Spend less on streaming music

Jared Newman

August 28, 2023

In this guide:

While practically every streaming music service has raised prices over the past year, you still don’t have to pay full price for them.

Much like in the streaming TV world, you can save on services like Spotify and Apple Music by looking in the right places. Extended trials, bundle deals, special discounts, and annual billing options can all help defray the cost of streaming music, and you can always consider cheaper tiers if your music needs are more minimal.

To help you reassess your streaming music spending, I’ve pulled every potential savings strategy into one big list.

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Bundle with other services

YouTube Music is included with YouTube Premium, which includes ad-free videos, offline downloads, and a few other perks. It costs $16 per month, or $23 per month for families, versus $11 per month or $17 per month respectively for YouTube Music alone.
Amazon Music is cheaper for Prime subscribers, at $10 per month or $99 per year.
Apple Music is included with Apple One, which bundles various other services such as Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade. It starts at $17 per month for individuals or $23 per month for families.
Apple Music is also included with some legacy Verizon Wireless plans, as noted in my wireless plan comparison chart. With Verizon’s current “MyPlan” offerings, you can add Apple Music Family for $10 per month, saving $7 off the list price.

Switch to annual billing

Spotify has annual gift cards for $99, saving $45 per year.
YouTube Music costs $110 annually, saving $22 per year. Bundling with YouTube Premium’s annual plan costs $140, saving $52 per year over the monthly option.
Apple Music hides its yearly option on the subscription management page inside the iOS Settings app. There you’ll find a $109 annual plan that saves $22 per year for individuals (but no family option).
Amazon Music offers annual billing for Prime subscribers through its plan settings page, at $89 per year for individuals (saving $19) or $159 per year for families (saving $33).
Deezer has annual plans at $108 for individuals (saves $36) or $219 for families (saves $20).

Get student or military discounts

Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Pandora, Tidal, and Deezer all offer student discounts that cut their prices in half (or nearly in half). Spotify’s student version even includes Hulu.

Military and veteran discounts are scarcer, but Tidal has one that takes 40% off its HiFi and HiFi Plus plans, and it offers the same deal for first responders. Pandora charges $8 per month for military and vets.

Consider a cheaper tier …

Amazon Music offers a $5 per month tier, with a catch: You can only play music through Alexa voice controls, and the plan is limited to a single Echo speaker or Fire TV device.

Pandora’s $5 per month “Plus” plan has no such voice requirements, and it offers ad-free radio stations with unlimited skips. You can also choose specific songs or albums in exchange for watching an ad first.

… or go free

If you don’t mind listening on shuffle mode, consider the free tiers of Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, or Pandora. Instead of being able to pick individual albums or tracks, you’ll get radio-style playback based on a particular artist or genre. (You can also get on-demand music via the desktop versions of Spotify and YouTube.)

Most of these services do have commercial breaks, but Amazon’s service lets Prime subscribers go ad-free.

Oh, and remember the forbidden YouTube tricks I covered last month? Those can come in handy for free music listening as well.

Exploit some free trial loopholes

I’ve previously written an entire newsletter about this, but by bouncing between streaming music services, you can take advantage of endless extended trials.

Sadly, Best Buy has nixed its cheap Tidal deals, but you can still get multi-month Apple Music subscriptions from both Target and Best Buy. I’ve had luck bouncing between those two options along with the occasional extended trial for Amazon Music Unlimited.

Try quitting

By playing the streaming music field, you may also open yourself up to comeback deals from the ones you’ve canceled.

Spotify, for instance, periodically offers me three months for $10 total, and Amazon routinely offers 33% off for returning subscribers as of this writing.

Roll your own

Instead of being at streaming music providers’ whims, it’s never too late to build your own music collection and stream it to yourself with a service like Plex. I made this change eight years ago and have never regretted it.

Granted, the amount I spend on CDs and Bandcamp purchases probably outweighs the cost of a Spotify subscription, but I never have to worry about music being pulled from my collection, and it’s nice knowing that most of my Bandcamp spending goes to the actual artists. It also makes my endless pursuit of cheap or free streaming—which I use mainly to discover new albums worth buying—that much easier to justify.

Streaming music comparison chart

Overwhelmed by the options? I’ve made a chart with the price of every major subscription streaming music service, along with all their available discounts and bundle deals.

And as always, you can email me with any questions you might have.