Skip to main content

Students can now snag YouTube Premium and YouTube Music for cheap

YouTube has its targets firmly set on younger paid subscribers and it has a new plan to cash in on their often inhibited cashflow. The company has announced new student discounts for its YouTube Premium and YouTube Music services, slashing prices up to 50 percent for those with a student ID.

YouTube Premium, the paid video streaming services that brings subscribers access to the company’s original series, as well as ad-free videos, will now cost just $7 per month for students ($6 if they subscribe by January 31, 2019). That’s down from the typical $13 price tag for those who’ve already snagged their degree.

But the better deal is YouTube Music, which can now be had for 50 percent off its usual $10 per month price tag, offering listeners ad-free access to millions of songs for just $5 per month.

The clear aim of this initiative is to get more college-educated young people — who have the highest potential to be big earners down the line — hooked on YouTube’s premium streaming services. Offering discounts to post-secondary students is fairly common practice in the streaming universe. Companies like Spotify and Apple have long offered various discounts to students, though it remains unclear how successful those initiatives really are. Then again, if anyone has the data to back up the decision to let college kids get up to half off, it’s Google, YouTube’s parent company. This move indicates that there is at least some water in the discount streaming well.

And they probably need it. Unlike most other major streaming services, YouTube has been very hush-hush about just how many people actually use its music and video streaming services, likely because the number is relatively minor compared to its huge number of unpaid users. In its first year (then known as YouTube Red), the company only touted 1.5 million paid subscribers, according to The Verge. That’s tens of millions less than major competitors like Apple Music and Spotify, which now grow by more than that on a near monthly basis.

So far, these discounts are only available for those attending college in the United States, but we expect that student discounts will likely spread to other countries where YouTube exists should it prove successful for the company.

Editors' Recommendations

Parker Hall
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Parker Hall is a writer and musician from Portland, OR. He is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin…
Tidal vs. Spotify: Which music streaming service has the features you need?
Tidal app for iOS on an iPhone 14 showing now playing screen with Max quality track.

Spotify has over 220 million subscribers and access to an immense library of artists, albums, podcasts, and audiobooks. A go-to music-streaming platform, Spotify is available on just about every desktop and mobile device one can think of. While it's a phenomenal way to enjoy your favorite tunes, it's certainly not the only music streamer in town. In fact, if you're committed to listening to only the best-sounding audio, Tidal may be a better fit. With its emphasis on hi-res content, Tidal is also home to a giant archive of music and video content.

But is one of these music streaming platforms truly the better of the two? To find out, we compared Spotify and Tidal, focusing on criteria like price, sound quality, and supported devices.
Price

Read more
YouTube rolling out some three-dozen new features this fall
The Digital Trends YouTube channel as seen on an iPhone and on a TV in the background.

The tweaks keep coming to the world's largest video provide. Today YouTube is taking the wraps off some three-dozen (more or less) new features. It's a cross-platform announcement, with the goods hitting phones and tablets, as well as televisions and wherever else you do your YouTube viewing.

Here's what you have to look forward to:

Read more
What is Spotify? Music, pricing, and features explained
Spotify app library screen..

Spotify is the first name that comes to mind when you think of music-streaming apps. Love it or hate it, Spotify is currently the most popular music-streaming service, boasting 551 million users and more than 220 million subscribers, putting it ahead of competitors like Apple Music. But what exactly is Spotify, and how does it really work? We're answering all your questions with this deep dive into what you can expect from Spotify. 
What is Spotify?

If you spend even a little time online, you've probably heard of Spotify. It's a popular free and paid music-streaming service founded in Stockholm in 2006 by Swedish friends Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. Fun fact: the name happened by fluke when the partners were shouting names back and forth from different rooms in Ek's Stockholm flat, and Ek misheard one of Lorentzon's suggestions as "Spotify." They later backtracked the meaning as a combination of spot and identify, and there you have it. 
Spotify today is a behemoth of a streaming service that also offers access to podcasts, videos, and highly tailored playlists driven by your unique usage. With several plan tiers to choose from, Spotify's free version lets you listen to unlimited music, podcasts, and even videos, so you can explore your taste without shelling out a thing, but you do have to endure ads and limited functionality (more on that below). It does offer much more robust paid options (more below, too), but the free version is more than enough for the casual listener. 
Spotify is also quite device-versatile, so you can use it on your smartphone, tablet, computer, laptop, TV, smartwatch, gaming console, and even in your car. You get the expected, intuitive controls like play/pause, next/previous, loop a song/playlist, and save favorites. But that's not all. There's a lot that Spotify offers, so let's break down what you can look forward to. 
Spotify features: music, podcasts, and more

Read more