So WWDC happened Monday. I watched about forty minutes of the keynote stream during lunch before my laptop fan started sounding like a leaf blower and I gave up and just read the liveblogs instead. Lots of stuff got announced: iOS 9, El Capitan (still can't get over that name, sounds like a ski resort), the multitasking split-screen thing for the iPad Air 2 that I don't own. But the thing that's actually stuck with me two days later isn't any of that. It's the pricing on Apple Music.
Nine ninety-nine a month for one person. Fourteen ninety-nine a month for a family plan covering up to six people. Free for three months if you sign up before it launches on June 30th. That's it, that's the whole pitch, and I keep doing math in my head that I don't need to be doing.
Here's my actual problem: I already pay for a Spotify family plan. Also fourteen ninety-nine a month, also covers people in my house. So the honest comparison isn't "is Apple Music good," it's "am I going to pay thirty bucks a month combined for two services that do basically the same thing," and the answer to that is obviously no, but Apple is betting that a decent chunk of people will do exactly that for at least the three free months and then just... forget to cancel.
I have done this before. Not with music, with Hulu. Signed up for a free trial in like 2013 to watch one specific show, put a reminder in my phone to cancel it, promptly ignored the reminder for four months, and only noticed when I actually looked at my bank statement instead of just glancing at the total. Four months of Hulu I never opened once. So I don't feel great about my odds of remembering to cancel an Apple Music trial either, and I think that's sort of the point of a three month window instead of a two week one — it's long enough that you stop thinking about it.
The other thing nagging at me is there's no free tier. Spotify's free version is bad on purpose (ads, shuffle-only on mobile, all that) but it exists, and it's how I actually discovered Spotify in the first place years ago, by using the annoying free version until I got sick of it and paid. Apple Music skips straight to "pay us or don't," aside from Beats 1, the radio station thing Zane Lowe is apparently running, which is free but is also just a radio station, not really the product.
I'm not trying to say the whole thing is doomed, because I genuinely don't know yet, nobody does until it's actually out and people can compare libraries and offline downloads and whether the app is going to be a mess (Apple's track record on music software UI is, generously, mixed — has anyone here used iTunes recently. Anyone. It's fine. It's not fine). I just think the "everybody in my family gets an account for fifteen bucks" pitch only works on people who aren't already paying for the exact same pitch somewhere else, and there have to be a lot of us at this point. Between Spotify, Netflix, and the Amazon Prime thing my parents insist on keeping even though nobody uses the video part, my household's monthly subscription total is getting embarrassing to add up.
Swift going open source, by the way (mentioned almost as an aside during the keynote), is probably the more interesting long-term story out of this whole week if you're the kind of person who writes code instead of just complaining about your credit card statement. I'm not going to pretend I have anything smart to say about it yet since there's no actual release, just an announcement that it's coming later this year. Filing that one away.
For now I'm doing nothing. Not signing up for the free trial, not switching off Spotify, just watching to see what the app actually looks like on the 30th before I let anyone talk me into a third music subscription. If past me is any indication, that resolve lasts right up until a free trial banner shows up in the App Store.