Share-mare
Firstly, well done on the mag, I look forward to it every month, it’s a great read! I am writing with regards to the new Apple Music family plan. I have signed up to the free trial of it and I’m making use of Family Sharing (as the organiser) so my daughter and my wife can also get Apple Music. The question is, just before the end of my free trial of Apple Music, if my wife starts a three-month free trial under her ID and we change our Family Sharing setup so my wife is the organiser and she adds us all to it, and I cancel my free trial, will we then get another three months of Apple Music for free? And could we do this a second time using my daughter’s ID to get nine months of it for free? In theory if you had use of all six Family Sharing slots with six different IDs, could you do a merry-go-round all of them and get an 18-month free trial? Keith Roberts Seth Singh says: The fly in your ointment is that when someone else in your family opens iTunes, they‘re automatically prompted to enable the benefits of Apple Music as part of their family’s subscription, rather than signing up for their own trial period. Notice that they don’t see reference to the three-month trial at the top of the For You page, which is where you would normally go to enrol in the trial if you turned it down the first time you opened iTunes 12.2.
It seems unlikely that Apple will have overlooked the scenario you propose – it has considered other ways you might think of to game the system; for example, tracks downloaded from Apple Music aren’t treated as purchases and so they aren’t listed in your iTunes Store account’s list of previous purchases (because they aren’t actually purchases, just rented content, and they contain DRM anyway). We’d be surprised if Apple isn’t already flagging up accounts that are part of a family plan as having already taken part in a family trial and therefore ineligible for several free passes.