Apple Music is an ad-free service that offers the ability to music, download music for offline listening, and make custom radio stations based on artists, albums, and songs. The service also offers the radio station Beats 1.
Apple launched their service with a free 3-month trial and reports claim that 11 million users have taken advantage of the free trial.
After the free trial, Apple offers three options. The first is to cancel the service. The second is to pay $9.99 monthly to enjoy the service independently. The third option is to pay $14.99 monthly for a family of up to six to enjoy the service. It will be interesting to see if after the free trial, users stay and pay or leave for an alternative service like Pandora or Spotify.
Spotify also offers a similar service featuringing and radio. You can either listen for free with Ads or get Spotify Premium, where radio is ad-free and you can listen to individual songs. Pricing oftions include $9.99/mo individual service or a family plan where the first account is $9.99/mo and each extra account is $4.99/mo.
Pandora offers a radio-only service which you can get ad-free music with Pandora 1 for $4.99 per month or $36 per year.
What Apple Music offers that other services don't is the Connect feature. This tool allows artists to post updates on new content, footage of concerts, snippets of new songs, and really anything they want. It's like a Facebook for music that is built right into the iOS Music app.
It also offers the option to music videos and other visual content, which Spotify and Pandora don't yet offer.
Do you use Apple Music? Will you stay and pay or switch to another service? Tweet us at @VAVEL_Tech and follow us for more on the world of technology!
Jack Griffin is a writer for the VAVEL USA Technology and Music sections. Follow him on Twitter at @jacksonlgriffin.
