Taylor Kerns / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Apple might experiment with a free tier for its music streaming service.
- An analyst has discovered references in Apple Music’s code, suggesting Apple might offer limited features for free.
- It’s possible this doesn’t happen, especially as Apple’s head of Music has opposed a free tier in the past.
Apple Music is one of the most popular alternatives to Spotify and YouTube Music. Despite being among the earliest mainstream services to offer Hi-Fi quality playback with lossless audio and Dolby Atmos, Apple Music doesn’t get the same affection, and one reason is the lack of a free tier. That might change soon, with rumors of a free tier in Apple Music now circulating online.
Apple may now be working on a free tier, just like Spotify and YouTube Music. Aaron Perris, an analyst at MacRumors, recently discovered references in the music player’s code suggesting that some features may work without a premium account.
Based on the code Perris spotted, Apple Music could allow users to skip a limited number of tracks, but would require a Premium subscription for more. This suggests Apple is likely to finally give users the option to access limited features for free. Perris also noted that the strings were found in the beta version of Apple Music for Android, suggesting it may not be limited to just iOS users.
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Of course, this is largely speculative and does not automatically prove that Apple Music would indeed get a free tier. The appearance also comes just months after Oliver Schusser, VP of Apple Music and international content at Apple, proclaimed on a Bloomberg podcast that the music service does not require a free tier. Schusser reasoned that free or ad-supported tiers hurt artists, and free perks devalue any service. Coming from Apple, which dares to ask exorbitant amounts for cleaning cloths, this doesn’t seem surprising. And it’s not even the first time Schusser claimed Apple Music would never have a free tier.
However, a 2025 report by Midia Research (via Bloomberg) classified Apple Music’s subscriber growth as “underwhelming” through 2024, attributing it to the lack of a free tier. While Apple does not disclose user counts for individual services, the research organization estimated it had only 6 million subscribers, compared to Spotify’s 30 million paying users in the year. The latter’s subscriber count has only grown in 2025 due to a restrictive household account policy and market-specific incentives. Additionally, while we can’t provide specific numbers for YouTube Music (since most users get it with YouTube Premium), Google also recently boasted about having 350 million paying users across its services.
So, if the number of users were isolated as a metric, Apple might consider offering a free or an ad-supported tier, especially to woo people outside its ecosystem. If Apple decides to move in this direction, next week’s WWDC conference could be the right stage for the announcement.
Notably, while Apple does not offer a free subscription, it allows users to bundle services such as Apple TV, Arcade, iCloud, Health+, and News+ into a single Apple One subscription, which costs $19.95 per month for an individual or $25.95 per month for a family of five. That’s something we’ve been hoping for Google to copy as well.
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