once your biggest rival moves, the pressure to match tends to follow. Content licensing keeps getting more expensive, and streaming services have spent the last couple of years quietly deciding that the era of rock-bottom pricing is over.

The part worth holding onto: even after this, Apple Music still costs less per month than Spotify. That won't make the extra dollar feel great when it hits your card, but it does mean Apple isn't suddenly the pricey option. It's closing the gap, not leaping past anyone.

What it actually means for you

If you're on the Individual plan, this is a dollar a month. Twelve bucks a year. Annoying, easy to shrug off. If you're the person paying for a Family plan so your partner, your kids, and possibly a sibling who never signed up for their own can all have music, the math is rougher. That's $36 more a year, and it's the plan Apple raised the most, which is not a coincidence. Families are the stickiest customers, and stickiness is exactly what lets a company nudge the price.

Same story with Apple One. If you've talked yourself into the Premier bundle because it technically saves money versus paying for Music, TV+, Arcade, News+, Fitness+, and 2TB of iCloud separately, the bundle still saves you money. It just saves you a little less than it did last week.

None of this is going to make anyone cancel on the spot. That's the whole point of a two-dollar increase spread across services you've long since folded into your monthly budget. You'll grumble, you'll notice it for about a day, and then it'll disappear into the background hum of every other subscription you're paying for. Which, if you're keeping score, is probably the real reason it works.