Just a day after Apple’s multi-billion-dollar buyout of the Beats brand, the newly coupled companies have announced a price drop for their streaming music service. Prior to today’s announcement, a Beats Music yearly subscription ran United States customers $119.98, but now it’ll only cost you a cool $99.99. That said, the $20 deduction — less about 17 percent of the total — unfortunately only applies to a full, yearly subscription. The price for monthly access still stands at the industry standard of $9.99.
The Hollywood Reporter hypothesizes that the Apple partnership has allowed the start of a price war with other streaming services. Apple takes 30 percent of in-app purchases from most streaming services, so Beats previous in-app purchases of year-long subscriptions were costing them approximately $36 per customer. Now that they’ve teamed up, that fee ostensibly goes away, making in-app purchases far more affordable for Beats than for their competitors. Spotify charges $9.99 per month, though recently gave college students a break.
In conjunction with this announcement, Beats also rolled out a new update of their app with a ton of bug fixes.
