Amazon Prime Subscribers Will Soon Pay More For Music Unlimited
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Amazon kicked off 2023 with a Music Unlimited price increase that impacted its non-Prime customers. Now, only a handful of months later, the company has quietly bumped the cost for Prime subscribers, too, meaning you'll pay a dollar extra even if you're also paying for Amazon's overarching Prime subscription. News about the price hike first surfaced over at The Hollywood Reporter, prompting questions directed at Amazon.
That seems to have spurred the company into action, as it has just updated its Amazon Music Unlimited FAQ to list the new $9.99 per month rate. If you're an existing Prime and Music Unlimited subscriber, you won't pay the higher price until September 19. New customers, however, will be charged the higher fee upon signing up as of today. Non-Prime customers who sign up for the standalone Music Unlimited plan will continue to pay the $10.99 per month rate that went into effect back in February.
Streaming service costs keep rising
You can save a bit of money on an Amazon Music Unlimited subscription by paying for a full year upfront — Prime customers will $99 per year going forward, which is a $10 increase over the current price. The family plan price, meanwhile, will jump from $15.99 to $16.99 per month. Though one could argue that this is ultimately a very small cost increase at the individual level, it is representative of a major trend in the industry right now.
Disney, for example, revealed alongside its latest quarterly earnings announcement that it will be raising the price for the ad-free version of Disney+ to $13.99 per month starting in October. Ensuring that everyone pays up, Disney will also follow Netflix's lead in cracking down on password sharing. If everything goes according to plan, Disney+ subscribers will see those measures kick off starting next year, though we don't yet know what the company has planned.
Other big-name streaming services have similarly raised their rates over the past several months, including Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock, and Max. As a result of these price increases, as well as the fragmented nature of streaming that results in content scattered across multiple platforms, many consumers report paying overall monthly prices akin to what they used to pay for cable TV.