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With Some Easy Tricks You Can Save 30% On Music Streaming From Apple, Amazon

This article is more than 7 years old.

I just renewed my Apple Music subscription for $7 a month. To get that price, I had to search high and low across the internet for some secret codes, type in some magic incantations, use ... No, not really. To get that price, I had to buy a $100 iTunes gift card for 15% off and then add it to my account. There's a good chance you can do the same thing right now. Even if you can't, so long as you're willing to prepay for a year of Apple Music, which recently reached 20 million paying customers, you can get the monthly cost down to $8.25 from the standard $9.99. It's all really easy, but I'll walk you through everything just in case.

Free lunch

In September, Apple began offering special discounted memberships to its music streaming service. Via a $99 prepaid card sold on eBay and at Apple retail stores, you could take 17.5% off your monthly bill for Apple Music. The gift cards are now also available at Apple's online store, though apparently they weren't initially. Apple calls this 12 months for the price of 10, which is close enough to precise to get the point across. (The company also sells a card for a 3-month membership that isn't discounted at all.)

If you're like me, you probably didn't even know this deal existed. Or perhaps you did but hadn't gotten around to taking advantage. But lest you think Apple was trying to hide something from you, i.e. they were making the discount available but not promoting it, here's where the story gets a bit more interesting.

One of my favorite things about the holiday shopping season is keeping an eye out for deals and during the Black Friday blitz I saw one I can never refuse: iTunes cards at a 15% discount. Why do I like this deal so much? You can scan the codes into your account in about 3 seconds (it's really amazingly easy) and then you can rent movies, pay for extra iCloud storage, and buy apps at 15% off for as long as that credit lasts. In the low-interest-rate environment of the recent era, a guaranteed 15% return on my money is super satisfying. And spending $100 with Apple might not be something I like doing, but it's something I'm absolutely certain to end up doing.

Anyway, when I take this discounted $100 iTunes Gift Card and scan it with my iPhone look what pops up on my screen:

No one would say Apple's trying to hide anything there, right? Either way, they get the money. It's going to sit in my account waiting for my next purchase or be used to extend that Apple Music subscription. For what it's worth, I added two of those $100 gift cards and the offer popped up twice. (I only took advantage once.)

Just to review the math, the discounted subscription knocks the price of Apple Music down from $9.99 to $8.25 per month. But I didn't pay $99 for that deal; I paid $84. The $85 cost of the gift card minus the $1 that Apple credited to my Apple ID, which you can see in the screen shot. After all, this was a $100 card and the subscription only runs $99. So in the end, my next year of Apple Music will run me $7 per month.

Unfortunately, that Best Buy deal is currently dead. But you might not only be able to get the same deal I did, you could even do better. Right now, Costco has $100 iTunes cards for just $84.49, a smidge better than the 15% offer that Best Buy could bring back and Office Depot has been known around this time of your. But if you're willing to go big, Costco has a $200 iTunes card for just $164.99, a 17.5% discount. With that, you could arguably get a 2-year deal for <$7/month -- if you're willing to commit that long.

Not the only deal in town

Apple offers other discounts that don't require gift cards or lengthy commitments. If you're a college student, for example, the service is discounted by half to just $4.99. That deal requires proof of enrollment as do other similar offerings for students. Perhaps the best discount of all belongs to families who link their accounts via Apple's Family Sharing feature. With that, you can not only share purchases made via the App Store, iBooks, et al. but you can have up to six family members on one Apple Music account for just $14.99/month. Someone capable of maxing this out perfectly would pay just $2.50/month per person. It's important to note that all the billing on a family account goes to the designated person in charge. You can set up spending controls, but you don't want to use this to share an account with strangers just for a discount.

What about the other guys?

Apple Music, of course, isn't the only unlimited music streaming game in time. Spotify has long been the leader in the field, with Google, Amazon, and (in 2017) Pandora all participating. In terms of pricing, Amazon offers the best overall deals. You can get single-user streaming for $7.99/month so long as you have Amazon Prime. And if you prepay for the year, the 12-months-for-10 deal applies, bringing the cost to $79 -- just under $6.60/month. If you don't have Prime, the $7.99 becomes $9.99 and the annual discount doesn't apply.

Amazon, like Apple, offers the $14.99 family plan for up to 6 users. Unlike Apple, though, you can get that plan discounted to $149 annually by paying up front. Non-Prime members can get the same monthly price, but again no annual discount.

The one truly oddball offering from Amazon is the $3.99 deal for users of Amazon's Echo devices. The service works only on the Echo in that case, which is an adequate -- read: not good -- music player. The appeal of this is limited, especially given that Echo devices integrate nicely with Spotify.

Speaking of which, Spotify offers pricing familiar at this point: $9.99/month single user, $4.99/month student, $14.99 family up to 6 users. Google has the same pricing, but no advertised student offer. I didn't find any meaningful discounts on Google Play cards either. If you have a lot of investment in Google-related content, it might make sense to choose Play Music, otherwise you're picking a service that has neither a substantial customer base (Spotify/Apple) nor a pricing edge (Amazon)

Spotify's teaser offer for new customers right now is 99 cents for each of the first 3 months. Apple Music will give you those first 3 months completely free. Amazon right now offers 30 days free, but also $20 of credit for Prime customers toward whatever plan they select, which could cover several months. Google offers 2 months free.

The competition has led to more appealing bundles and offers, though the music labels control pricing to a significant degree. Streaming will exceed $3B in revenue for the labels domestically this year, but that's still a small fraction of the more than $10B CDs took in for several years in their heyday. With lower pricing through these deals, the tech companies are helping the labels close that gap. It might be time for you to take a leap across if yourself.

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