Apple is ditching its cheapest Apple Music tier for good

An image of Apple Music being controlled with Siri

(Image credit: Apple)

Apple Music may be one of the best streaming services, but we’ve got some bad news for users of its low-cost Voice Plan: Apple is ditching the plan this month. All other Apple Music tiers will continue as usual, but it seems the Voice Plan has been kicked out of the band.

According to an official support document, Apple Music’s Voice Plan will be discontinued “beginning in November.” Apple wasn’t any more specific about the date than that, but the company noted that “All Apple Music plans already work seamlessly with Siri, and we will continue to optimize this experience.”

As the name implies, Apple Music’s Voice Plan was focused on controlling your audio using Siri – in fact, that was the only way to navigate your tunes. In return, it was the cheapest tier of Apple Music, priced at $4.99 a month.

With its demise, the most affordable Apple Music tier will now cost $10.99 – more than twice the price of the Voice Plan. That’s a sharp increase for users of the soon-to-be-discontinued tier.

What if I’m a Voice Plan user?

Subscribers to the Apple Music Voice Plan have a few choices. If you’re a current user, you can continue with the Voice Plan until the end of your current billing cycle, at which point you can switch to a different Apple Music plan. Apple says you’ll get a notification before the end of your billing cycle with more information.

Things are mostly the same if you’re on a trial of the Voice Plan. After your trial has finished, you can stick to the Voice Plan until the end of your billing cycle, at which point it will end and you can move to a different plan.

Apple didn’t give any reason why the Voice Plan has been canceled, but its voice-only restriction may have hampered sales. Whatever the cause, it now seems that Apple feels it can do without this option.

The move comes as Apple has raised prices for a range of its services. Apple TV+ is increasing from $6.99 to $9.99, while Apple Arcade has risen from $4.99 to $6.99 a month. If you’re looking for a cheap Apple deal, you’ve got to look harder than ever.

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Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he's learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That's all his brain can hold. As well as TechRadar, Alex writes for iMore, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at MacFormat magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.