I’m currently getting my Apple Music (as a 6 x user family subscription) through Verizon for $10 a month - which is much cheaper than Spotify’s current rate of $21.99 for the comparable plan:
Multi-user plans are seeing larger increases, with the Duo plan, which supports two accounts, moving from $16.99 to $18.99 per month, and the Family plan increasing from $19.99 to $21.99 per month
But my eventual plan is to cancel my $10/m plan and revert BACK to old-school
offline music - because the main benefit I feel like I currently get (out of streaming) is the discovery feature - so my ability to find new songs that I want to add
At this point, I feel like I already have plenty of good music and the discovery feature can also be somewhat time consuming as well - having to skip through many songs that you don’t like (to
eventually find one that you actually do like) to then subsequently add to your library
But at this point, the streaming aspect is much more of
just a convenience (that is currently worth paying $10/m for) but once they raise my price, it certainly won’t be worth it and I’ll probably cancel and spend maybe 20 hours worth of work, re-building and transferring all my playlists to offline/local listening - whatever work that entails, I’ll figure it out when the time comes and invest the 20+ hours into getting that project done because once it is done, I’ll basically save $10+ a month going forward
My plan at that point (when I am actually interested in new music discovery - to add to my library) is to sign up/rotate all of those 3-6 month trials that Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Google/YouTube music constantly offer - Amazon Music recently offered me a 6 month trial to their music streaming service 2 months ago
That would basically ONLY be for music discovery so the differences in the UI (from one app to the next) would be irrelevant for the most part. Again I feel like I already have plenty of good music that I’ve ‘discovered’ and then added over the last 5+ years
I’m certainly not going to turn down a 3 month trial but the value proposition is just not there for me, considering investing maybe ~20 hours of work~ involved in transferring everything to iTunes (offline) to then never have to pay monthly is well worth it for me
Especially with how much Spotify has increased their rates in the last two years. Apple has maintained their prices and hasn’t followed suit (like I thought they would) but I can’t imagine that thats sustainable - and that they won’t eventually match Spotify and I really don’t want to be subjected to huge potential rate increases down the road
