Apple Music has raised its monthly subscription prices in the US. The individual plan went from $10.99 to $11.99 per month, the family plan from $16.99 to $19.99, and the student plan from $5.99 to $6.99, The Verge reported on July 17, 2026.

Apple said the increases are due to rising licensing costs, in a statement to Music Business Worldwide. Prices have also gone up in the UK and Europe, though the exact amounts for those regions were not shared.

This is not the first time Apple has raised prices. The last increase came in October 2022, when Apple also raised the cost of Apple TV Plus and Apple One. That round was blamed on the same kind of cost pressures. The new increase comes about three years and nine months later.

Spotify recently raised the price of its own US Premium plan from $11.99 to $12.99 per month. Apple's individual plan is now $11.99, so the two services are still $1 apart. But the baseline price for listening to music without ads has gone up by a dollar on both platforms.

The family plan took the biggest hit, rising by $3 per month. That raises the cost for households with multiple listeners. The student plan went up by a dollar. For someone on the individual plan, the change adds up to $12 more per year.

Here is why that reasoning makes sense. When you stream a song, the service has to pay a small fee to the people who own that music, the record labels, songwriters, and other rights holders. The more people listen, the more the service pays. Unlike video streaming services such as Netflix, which can make their own shows to avoid paying others, music services do not have much power to lower the rates they owe. Those rates are set through contracts and government rules, and they have been going up as the music industry has settled on paid subscriptions as its main source of income.

The timing is worth thinking about. When the two biggest music streaming services raise their prices around the same time, it raises a fair question: are costs genuinely going up for both of them, or have they simply reached a point where neither worries about losing customers to the other? The available facts do not tell us which explanation is the real one.

For subscribers, the choice is simple. Apple Music is still $1 cheaper than Spotify Premium in the US. But that dollar difference is small enough that it probably will not push people to switch. The bigger question is whether these increases from both major services signal a new normal for what people will pay to listen to music on demand. For years, the streaming industry pushed toward a $9.99 monthly price as the standard. Both major services have now moved well past that.