Apple Music recently announced that they are raising plan prices for Apple Music and Apple TV+ (link). Amazon similarly raised the monthly prices of two of its Amazon Music Unlimited plans by $1 each on May 5, 2022 (link). We dove into Sign-ups for Amazon Music Unlimited in the months following the price increase in an effort to explore how this price change may have impacted the Service’s acquisition efforts.
To begin, the weeks that succeeded Amazon Music Unlimited’s price change saw an immediate drop in Sign-ups. This dip was driven primarily by a decrease in Sign-ups to the plans that saw the price increase: Prime and Single Device. The Prime Plan offers existing Amazon Prime members the opportunity to Subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited for $8.99 per month while their Single Device Plan, at $4.99 per month, only allows you to stream music from an Echo device or Fire TV.
While Sign-up volume increased for Family and Non-Prime plans in the period following the price increase, Prime and Single Device plans saw significant dips in acquisition. Sign-ups to the Prime Plan were down 41% while Sign-ups to the Single Device plan were down 23%.
As a whole, Sign-ups to Amazon Music Unlimited dropped 12% in the 21 days following the price increase, compared to the three weeks prior to the price change going into effect. The Service averaged 23K Sign-ups per day in the three weeks prior to May 5. However, in the three weeks that followed the price change, average daily Sign-ups shot down to 20.5K Sign-ups per day, which resulted in a more than 50K decrease in total Sign-ups in this three-week period.
This decrease in daily Sign-ups was sustained through the first half of June 2022, which averaged 20K Sign-ups per day. Nevertheless, whereas the price increase may have resulted in a significant drop in Sign-ups for a six-week period, Antenna data suggests that Amazon Music Unlimited was more than able to catch up to pre–price change Sign-up volumes in the months that followed.
The increase in Daily Sign-ups may have been driven in large part by a unique Prime Day promotion that took place from June 21 to July 13, during which users could enroll in Amazon Music Unlimited via a free 4-month trial (link).
For the second half of June, daily Sign-ups shot up to an average of more than 34K per day. As a whole, the average for June and July 2022 was 32K daily Sign-ups—a 9K increase over the three weeks preceding May 5. Post-promotion Sign-up volumes remained elevated to levels similar to those prior to the price increase.
Brendan Brady is a Content Strategy Associate at Antenna, a measurement and analytics company providing insight into purchase behavior and subscription metrics across the new media landscape.
