Apple offers discounted annual Apple Music subscription through $99 gift card

Apple is now selling 12-month Apple Music gift cards for $99 in the U.S., allowing people willing to commit for that span to save a significant amount on their subscription.

The cards are available at Apple's retail stores, and from several online retailers including Best Buy, Walmart, and even PayPal's eBay store. Apple itself isn't selling 12-month subscriptions online, whether through the Web, iTunes, or iOS.

For an individual listener, Apple Music normally costs about $120 per year at a rate of $9.99 per month. Apple's main rival in on-demand streaming — Spotify — does sell cards for 12-month Premium subscriptions, but these are normally full-price ($120) unless a vendor happens to be offering a discount.

Apple can afford to be more aggressive with pricing, since its online services are mostly a way of keeping people attached to its hardware, where most of its profit is made. While both Spotify and Apple Music are multi-platform, the latter is deeply integrated into iOS devices.

The company may be hoping to intensify competition with Spotify, which still has twice the number of paid subscribers and an even larger number of ad-supported listeners. An Apple Music revamp is coming with this month's release of iOS 10, which should significantly improve the service's interface.

18 Comments

ireland 17435 comments · 18 Years

About 8 years ago

Europe?

NY1822 620 comments · 8 Years

Last year I waited until around Black Friday and purchased two $100 ITunes gift cards for $80 each from Best Buy and used towards my Apple Music subscription. Nice idea this year to give as a gift.

kozchris 206 comments · 20 Years

I purchased the 12month code through the PayPal eBay store. The $99 was added to my existing iTunes credit. Not sure how this is supposed to work but something appears to be broken.

To answer the basic question, yes the code is for the 12 month subscription and not some $99 iTunes credit code.

yoyo2222 144 comments · 14 Years

This is fine except I have a family plan. Would the discount code give me a break on at least part of my subscription?

kozchris said:

I purchased the 12month code through the PayPal eBay store. The $99 was added to my existing iTunes credit. Not sure how this is supposed to work but something appears to be broken.

To answer the basic question, yes the code is for the 12 month subscription and not some $99 iTunes credit code.

something does seem weird. They need to do a better job of explaining what the card can be used for. So if you sign up for Apple Music and get the 3-month free trial, while this gift card be applied on top of that? What about a family plan? is it just applied as iTunes credit (since a regular iTunes gift card can be used for recurring payments of Apple Music)?