The streaming price wars are coming – and they’re a music fan’s dream come true

There really has never been a better time to be a music fan — particularly if you’re a music fan who loves exploring vast catalogs of music that you won’t find on any top 40 radio stations. Pandora and Spotify have proven to be the two most popular music streaming services so far but there are plenty of competitors that are lining up to take the crown, led by Apple and its newly acquired Spotify rival Beats Music. All this added competition can only mean one thing: Streaming price wars are coming.

Spotify on Monday announced that it will soon launch a new program called Spotify Family that will let you add up to four different Premium user accounts to your own Spotify account at a 50% discount from the normal monthly price. So for example, if you’re already a Spotify subscriber and your spouse wants to sign up, you can add them to your plan for just $5 extra per month instead of the $10 per month they they’d pay for their own account.

This will obviously be a great money saver for anyone who has multiple Spotify fans in their family… but it’s only just the beginning of great music streaming deals.

Re/code reports that Apple “has been pushing the labels for more extensive price cuts” and that “it wants to relaunch the Beats Music subscription service it bought last spring next year, and industry scuttlebutt is that it’s trying to get the the price cut in half, to $5 a month.” Apple is one of the few companies out there with the scale and negotiating leverage to really push labels to accept this sort of price cut, which could be a huge game changer for the music streaming business.

So buckle up, music fans: It looks like the next year is going to be very exciting.

SOURCE:

SPOTIFY, RE/CODE