Apple Music: Features, Devices, Pricing, Radio, and more

Apple Music is the company’s music streaming subscription-based service that was released on June 30 of 2015 in 100 countries. Apple Music has over 70 million songs in its catalog and offers the ability to download your favorite tracks and play them offline.

With the possibility of listening across all your favorite devices, Apple Music offers new music personalized for every user, curated playlists from Apple’s editors, exclusive Radio, video clips, and original content.

Here’s everything you need to know about the service.

Everything about Apple Music

How and where can I listen to Apple Music?

Apple Music is available on a variety of devices: iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Mac, HomePod, CarPlay, PC, Android, Sonos, Amazon Echo, Samsung Smart TV, Google Nest, and the web.

To be more specific, the service needs at least iOS 10 and watchOS 2.2 to run on your Apple devices. Here are the devices available:

• iPhone 5, 5C, SE (1st generation) or newer;
• iPod touch (6th generation) or newer;
• iPad (4th generation), iPad mini 2, iPad Air (1st generation), iPad Pro (1st generation) or newer;
• Apple Watch (all)
• Apple TV (4th generation) or newer;
• Samsung Smart TVs from 2018 or newer.

It’s also possible to listen to it on your browser, just type music.apple.com. A subscription is required.

How much does Apple Music cost? Does it have a family plan? What about a student one?

Apple Music is a subscription-based service and it doesn’t have a free tier like Spotify, although you can try it for free for three months. As for now, the service has three subscription tiers. Here they are:

• Student: $4.99/month;
• Individual: $9.99/month;
• Family: $14.99/month.

With a subscription, you can:

• Listen to over 70 million songs, plus your entire iTunes library;
• Listen online or offline;
• Stream ad-free music and music videos;
• download 100,000 songs to your library;
• Access across your devices;
• See what your friends are listening to;
• Original shows, concerts, and exclusives;
• Live and on-demand radio stations hosted by artists.

A family subscription offers:

• Access for up to six people;
• A personal account for each family member;
• Share your existing music library however you want.

Individual and student subscriptions have the same benefits. To apply for a student subscription, you just need to verify your college credentials with UNiDAYS every year while you’re studying.

Apple Music is available on all Apple One bundles as well. Learn more here.

Is Apple Music the same as iTunes?

This is sort of true because macOS Catalina Apple killed iTunes. The Music app is where you can find all your songs, bought on the iTunes Store, ripped from a CD, or downloaded via Apple Music.

iTunes Match

Before Apple Music, there was iTunes Match. The service uploaded your music library from the Apple Music app on your Mac or iTunes for Windows on your PC. Then you could access your music library on all of your devices that have Sync Library turned on.

Since Apple introduced its music service, the company encourages users to subscribe to the service, since you get all of the benefits of iTunes Match, plus access to the entire Music catalog.

Does Apple offer Hi-Fi quality on Apple Music?

Although Apple has really good speakers and headphones, such as the HomePod and AirPods Max, the company doesn’t offer Hi-Fi quality in its subscription yet.

Its music streaming service sound quality, on the other hand, tends to be better than other services available, because the company uses AAC format over MP3. Advanced Audio Coding achieves the portability and convenience of compressed and encoded digital audio while retaining the audio quality that’s indistinguishable from much larger digital files.

With Apple Digital Masters, artists can offer higher-quality tunes. Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Billie Eilish, and Sigrid, for example, offer their catalog with this label.

If you want to see if an album or artist has the Apple Digital Master label, you must open the iTunes Store and search for it.

Apple Music Replay

Apple Music has a Replay playlist of your most played songs of each year all the way from 2015 when the service launched.

The feature doesn’t have much, but by the end of every year, you can enter the Replay website here and see how much you listened to your favorite artists, your top 100 songs, and play counts for your top albums.

Apple Music vs Spotify

The main Apple Music competitor is Spotify. They’re both very similar. While AM is a better choice for those who already have a long-time iTunes catalog purchased, Spotify is the key music service if you love recommendations and algorithm-curated playlists.

With Spotify recently announcing it’s going to raise its prices, Music becomes a solid choice if you bundle it with Apple One. In 9to5Mac review post about the two services, José Adorno noted:

Starting with Apple One, I think is more convenient to pay one subscription for a lot of services rather than paying only Spotify for one service. With the Apple One Family plan, I have 200GB of iCloud storage, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and Apple Music, and I can share all of these services with my family. For $19.95 a month, I have way more benefits instead of paying $9.99 per month for Spotify individual plan or $16.99 for a family subscription that only includes the music service.

Here, you can learn more about similarities between these two services and what’s 9to5Mac readers take.

Apple Music walkthrough

As on iOS 14.5, Apple Music has five tabs on the iPhone. In this guide, I’ll explain what each tab does. There’s also your Profile on the app.

Listen Now

“Listen Now” is a section based on your favorite picks. It shows your recently played songs, what your friends are listening to, and stations and mixes just for you. At the end of the page, you can find the Replay section with your top songs by each year.

Browse

The “Browse” section is curated by Apple editors. You can find the most listened songs everywhere, new releases, what’s trending, exclusive playlists, the Daily Top 100, and what’s coming soon.

Alongside iOS 14.5, Apple introduced its City Charts, a bunch of playlists with the Top 25 songs of over 100 cities around the world. It’s updated daily. You can learn more about it here.

Radio

Apple Music Radio is the rebrand of Beats 1. Introduced in 2020, it offers shows, interviews, and everything else you expect from a radio. Apple Music Hits and Country are people’s favorite stations.

“Apple Music is home — it’s home to artists, it’s home to fans, and it’s home to incredible music,” said Zane Lowe, Apple Music’s global creative director, and host. “I’m an obsessive music nerd. I love searching for the most exciting new artists and playing them right alongside the most essential, established artists of our time because great music does not know the difference and the service’s fans just want to hear great music.”

Library

The “Library” section is where you find your added songs. You can opt to listen to them online or offline. The offline songs are also available in the “Downloaded” tab.

You can edit the section to appear just the tabs you really use, such as “Playlists,” “Artists,” “Albums,” and “Songs,” while toggling of “Genres,” “Compilations,” and others.

Search

You can search on Apple Music and in your library. You can also browse categories or write a part of a lyric to find the song.

Now Playing

The Now Playing screen shows the song, album, or playlist you’re listening to. You can enjoy the “lyrics view”, AirPlay your song using your speaker, Apple TV, Smart TV, wireless headphones, and see what will play next. In this section you can “Shuffle,” turn “Repeat” on, and toggle the “Infinite” button, to keep playing similar songs after a playlist or album is over.

In the “Now Playing” section, you can also share the song or the lyrics on Instagram and other social media platforms, and let Apple Music know if you love the song or want the service to suggest less like this.

Profile

At the top of the “Listen Now” section, there’s your Profile. You have to click on your photo, then “View Profile.” In this section, there are your public playlists, what you recently listened to, and who you follow, and who follows you.

The social part was never Apple’s strong move. These public playlists you can share with everyone and you can see who adds your list to their own library, which is nice. But apart from that and the possibility to know what your friends are listening to, there’s not much to do here.

Apple Music Awards

Apple Music Awards honor achievements in music across five distinct categories and winners are chosen through a process that reflects both Apple’s editorial perspective and what customers around the world are loving most. The award recognizes the best and boldest musicians of the year.

Apple has designed a series of physical awards that represent the extraordinary craftsmanship integral to creating music. Each award features Apple’s custom silicon wafer suspended between a polished sheet of glass and a machined and anodized aluminum body. The result of this multi-month process, before it is sliced into hundreds of individual chips, is stunning and distinctive. In a symbolic gesture, the same chips which power the devices that put the world’s music at your fingertips sit at the very heart of the Apple Music Awards.

Here are the categories and which artist had won in each one of them:

• Artist of the Year: Lil Baby (2020) and Billie Eilish (2019);
• Breakthrough Artist of the Year: Megan Thee Stallion (2020) and Lizzo (2019);
• Songwriter of the Year: Taylor Swift (2020) and Billie Eilish and Finneas (2019);
• Top Song of the Year: “The Box” by Roddy Ricch (2020) and “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X (2019);
• Top Album of the Year: “Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial” by Roddy Ricch (2020) and “WHEN WE FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?” by Billie Eilish (2019).

As for now, Billie Eilish is the artist with more Music Awards with three awards from 2019 as “Artist of the Year,” “Songwriter of the Year,” and “Top Album of the Year,” followed by Roddy Ricch with two awards in 2019.