Just weeks after hardware prices shot up across the board, Apple has quietly raised the price of Apple Music and Apple One too.
Apple Music’s individual plan rises from $11 to $12 a month, with the family plan jumping from $17 to $20 and the student plan going from $6 to $7. Apple One Family goes up from $26 to $28, and Apple One Premier from $38 to $40 – though the individual Apple One tier stays put at $20, making it marginally better value. Prices will vary by region, but expect to see similar increases worldwide.
This is the first Apple Music price rise since October 2022, when the individual plan went from $10 to $11. Apple TV+ jumped by $3 last year too. This time Apple has blamed “rising licensing costs.” Fair enough – but it’s a notably different excuse to the one Apple gave for June’s hardware hikes, where Tim Cook pointed the finger at AI-driven demand for RAM and storage sending component costs soaring. Licensing deals with record labels aren’t tied to the price of memory chips, so this feels less like collateral damage from the AI boom and more like Apple deciding this was a convenient moment to nudge prices up anyway.
Apple Music still undercuts Spotify, which raised its own Premium plan by a dollar to $13 earlier this year – so Apple’s not out of step with the market. But with Apple’s services revenue hitting an unbelievable $31 billion last quarter alone, it’s hard to have much sympathy for the tech giant having to pay artists slightly more.
We asked whether Apple really needed to raise hardware prices last month. It would be nice for Apple to absorb these increases to protect its customers, but I suspect the plan is to boost services revenue even further in anticipation of fewer people upgrading their iPhone this cycle – at least shareholders will be happy, if not your average music fan.