You now have less time to decide whether or not Apple Music is the music streaming service for you: from now on, users who sign up for a free trial only get one month of listening without paying, down from the previous three months.
Apple hasn’t announced the change but it was spotted by Japanese blog Mac Otakara. It’s the first change to the free trial since Apple Music was first unveiled to take on Spotify in June 2015.
Pricing for the service remains unchanged, with subscribers set to pay $9.99 / £9.99 / AU$11.99 per month for the full Apple Music experience, and $4.99 / £4.99 / AU$5.99 AU$ for the recently launched Apple Music Voice plan, where everything is controlled via Siri.
6 month supply
As before, you cannot take advantage of more than one free trial with the same Apple ID. You get a single shot to see what Apple Music has to offer, and then you either have to start paying for the service or forget about it.
You can currently get Apple Music free for six months if you’re a new subscriber by picking up select Apple audio devices: AirPods, Beats headphones and the HomePod Mini are currently included in the deal, which appears to be for a limited time only.
It looks like the change applies to all countries where Apple Music is available, over 150 at last count. A month is also the standard trial period for other music streaming services, although some of them offer a free tier.
Notice: Give us a free Apple Music tier
There are more ways than ever to access the music you love, from buying vinyl records to telling your Amazon Echo speaker what you’d like to hear – and Apple Music, like other streaming services musical, must work hard to continue to attract users.
However, unlike several other competitors, including Spotify, Deezer, and YouTube Music, Apple isn’t letting anyone in for free. The free tiers available elsewhere are limited in terms of playlist control and offline syncing, and they come with lots of ads, but you don’t have to pay a dime to use them.
While we’re not privy to the specifics of how effectively these free plans get users to sign up for a full subscription, Apple would certainly attract a lot more people with a scaled-down version of Apple Music that anyone could. access indefinitely.
What sets Apple apart is that it already has a traditional digital music business: many potential Apple Music subscribers have probably already curated digital music libraries, which may be why Apple doesn’t think that having a completely free tier is going to move the needle too much in terms of attracting new business.
