M3 StudiosSpring, TX5 min readAugust 1, 2026Apple Music raised its United States prices on July 17. The individual plan moved from $10.99 to $11.99 a month, the family plan jumped nearly 18 percent from $16.99 to $19.99, and the student plan went from $5.99 to $6.99. It was the first increase since October 2022, and Apple explained it in a single sentence: "As a result of rising licensing costs, Apple Music is increasing its subscription price beginning today." For a Houston artist or songwriter with music on the platforms, those four words, rising licensing costs, are the actual story, because licensing costs are the money that becomes royalties.
Price news almost always gets read from the subscriber's side, as one more dollar leaving the account every month. This piece follows that dollar in the other direction, through splits that federal regulators and label negotiations have already fixed, to the accounts where it lands and the paperwork that decides whether one of those accounts is yours.
Apple was late to this round, and that is worth noticing. Spotify's individual plan reached $12.99 and its family plan $21.99 after increases announced in May. Amazon Music Unlimited moved back in February, and now charges non-Prime members $12.99 a month for individual and $21.99 for family. YouTube Music raised its own rates this year as well, which leaves Pandora, still at $10.99, as the last major holdout. The $9.99 subscription that defined streaming for more than a decade no longer exists at any of the big services.
The reversal is the sharpest part. In February, Apple signaled that new increases were not in the near-term cards, and reporting at the time took the company at its word. Five months later it moved anyway, and where most companies dress a price increase in language about added value and new features, Apple pointed at its supplier bill. In music streaming, the supplier bill is the royalty pool.
A streaming service pays for music through two pipes. The recorded-music pipe pays labels and distributors for the master recordings, and those deals are negotiated privately, though they are broadly structured as a share of service revenue. The publishing pipe pays songwriters and publishers, and in the United States a large part of it is set by federal statute, in public, by the Copyright Royalty Board.
Those statutory numbers have been climbing on a fixed schedule. The headline publishing rate for interactive streaming sits at 15.3 percent of service revenue in 2026 and steps up to 15.35 percent in 2027, the top of the Phonorecords IV ladder. On the physical and download side, the mechanical rate has risen with inflation every year since 2023 and reached 13.1 cents per copy this year, which ended the 9.1 cent freeze that held from 2006 through 2022. The next five-year rate cycle is already in motion, and our report on the 2028 to 2032 mechanical rates covers the docket and its August 10 comment deadline.
So when Apple attributes a price increase to rising licensing costs, it is describing rates that have gone up line by line in public documents for four straight years. Part of the extra dollar on your receipt is the rate ladder arriving at retail.
A streaming price increase is a royalty raise that nobody announces to the people it pays, and it is collected with paperwork rather than applause.
Because the publishing pool is defined as a percentage of revenue, it scales the moment the price does. At the 15.3 percent headline rate, the extra dollar on each individual subscription sends roughly 15 cents per subscriber per month toward songwriters and publishers, and the three extra dollars on each family plan send roughly 46 cents. The recorded-music side is negotiated rather than statutory, but it is built as a revenue share too, so it moves in the same direction at the same moment. Spread across every subscriber Apple bills in the United States, the pools grow without a single additional stream being played.
That last point is the one working artists should sit with. A per-stream rate is a quotient, the pool divided by the plays, which is why per-stream figures drift down whenever uploads grow faster than revenue. Price increases are one of the few forces that push the numerator up, and 2026 has now delivered them at every major service.
Methodology: the per-subscriber figures apply the 15.3 percent headline rate to the price increase alone. Actual statutory pools use greater-of formulas that include total content cost and per-subscriber floors, so the precise flow varies by service and by month. The direction, larger revenue producing larger pools, does not vary.
A royalty pool pays accounts, not talent. For the new money to reach you, the song has to be registered where each pipe looks for its owner: with a performing rights organization for the performance share, with The MLC for the streaming mechanical share, and with SoundExchange for the digital performance royalties on the master, a stream of money we covered in our report on unclaimed royalties. A song that is missing from those databases still earns its share, and that share then sits as unmatched money until it is eventually redistributed to everyone else.
The rates themselves, and the order to claim them in, are laid out in our breakdown of the 2026 songwriter rate increases. For writers who would rather have the chain handled once and correctly, M3 Studios in Spring, TX runs publishing registration as a flat-rate service, so the splits, the codes, and the society filings are in place before the next release goes out.
Several caveats keep this story honest. The label-side deals are confidential, so nobody outside those rooms can state the recorded-music percentage with precision. The statutory formulas are greater-of structures, which means the clean 15.3 percent arithmetic above is an approximation of a messier calculation. A price increase can also shed subscribers, and a shrinking subscriber base works against a growing rate, which is exactly the tension the industry is now testing. None of this guarantees any artist a higher per-stream figure on the next statement, since your own share still depends on how much of the total listening your catalog earns.
What the caveats do not change is the shape of the year. Every major service now charges more for the same catalog, the stated reason at the biggest hardware company on earth is the cost of licensing music, and the rate schedule behind that cost keeps stepping upward through 2027 with the next cycle under negotiation now.
Spend one afternoon reading your catalog the way an auditor would. Confirm the writer registrations at your performing rights organization match your splits, confirm your songs sit in The MLC database with your publisher or administrator attached, and confirm SoundExchange knows who owns your masters. Then put the energy back into the records themselves, because a rising pool only pays catalogs that are inside it and getting played, and the price increases of 2026 just made every legitimate stream worth defending.
In the United States, the individual plan costs $11.99 a month, the family plan costs $19.99, and the student plan costs $6.99. The new prices took effect on July 17, 2026, the first increase since October 2022.
Apple's full statement attributed the change to rising licensing costs. Licensing costs are what streaming services pay labels, distributors, publishers, and songwriters, and the statutory publishing rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board have risen every year since 2023 on a published schedule.
The royalty pools are defined largely as percentages of service revenue, so higher prices enlarge the pools even when listening stays flat. The money reaches individual artists and writers only if their works are registered with the organizations that pay each stream of royalties, and each artist's share still depends on how much listening their catalog earns.
The headline rate for interactive streaming is 15.3 percent of service revenue in 2026 and rises to 15.35 percent in 2027 under Phonorecords IV. The physical and download mechanical rate is 13.1 cents per copy in 2026. Rates for 2028 through 2032 are being set now, with public comments due August 10, 2026.
Spotify announced increases in May, reaching $12.99 for individual and $21.99 for family. Amazon Music Unlimited raised prices in February, YouTube Music raised its rates as well, and Apple Music followed on July 17. Pandora has held at $10.99 for individual and $17.99 for family.
Follow M3 Studios for the money and rights mechanics Houston artists actually use: Instagram @metamusicmediainc, TikTok @metamusicmediainc, YouTube @metamusicmediainc. Questions: info@metamusicmedia.com. Cut the record the new pool pays for, in Spring, TX: metamusicmedia.com/pages/book-your-session.
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