How to Add Family Members to Your Apple Music Subscription

Apple Music is one of the go-to streaming services for all things melodic and melody-adjacent. Hosting over 72,000 million subscribers and featuring upwards of 90,000 tracks from the leading artists of today, Spotify’s nemesis has plenty to love.

Contents

Before you get started
What is Family Sharing?
Setting up Family Sharing
Invite family members
Next steps

If you’re a new subscriber, Apple Music gives you a generous break-in period of three free months of service. After the trial period, memberships are billed on a monthly ($9) or yearly cycle ($99). While that’s on par with the average cost for other music streamers, saving a buck here or there is never a bad thing. While college students can get Apple Music for $5/month, another way to save on your subscription is with an Apple Music family plan.

In this guide, we’ll teach you how to set up Apple’s Family Sharing and how to add users to your account. Before you know it, you’ll have multiple family members streaming tunes under one roof (and helping you pay that Apple Music premium).

Before you get started

In order to follow the instructions in this guide, you’re going to need a few things, some of which are more obvious than others. First off, you’ll need an Apple ID, which anyone with at least one iOS or macOS device or other Apple service should have. Second, you’ll need an iOS device running iOS 8 or later, or a Mac running OS X Yosemite or later.

You’ll also need an Apple Music Family subscription, of course. If you’re setting up Apple Music from scratch, be sure to choose a Family subscription instead of an Individual one. If you’d like to change an Individual Apple Music subscription to a Family subscription, it’s a fairly quick process, and detailed instructions are available via the support section of the Apple website.

What is Family Sharing?

Family Sharing is a convenient way to share content across a number of Apple services, including movies, iCloud storage, apps, and our focus today, Apple Music. For only $15/month, account administrators can host up to six users under one family subscription. Since everyone under Family Sharing uses their own Apple IDs, everyone gets their own preferences and recommendations.

Best of all: When you enable purchase sharing with Family Sharing, the entire family can swap movies, shows, books, and music — just as long as the purchasing user approves sharing for the other group members.

Setting up Family Sharing

Instead of functioning independently, Apple Music’s Family plan piggybacks on Apple’s Family Sharing infrastructure. If you already have Family Sharing set up and are just looking to add new family members, skip to the next section. If you’re setting up your Family subscription for the first time and have never used Family Sharing, read on.

Setting up Family Sharing on iOS

If you’re reading this article on your iPhone or iPad, you’re in luck: You can set up Family Sharing right now in a few simple steps.

Find the Family Sharing settings: Open the Settings app and either tap on your name at the very top, or on older iOS devices, scroll down and open the iCloud settings.
Tap Set Up Family Sharing: Then tap Get Started. From here, follow the prompts until setup is completed.
Invite family members: If you’re using iOS 11 or later, you’ll be invited to choose the first feature you want to turn on for sharing. From here, follow the instructions to invite family members via Messages.

Setting up Family Sharing on Mac

If you’re using a Mac, setting up Family Sharing is as easy or perhaps even easier than using an iOS device. The steps are just a little different.

Open Settings: Click on the ever-present Apple logo in the top left of the screen, then select System Preferences. Once the preferences window is open, click on Family Sharing. For devices running macOS Mojave or earlier, you’ll click iCloud instead of Family Sharing.
Start the setup process: Simply click Set Up Family, then follow the onscreen instructions to complete the process.

Invite family members

Whether you’ve already set up Family Sharing or just followed the above steps, the next step is to add family members so they can use Apple Music, too. You can do this on your Mac, iOS, or Android device. Steps for each are listed below.

iOS

Find the Family Sharing settings: As mentioned above, all you need to do is open the Settings app and tap on your name at the very top, or on older iOS devices, scroll down and open the iCloud settings.
Add a new family member: This is as easy as tapping Add Family Member and entering their name or email address. Then just follow the onscreen instructions.
Finish setup: If you’re using iOS 11 or later, you can choose whether you’d like to invite the family member via Messages or in person.

Mac

Open iCloud settings: Click the Apple icon in the top left of your screen, then open System Preferences and click on iCloud.
Open Family settings: Just click on Manage Family.
Add a new family member: Click the + icon, then follow the onscreen instructions.

Android

Open Apple Music settings: Open Apple Music, then tap the menu icon in the upper left corner.
Navigate to Account settings: Tap on your photo or name at the top of the screen.
Open Membership settings: Tap on Manage Membership, then enter your iCloud password if prompted.
Open Family settings: Tap on either Family or Family Setup.
Add family members: If you tapped Family Setup, follow the onscreen instructions to add family members. If you tapped Family, tap Add Family Member at the bottom of the screen and follow the prompts.

Next steps

Now, you should be all set on your end. All that’s left is for your family members to actually start using Apple Music. All they need to do is log into Apple Music with the same credentials they use for Family Sharing, and they’ll be ready to start listening. That said, every once in a while, things don’t go as smoothly as you hoped.

If you run into trouble

A common issue is a family member using multiple accounts and logging into either Apple Music or iCloud (in the case of Family Sharing) with the wrong one. That’s the first thing to check if one person is having trouble accessing Apple Music.

Logging out and back in can sometimes fix issues that prevent you or a family member from accessing a Family subscription. First, try logging out of the affected Apple Music account and back in again. If that doesn’t fix the issue, try doing the same thing with all of your Apple services. If neither of those work, try removing everyone from Family Sharing and adding them back. This is a little tedious, but following the steps above should make quick work of it.

And it’s as easy as that. If you’re considering adding another service to share with your family, take a look at our roundup of the best music-streaming services. If you decide to change to another service, we’ve got a guide on how to cancel your Apple Music account.

How to add family members to your Apple Music subscription