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Apple Music unveils mid-price subscription package

By | Published on Tuesday 19 October 2021

Apple Music

Apple Music has announced a new mid-price subscription package built around its Siri virtual assistant. The new Apple Music Voice Plan package will cost $4.99 a month.

Although the general consensus in the music community is that the standard $9.99 a month subscription price for premium streaming is not enough – and slowly but surely price rises are being implemented – at the same time there is a sizeable number of consumers who will never spend $120 a year to access recorded music. And while the free streaming services satisfy those consumers to an extent, ad-funded streams never generate as much revenue as subscription sales.

To that end there has been much debate over the years regarding the need for mid-price subscription packages, which offer more than something like Spotify’s free tier, but less than what people are getting for $9.99.

Although Spotify confirmed it was investigating a possible new mid-price package earlier this year, the company that has done the most in this space is Amazon, which offers a discount on its $9.99 package for Prime members, plus a $3.99 a month version of its streaming service that can only be accessed via its Echo and Fire devices.

Voice Plan is basically Apple’s competitor to that latter Amazon package. Although the blurb bigs up how super modern and exciting a streaming music experience entirely built around Siri and voice control is, in reality the aim of Voice Plan is to offer a cheaper entry point into Apple Music – which doesn’t have a free version, of course. That will expand Apple Music’s potential consumer base and will also provide a new audience to whom the tech giant can try and upsell its $9.99 package

“The Apple Music Voice Plan”, says the official blurb, “offers subscribers access to the service’s catalogue of 90 million songs; tens of thousands of playlists, including hundreds of brand new mood and activity playlists, personalised mixes, and genre stations; as well as the award-winning Apple Music Radio – all through Siri for just $4.99 per month”.

Meanwhile, Apple Music boss Oliver Schusser adds: “Apple Music and Siri are natural partners and already work seamlessly together. With Siri actively used on hundreds of millions of devices worldwide, we are THRILLED to add this new plan that delivers an effortless music experience just by using your voice and makes Apple Music accessible to even more people around the world”.

Voice Plan will work on any Siri-enabled Apple device, and will be available later this autumn in seventeen markets: Australia, Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, Taiwan, the UK and the USA.



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