Amazon hiked Music Unlimited prices. Here’s why Apple and YouTube are next

For video streamers, another price hike just means it’s Tuesday. For music streaming, however, price increases are bigger deals, and they tend to reverberate for everyone. 

Take Amazon, which just hiked the price of its individual Music Unlimited plan to $11.99 a month, or $10.99/month for Prime members. The new price is effective immediately for new subscribers, while existing users will see the price hike on their next bill, TechCrunch reports. 

That price increase brings Amazon’s music streaming prices up to par with Spotify’s, which raised its individual Premium plan to $11.99 a month last June. (Spotify’s Family and Duo plans got price hikes, too.) 

This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best music streaming services.

Meanwhile, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Tidal are holding the line at $10.99 a month for their music streaming plans—so for now, if you want to stream unlimited tunes, doing so on those services is a relative bargain. 

But that’s probably not going to last for long, and if I had to wager, I’d bet Apple, YouTube, and likely also Tidal will all hit that $11.99-a-month price for individual music streaming before the year is up. Qobuz, meanwhile, already charges $12.99 per month (discounted to $10.83 per month if you pay up front for a one-year subscription).

Before we get to “why,” let’s consider the key difference between the music and video streaming businesses. The big video streamers like Netflix, Disney+, and Max have their own unique lineups of shows and movies—only Netflix has Squid Game, only Hulu has that buzzy new Paradise show, only Max has The Pitt. So yes, you could jump from one to another to save money, but then you’d be missing out on, say, House of the Dragon or Tulsa King.

The music streamers, on the other hand, all have fundamentally the same catalogs. So if, say, Spotify hikes its prices, you could always just jump to a cheaper music streamer without missing a beat. (Yes, you’d have to say goodbye to your playlists, but there are plenty of tools that solve that problem.) 

Raising prices in the music streaming market is like a game of chicken. All the big streamers want to raise prices, but no one wants to be first.

That’s why individual music streaming prices held steady at $9.99 a month for more than a decade, until finally Apple Music broke ranks in October 2022 and boosted its individual streaming price to $10.99 a month. 

Pretty soon, $10.99 a month was the new norm for individual streaming, but that price point stuck for only about two years rather than a decade, with Spotify making the jump last summer to $11.99 a month for its individual Premium tier. 

So here we are, with Amazon Unlimited Music matching Spotify. And for now, that means Apple Music and YouTube Music are cheaper.

But probably not for long.