What music streaming costs a year

The cheapest way for one person to stream music in the United States is Deezer, at $107.99 a year, checked 25 August 2026. Qobuz comes next at roughly $129.96 if you prepay twelve months. Apple Music, TIDAL and YouTube Music Premium all sit at $11.99 a month, which is $143.88 a year. Spotify Premium and Amazon Music Unlimited are both $12.99 a month, or $155.88. That is a $47.89 spread between the cheapest and the dearest — real money, though smaller than you might expect in a category where four of these seven raised prices during 2026. The bigger variable is not which logo you pick. It is whether the service will let you pay once instead of twelve times.

Prepaying is the only discount left

For years the standard advice in this category was to wait for a promotion. That advice has quietly stopped working. What replaced it is duller and more reliable: pay for a year up front, if the service lets you.

Three of the seven do. Deezer prints $107.99 a year on its own offers page against $11.99 a month, so prepaying saves $35.89. Qobuz drops Studio Solo from $12.99 a month to $10.83 a month billed annually. Amazon Music Unlimited sells annual plans too.

The other four do not, and their reasons differ in ways worth knowing. Spotify has no annual plan in the United States at all — the twelve-month gift cards sold at retail are a workaround, priced by the shop rather than by Spotify, which is why no figure for them appears above. TIDAL and standalone YouTube Music Premium had no yearly prepay we could find. Apple is the odd one: its Apple Music page names no annual plan and prints no yearly figure, though an annual option is widely reported to sit inside App Store subscription settings. A price we cannot read is a price we do not print, so we have left it blank rather than guessed.

That is the whole discount landscape. No loyalty pricing, no retention offers you can rely on, no meaningful difference between signing up today and signing up in November.

What each one costs for one person

Deezer — $107.99 a year. The only service here that puts its annual price on a public page in plain sight rather than burying it in an account screen. The page also expresses it as $9.00 a month, which is the lowest effective monthly rate in this group.

Qobuz — $12.99 a month, or $10.83 billed annually. Note the shape of that second number. Qobuz advertises the annual deal as a discounted monthly rate and never prints the yearly total, so the $129.96 above is our arithmetic on Qobuz’s figure, not a number Qobuz states. A per-month-billed-annually price is the most common way a subscription looks cheaper than the money actually leaving your account, and it is worth doing the multiplication yourself every time you see one.

Apple Music — $11.99 a month. Up from $10.99 after Apple raised prices in July 2026. New subscribers were being offered three months for $1.99 when we checked; $11.99 is what follows that.

TIDAL — $11.99 a month. Raised on 3 August 2026, 22 days before this check, from $10.99.

YouTube Music Premium — $11.99 a month. Up from $10.99. Do not confuse this with YouTube Premium, which also strips ads from YouTube itself and costs $15.99 a month, or $159.99 on its annual plan. The annual option belongs to the bundle, not to the music tier.

Spotify — $12.99 a month. The most expensive per year of the mainstream options, tied with Amazon, and the only one of the seven with no annual route at all.

Amazon Music Unlimited — $12.99 a month without Prime, $11.99 with it. The Prime rate is only a saving if you were buying Prime anyway; otherwise the membership costs more than the discount returns.

Duo, family and student

This is where the actual money is. If two or more people in one household are each paying an individual rate, you are almost certainly overpaying, and the gap widens every time individual prices rise.

All figures US list prices, checked 25 August 2026. A dash means we found no such tier on the day we checked — not that the service has ruled one out.

Three things fall out of that table.

A family plan pays for itself at two people on every service that sells one. Spotify Family at $21.99 covers six accounts for less than two individual subscriptions at $12.99. Apple Music Family at $19.99 beats two individuals at $11.99 by almost four dollars a month. The break-even is two, not three or four, which is not how most households think about it.

Duo is nearly extinct. Only Spotify, Deezer and Qobuz still sell a two-person tier, and on Spotify the Duo plan at $18.99 sits close enough to Family at $21.99 that the three-dollar gap buys four extra accounts. If you are a couple on Spotify Duo, Family is usually the better contract even with four seats unused.

Student pricing roughly halves the bill and is the largest discount in the category — Deezer at $5.99 and Spotify, Apple Music and TIDAL at $6.99. Every one of them requires re-verification, and every one reverts to the full rate when the verification lapses. That reversion is the part people get caught by, because it happens silently on a renewal date rather than with an email you would notice.

Lossless stopped being an upsell

For most of the last decade this category sold audio quality as a tier. That is largely over, and it changes the price comparison more than any single headline rate.

Spotify’s own Premium page now states lossless up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz as part of the standard plan. Apple Music includes lossless and Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos at no extra cost on every tier including Student. TIDAL includes lossless, hi-res FLAC and Dolby Atmos on all plans. Qobuz includes FLAC up to 24-bit/192 kHz on every Studio plan.

The practical consequence: there is no longer a “hi-fi tax” to price into your decision, and the services that once charged one now charge roughly what everyone else does. Qobuz and TIDAL used to justify a premium on audio quality alone. In 2026 Qobuz’s annual rate is below Spotify’s effective yearly cost and TIDAL matches Apple exactly.

We are not going to tell you whether any of this sounds different to you. That is not what this desk does. We are telling you that it no longer costs extra, so it should not be a line in your budget.

What we could not read

Three of the seven records above carry “Not published” in the renewal column, and the reason is the same in each case: we could not load the vendor’s own price page on 25 August 2026.

TIDAL’s pricing page returned a 403 to us. Amazon’s Music Unlimited page returned a 503, and Amazon’s own newsroom page was still showing pre-increase figures — $10.99 a month and $109 a year — well after the increase took effect, which is exactly why we did not print an annual Amazon figure we could not stand behind. music.youtube.com returned a browser-compatibility error rather than a price.

For those three, the monthly rates above come from reporting of each company’s own price-change announcement rather than from a page we read ourselves. That is a weaker source than this desk prefers, and saying so is cheaper than pretending otherwise. “Not published” here records the limit of our check on one day. It is not a claim that any of these services changes its price on renewal, and it is not a claim that it doesn’t.

The four we did read directly (Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and Qobuz) all state their ongoing rate plainly next to the introductory one, which is more than this desk finds in most categories.

The short version

If you are one person and the bill is what matters, Deezer at $107.99 a year is the cheapest full-catalogue option we can verify, and lossless is included. If you want hi-res and an annual plan, Qobuz at $10.83 a month billed annually is the next rung. If you are two or more people, stop reading the individual column entirely: a family plan beats two individual subscriptions on every service that sells one, and it beats them from the second person onward.