I’m not a financial advisor, just a finance student sharing what I’ve actually done and learned. Do your own research before making any financial decisions.
Streaming music is one of those expenses that feels so small you stop thinking about it. $10.99 a month for Spotify. $10.99 a month for Apple Music. Neither one breaks you, so you never bother questioning it. But $10.99 a month is $131.88 a year, and if you’re in college, you almost certainly qualify for a student plan that cuts that in half or eliminates it entirely. Most people just never bother to look.
I didn’t look for longer than I should have. That’s on me. Once I actually checked, it took about ten minutes to switch and I cut my Spotify bill from $10.99 to $5.99 a month. That’s $60 a year I was just leaving on the table because I assumed setup would be annoying.
It wasn’t.
What the Student Plans Actually Cost
Both platforms have dedicated student pricing, and the difference from the standard individual plan is significant enough to matter.
Spotify Premium Student runs $5.99 a month. That’s a roughly 45% discount off the standard $11.99 individual plan. It also includes a Hulu (with ads) subscription and SHOWTIME at no extra cost, which is either a nice bonus or completely irrelevant depending on whether you use either of those. I don’t watch much Hulu but I know people who consider that bundle reason enough to choose Spotify over Apple.
Apple Music Student is $5.99 a month as well. Same price point, same discount structure. You get the full Apple Music library, lossless audio, spatial audio, and all the features available on the standard plan. The student plan doesn’t strip anything out. It’s the exact same product at half the price.
Both plans require verification through SheerID, a third-party verification service that confirms your enrollment. You enter your school, your name, your email address, and sometimes upload proof of enrollment like a class schedule or acceptance letter. It usually approves within a few minutes. If your school email ends in .edu, it tends to go even faster.
Eligibility is generally limited to students enrolled at an accredited two-year or four-year college or university. You can renew annually for up to four years, sometimes longer depending on the platform’s current policy. You’ll have to reverify each year, which takes about the same ten minutes as the initial setup.
The Free Options That Actually Work
If $5.99 a month still feels unnecessary, there are legitimate ways to get either service for free.
The most reliable is through your university library or student portal. A lot of schools have institutional licensing agreements with streaming platforms that give enrolled students access at no personal cost. Tulane has resources along these lines that most students never discover because no one advertises them well. Log into your student portal and look under “student benefits” or “software and subscriptions.” You might be surprised what’s sitting there.
Spotify Free still exists and it’s genuinely functional if you’re not someone who needs ad-free, offline, or on-demand playback on mobile. The ads are annoying. Shuffle-only on mobile is a real limitation. But if you mostly listen on a laptop or desktop and you’re not particular about skipping tracks, it costs nothing and it’s not a degraded version of the service in every respect. I used it for most of freshman year and it was fine.
Apple Music doesn’t have a free tier the way Spotify does, but Apple One bundles sometimes get offered as promotional trials, and if you’ve never subscribed before, Apple Music itself occasionally runs three-month free trials for new users. Worth checking before you commit to paying monthly. The three-month trial is legitimately three months of full access and you can cancel before it charges you anything.
If you’re already paying for Apple One or know someone in your family who is, you may already have access through a Family plan and just don’t realize it. Apple One Individual is $21.95 a month but Apple One Family is $32.95 a month split across up to six people. If a parent or sibling is already subscribed, getting added costs them $11 a month and gives you Apple Music plus Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and iCloud storage. That’s a better deal than the student plan if someone in your orbit is already paying for it.
Family Plans and Splitting Costs
Speaking of family plans, cost-splitting is underused and underrated. I’ve written before about how I split a Costco membership three ways with roommates junior year and paid $22 each for the year. The same logic applies to streaming.
Spotify Premium Family runs $19.99 a month for up to six accounts. Split evenly among six people, that’s $3.33 per person per month. Split among four people, it’s $5.00 each. That beats the student plan on price and you don’t have to reverify your enrollment every year.
The catch is that Spotify’s family plan technically requires all members to reside at the same address. Spotify has gotten more serious about enforcing this in recent years. If you and your actual roommates want to split it, that’s a genuine use case. Splitting it with five college friends scattered across different zip codes is technically against their terms of service, and Spotify has been known to audit and kick people off family plans that fail location verification. I’m not telling you what to do, I’m just being honest that it’s a real risk now in a way it wasn’t a few years ago.
Apple Music Family is $16.99 a month for up to six people, so about $2.83 per person at full split. Apple has similar household-residency language in its terms but enforcement has been less aggressive, at least in my experience. That could change.
If you’re looking to cut costs across multiple subscriptions at once, the broader principle of auditing what you’re actually paying for applies to more than just music. The same thinking I apply to streaming is what I apply to cutting costs while living in a big city as an intern. Small fixed expenses are easy to ignore. They’re also easy to fix once you look at them.
How to Actually Set This Up Without Overthinking It
If you’re on Spotify and you’ve never switched to the student plan, go to spotify.com/us/student right now. Click “Get started,” enter your school, and verify through SheerID. If your school isn’t in the system, you may need to upload a document proving enrollment. A current class schedule or a screenshot of your student portal showing your name and enrolled status usually works. Once verified, your billing flips to $5.99 immediately and you get Hulu included.
If you’re on Apple Music, go to apple.com/shop/product/BMGE2Z/A or just search “Apple Music student” on Apple’s site. Same SheerID verification process. Same reverification every twelve months.
One thing worth doing: set a reminder to cancel or downgrade before any trial ends. Apple and Spotify both make it easy to forget a trial is running. Put it in your calendar the day you sign up. If you’re genuinely going to use the service, you’ll convert to the student plan. If you decide you don’t need it, you haven’t paid anything.
Also, check whether your university offers any free access before you pay for anything at all. Your tuition already covers a lot of resources that go unused because students don’t know to look. Same reason I always tell people to check what’s available through their school before buying textbooks at full price. If you haven’t thought through your full cost-of-college picture that way, this piece on saving money on textbooks is worth a few minutes.
Once you’ve verified your student status and locked in $5.99 a month, the only thing left to do is set another reminder for twelve months out so you don’t forget to reverify and accidentally get bumped back to $10.99.
That’s genuinely it. You don’t need a complicated system. You need ten minutes and a willingness to actually do it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Can I use the Spotify or Apple Music student discount if I’m a part-time student? Part-time enrollment generally qualifies as long as you’re enrolled at an accredited institution, but SheerID’s verification can occasionally be stricter for part-time students. If you get flagged, uploading a document showing your enrollment status usually resolves it.
Q: How long does SheerID verification take for student music discounts? Most verifications go through in under five minutes, especially if your school email ends in .edu. If you need to upload a document, it can take up to 24 hours, but in my experience it’s usually much faster than that.
Q: What happens to my Spotify student discount when I graduate? Spotify will reverify your eligibility each year. Once you’re no longer enrolled, you won’t qualify to renew the student rate and your plan will revert to the standard individual price of $11.99 a month at the next billing cycle.
Q: Is the Hulu included with Spotify Student worth it? It’s the Hulu plan with ads, so it’s not premium, but it’s free on top of the music subscription. If you’d be paying for Hulu separately anyway, it’s a real added value. If you genuinely won’t use it, it doesn’t change whether the student music discount is worth getting.
Q: Can I stack the Apple Music student discount with Apple One? No. The student discount applies to Apple Music as a standalone subscription. If you subscribe to Apple One, you pay the Apple One rate, not the student rate. The student plan is the better deal if you only want music. Apple One makes more sense only if you’re actively using the other services it includes.