As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, including a fee if you start Amazon Music Unlimited through a link here. Spotify, Apple and YouTube pay us nothing — and the service we recommend to most people below is one of the three that doesn’t. See our methodology.
Three services, three near-identical catalogues, and a price spread of exactly one dollar a month. Spotify Premium is $12.99, Apple Music is $11.99, and YouTube Music is $11.99 — all read from their own pages today.
At that spread the catalogue argument is a waste of your time. The decision worth money on this page is a different one: YouTube Music is the only one of the three that comes attached to something else you might already want, and that attachment costs exactly $4 a month.
What the three actually cost, per year
Monthly pricing is designed to feel small. Here is the same information with the multiplication done:
| Plan | Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual / month | $12.99 | $11.99 | $11.99 |
| Individual / year | $155.88 | $143.88 | $119.99 (annual plan) |
| Family / month | $21.99 (6) | $19.99 (6) | $18.99 (6) |
| Family / year | $263.88 | $239.88 | $227.88 |
| Student / month | $6.99 | $6.99 | $5.99 |
| Duo (2 people) | $18.99 | — | — |
All exact, read on 19 August 2026 from Spotify’s US Premium page, Apple’s Apple Music page and YouTube’s Music Premium page.
YouTube Music is the cheapest of the three on every tier, and the gap is widest on the annual plan: $119.99 for twelve months against Spotify’s $155.88 — a $35.89 difference. One detail worth noticing there. YouTube’s annual sticker says “save 15%”; $119.99 against $143.88 of monthly payments is a saving of $23.89, or about 17%. Not a scandal, but it is the kind of number that repays checking yourself, which is the argument we make about annual billing generally.
Apple and Spotify publish no annual individual plan at all on the pages above. If one is offered to you at signup, do the same division before accepting it.
The $4 question that actually decides this
YouTube sells two things that overlap. YouTube Music Premium is $11.99 a month. YouTube Premium is $15.99 a month, and it includes YouTube Music Premium in full — plus ad-free, background and downloadable YouTube video.
So the entire price of removing ads from YouTube, for someone who was going to pay for a music subscription anyway, is $4.00 a month. On the annual plans it’s less: $159.99 against $119.99, a flat $40 a year.
Here’s the calculation to run on yourself. Take the hours of YouTube you watch in a week — your phone’s screen-time report will tell you, and most people are surprised by the number — and multiply by 52. Then divide $40 by that.
- 10 minutes a day — about 61 hours a year — is $0.66 an hour
- 30 minutes a day — about 183 hours — is $0.22 an hour
- An hour a day — 365 hours — is $0.11 an hour
Anything above roughly half an hour a day and ad-free YouTube is costing you less per hour than almost any other subscription you own. Below ten minutes a day, you’re paying $40 a year to skip a handful of pre-rolls, and you should buy YouTube Music on its own.
Family plans invert this. YouTube Premium Family is $26.99 a month — $323.88 a year — against $227.88 for Music Family. That’s $96 a year for household-wide ad-free video, not $40. Six accounts of ad-free YouTube is a real product, but price it honestly before buying it.
The trap in Premium Lite
YouTube also sells Premium Lite at $8.99 a month, advertised as 44% cheaper than Premium. It is the cheapest way onto this page and the easiest way to buy the wrong thing.
Premium Lite gets you most videos ad-free, background play and downloads. It does not include ad-free YouTube Music. That exclusion is marked on YouTube’s own plans page — in the plan’s feature list, the music line is the one item carried with a cross rather than a tick, and it’s easy to miss.
So Premium Lite plus a separate music subscription is $8.99 + $11.99 = $20.99 a month, which is $5 a month more than YouTube Premium and gets you less. If music matters to you at all, Lite is not the cheap option. It’s for people who watch YouTube and listen to nothing.
Where Amazon Music sits
If you already pay for Prime, the cheapest option on this page isn’t on this page. Amazon Music Unlimited runs about $11 a month with Prime, or roughly $109 a year paid annually — cheaper than YouTube Music’s $119.99, on a comparable catalogue.
Two caveats, and they’re the reason it isn’t our headline recommendation. These figures are approximate. Amazon’s shopping pages can’t be read by us at all, and the numbers above come from an undated post on Amazon’s own newsroom that may not reflect current pricing; third-party sources have reported an increase that the newsroom post doesn’t show. Treat them as ballpark and confirm the rate at checkout. Second, the discount is conditional: without Prime the price lands level with everything else here, so the saving only exists for people already paying for Prime for other reasons.
We go through that comparison properly in Amazon Music vs Spotify vs Apple Music. (Amazon Music is also the only link on this page that pays us, which is worth weighing against the fact that we’re recommending against it for everyone who doesn’t have Prime.)
What you give up by leaving Spotify
Spotify is the most expensive of the three and still the right answer for two groups.
Discovery. Spotify’s recommendation engine is the feature people cite when they refuse to move, and if you use music to find music, that reputation is worth a dollar a month to test against your own listening.
Audiobooks. Every paid Spotify tier includes 15 hours a month of audiobook listening, stated on Spotify’s own plans page. Neither Apple Music nor YouTube Music includes anything comparable. If you listen to a book or two a month, that allowance is worth more than the entire price gap — we did the arithmetic in audiobook subscriptions compared. Two limits: the hours don’t roll over, and on Duo and Family only the plan manager gets them.
Spotify’s Student plan at $6.99 also includes Hulu’s ad-supported tier, per Spotify’s page — a bundle neither competitor matches at that price.
Apple Music at $11.99 makes sense mainly if your household runs on Apple hardware. Check Apple One first — Apple’s page puts those bundles from $19.95 a month, and if you already pay Apple for storage or TV, the bundle can beat buying music separately.
The verdict
You watch YouTube most days. YouTube Premium at $15.99 a month, or $159.99 a year. You’re getting a music subscription at market rate and ad-free video for $40 a year on top. Nothing else here competes on that arithmetic.
You want the cheapest music subscription, full stop. YouTube Music’s annual plan at $119.99 — $35.89 a year less than Spotify. If you have Prime, check Amazon Music Unlimited at roughly $109 first — linked in the section above — remembering that figure is approximate.
You discover new music, or you listen to audiobooks. Spotify at $12.99. The discovery engine and the 15 audiobook hours together are worth more than the $12 a year it costs over Apple.
A household of three or more. Any family plan — the spread is $227.88 to $263.88 a year, about $3 a month between best and worst. Pick the app your household already uses. Getting everyone onto one family plan matters roughly ten times more than which one.
Students. YouTube Music at $5.99 is cheapest; Spotify at $6.99 includes Hulu. That $12 a year is the whole decision.
Do not buy Premium Lite if you listen to music. At $8.99 it looks like the value pick and it excludes the one thing this page is about. Lite plus any music service costs more than YouTube Premium and delivers less.
And do not buy a music subscription if you already pay for YouTube Premium. You have one. Paying $15.99 for Premium and $12.99 for Spotify is $347.76 a year for a service you’re buying twice — $155.88 of it pure duplication. It’s the single most expensive mistake available on this page, and it happens constantly, because the music half of YouTube Premium is invisible if you never open the app.
Skip all of them if your listening is background noise while you work. Spotify and YouTube Music both have free ad-supported tiers that are genuinely usable, and $120–$156 a year to remove ads from something you’re half-hearing is a worse deal than it feels like at $12 a month.
Verified 19 August 2026. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, YouTube Premium and Premium Lite prices are exact, read today from spotify.com/us/premium, apple.com/apple-music, youtube.com/musicpremium and youtube.com/premium. Amazon Music Unlimited figures are approximate and could not be confirmed on a dated Amazon page — amazon.com blocks automated access, and the newsroom post they come from carries no publication date. Confirm that one at signup.