Paying for Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Premium? You're Paying 3x for the Same Thing

Fumigastos · Practical guide

It's more common than it sounds: you keep Apple Music because it came with your iPhone, you keep Spotify because that's where your years-old playlists live, and at some point you activated YouTube Premium for ad-free videos — and without noticing, you end up paying for three services that do basically the same thing.

The real cost of running all three

Reference pricing, verify current rates on each platform — they change often.

Why this happens

It's almost never a conscious decision. Apple Music usually comes bundled with a free trial when you buy an Apple device. YouTube Premium tends to get activated to remove ads from videos, without thinking about the fact that it already includes music. And Spotify sticks around because that's where you built your listening history and playlists over the years. Each subscription made sense on its own at the time — the problem is that almost nobody sits down to check whether all three still make sense together.

How to decide which one to keep

• If you mostly use Apple devices (iPhone, Mac, AirPods), Apple Music integrates better and offers higher audio quality at no extra cost.
• If you have years of playlists and prefer the discovery algorithm, Spotify is still the strongest option on that front.
• If you genuinely use YouTube Premium for the videos (not just the music), it's worth keeping — but then you likely don't need Spotify or Apple Music separately, since Premium already includes YouTube Music.

The practical rule: if you can't explain in one sentence why you need each one, you probably don't need all of them.