Shopping

Amazon Prime

Amazon

If you’re not piggy-backing off of your parents’ Amazon Prime account, you can have the subscription for less while you’re in school. College students can get Prime Student for $6.50 per month or $60 per year, and it includes the same perks as a standard Prime membership including free two-day shipping, free same-day delivery in select areas, and access to the entire Prime Video library. Amazon also currently offers a six-month free trial, so you’ll pay even less during your first year.

Buy Prime Student at Amazon – $60/year

Shipt

Shipt is similar to DoorDash but for groceries and household essentials: Pay an annual fee and you can get same-day delivery from numerous stores including Target, Costco and CVS. Shipt’s student plan costs $50 for the year — a 50-percent discount from the normal price — and you get the first two weeks free. Just double check that Shipt has stores available in your area before you subscribe.

Buy Shipt – $50/year

Apple

Apple offers some deals to students and educators. This year in particular, Apple is throwing in a free pair of AirPods when you buy select Macs or iPads for college. You’ll get AirPods with the regular wired charging case free, or you can upgrade to AirPods with the wireless charging case for $40 more. Alternatively, you can get the AirPods Pro for $90 more. Apple knows how popular AirPods are and it clearly wants to sweeten the deal for students who have been thinking about getting a new computer before heading off to college.

The AirPods promotion also includes Apple education pricing on Macs and iPads. There isn’t a flat percentage rate across all products; the discounts are device dependent. For example, right now students can get a new MacBook Air starting at $899, which is $100 less than the normal starting price. The 13-inch MacBook Pro also starts off $100 cheaper and the new iPad Pros start at $749, or $50 cheaper than normal. These are decent savings if you must have a brand new Apple product, but those with tighter budgets should also consider Apple’s refurbishment program.

Shop Apple’s back-to-school promos

Samsung

Samsung offers up to 10 percent off most of its products to students and educators. The Galaxy manufacturer also has some decent offers like a free pair of Galaxy Buds when you buy a Samsung Chromebook. We’d recommend stretching that 10 percent discount as much as possible by using it on big-ticket items like a Samsung laptop or a Galaxy smartphone if you need one. Otherwise, Samsung has solid accessories like the T5 portable SSD and the Galaxy Watch Active 2.

Shop Samsung’s back-to-school promos

Microsoft

Microsoft also provides students and educators with up to 10 percent off its gadgets, including the already affordable Surface Go 2 and the new Surface Headphones 2. And Microsoft’s online store doesn’t only sell Surface devices — you can also find Windows PCs from Lenovo, HP, Acer and others there at discounted prices.

Shop Microsoft’s back-to-school promos

Streaming

Spotify

Will Lipman Photography / Spotify

Spotify Premium’s student plan gives you a lot for only $5 per month. Besides access to millions of songs, it also includes Hulu’s ad-supported plan and Showtime’s ad-free service. You’d spend roughly $27 per month if you paid for all three separately at their full prices, making this student offer one of the best you can get.

Buy Spotify Premium Student – $5/month

Pandora

Pandora also offers students its Premium membership for $5 per month. Pandora’s offering doesn’t include any additional services, but you do get an ad-free experience, personalized music, unlimited skips and unlimited offline play. 

Buy Pandora Premium Student- $5/month

Apple Music

Apple also slashes 50 percent off its Apple Music subscription for students, bringing it down to $5 per month. The offer is available for up to 48 months so you can enjoy the rate for the entirety of your college experience. What’s more, the company bundles Apple TV+ in this student offer, so you can watch Apple originals like The Morning Show and See. 

Buy Apple Music Student membership – $5/month

Tidal

Tidal provides student discounts on both of its streaming services: Premium and Hi-Fi. Premium drops to $5 per month, down from $10, while Hi-Fi costs $10 per month, down from $20. Tidal is still often overshadowed by Spotify and Apple Music, but these discounts are a good way to give it a try without spending too much money.

Buy Tidal Student starting at $10/month

YouTube

If you’re already spending a lot of time watching YouTube, you may have a better experience with YouTube Premium. The Student plan knocks nearly 50 percent off the price so you’ll pay $7 per month for ad-free video viewing, background play, video downloads and access to YouTube Premium Music. The latter is YouTube’s attempt at a Spotify/Apple Music competitor, but it has a long way to go before it can really hold a candle to those services. However, if you listen to most of your music via YouTube already, Premium could be your one-stop-shop for music and video streaming.

Buy YouTube Premium Student – $7/month

Audible

Audible can be a good way to supplement your Libby audiobook borrowing habit, especially when the student discount costs only $10 per month. That’s $5 less than a regular membership and you get all the perks: one credit per month for you to use on any title in Audible’s library plus two Audible Originals for free. The company also has daily deals and book sales regularly that are only available to members, so you can often snag two titles for the price of one or for as low as $2.

Buy Audible Student – $10/month

Headspace

Being a student is stressful even in the best of times, but now it’s even more difficult to concentrate and find peace. Headspace is just one of many meditation and mindfulness apps available that can help with that, but it stands apart with a great student discount: $10 for the entire year, or $60 less than a normal annual membership. In addition to a large library of meditation lessons and routines to follow, Headspace recently added SleepCasts, a collection of soothing voices reading bedtime stories to help you fall asleep, as well as “mindful” workout routines.

Buy Headspace Student plan – $10/year

Tools

Adobe Creative Cloud 

Adobe

You’re probably using Adobe products if you’re studying anything to do with digital art or design. Adobe CC is the industry standard in this space but the entire suite of programs is quite expensive at $53 per month. Thankfully, Adobe has education pricing for students that drops the entire creative suite to $20 per month for the first year. That includes the big programs like Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC along with Lightroom CC, Premiere Pro CC, Adobe XD and more.

After your first year, the monthly cost increases to $30 per month. While not ideal, it’s still more affordable for students than it is for industry professionals. If you’re not tied to Adobe programs, you can also consider Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher apps from Serif ($50 each for the Mac or Windows versions), which compete with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

Buy Adobe CC for students – $20/month

Microsoft 365

Many students have to use Microsoft 365 tools on a regular basis. If your college or university doesn’t provide you with an account, you can still get Microsoft 365 for free by taking advantage of the company’s student and educator discount. This gives you access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and even Microsoft Teams free of charge, which is a great deal considering an annual subscription costs $100.

Get Microsoft 365

Ulysses

Spending all day and night writing papers is even more frustrating when you don’t have all your writing organized in one place. Ulysses is a popular writing app for mac/iOS that can be used for note taking as well as thesis writing, with features like auto-save and auto-backup, word-count writing goals, markup, plain text support and DropBox integration. Normally, Ulysses costs $40 per year but students can get it for only $11 every six months, or $22 per year. There isn’t a direct alternative for Windows users, but you do have options including Scrivener (a one-time student price of $41.65), IA Writer (a $20 one-time price) and FocusWriter (free and open-source).

Buy Ulysses – $22/year

LastPass Premium

Keep all of your school passwords and login information safe (and easily accessible) with a password manager like LastPass Premium. While the password manager doesn’t technically have a student discount, it does offer students six months of Premium for free. Premium, which costs $36 annually, adds 1GB of encrypted file storage on top of the features included in LastPass’ free tier — those include password storage and accessibility on all devices, password generator, multi-factor authentication and more. We suggest snagging the free six-month offer and deciding later if you want to continue with Premium or opt for the free tier.

Get LastPass

Squarespace Student plan

Whether you’re itching to get a jump-start on your portfolio or just want an online space for to show off your work, Squarespace is a good option as it gives students a 50 percent discount on any of its annual plans. The most affordable option will cost $72 for the year, which is half the normal yearly price of $144. Squarespace is one of many website builders out there, but it’s particularly popular with creative professionals. Its customizable templates make it easy to build a website and make it look exactly how you want it. Plus, you can upgrade down the line to add things like website analytics, custom JavaScript and CSS and e-commerce.

Buy Squarespace starting at $72/year

News

Will Lipman Photography / The Atlantic

It’s always been important to keep up with the news, but it’s never been more important than it is now. Yes, it’s daunting sometimes and we don’t expect (or encourage) you to inhale every breaking-news headline as it’s published. However, it’s crucial to know what’s going on in the country and the world as a whole. Here are some reputable news organizations that offer student discounts on their monthly or annual subscription plans.

The Atlantic: Starts at $25 per year for digital-only access.

The New York Times: $4 every four weeks for a base subscription.

The Washington Post: $5 every four weeks for digital-only access.

The Wall Street Journal: Starting at $1 per month for the Student Digital Pack.

While Modes were previously only on artist-based stations, the feature is now available on the new Qmunity and Black Music Forever genre stations. Instead of being data-driven, the new Modes are “fine-tuned by Pandora’s expert curation team across genres, decades and themes,” according to a statement from Pandora.

Qmunity features iconic pride anthems from artists like Madonna, Whitney Houston and Abba. Its “Future of Pride” Mode showcases music from emerging LGBTQIA+ artists, such as Sam Smith, Kim Petras, and Troye Siva.

Black Music Forever, another new station, features nine ways to celebrate the music of black artists. These Modes are Today’s Hip-Hop Mode, Today’s R&B Mode, Pop Mode, Afrobeats/Reggae/Reggaeton Mode, Black Voices Through the Years Mode, 1990s Hip Hop Mode, 1980s R&B Mode, 1970s Disco/Funk Mode or 1960s Soul Mode. While Qmunity appears to have already launched, Black Music Forever hasn’t gone live just yet. This could be the beginning of a bigger expansion for Modes. Now that Pandora has shown it can make Modes work on more than just artist stations, we’ll see if the feature rolls out more broadly in the future.

The Pandora Watch app is now completely standalone. Previously, you could download music to the wearable through Pandora, but being able to stream whatever you want without having your phone close by is a neat update.

Pandora’s stealing a march on many of its rivals here. Apple, of course, allows direct streaming to Apple Watch with Music and Podcasts. The likes of Spotify and Deezer still need an iPhone connection, effectively making their Watch interfaces remotes for their iPhone apps. YouTube Music and Tidal don’t support Apple Watch at all.

Given that Apple is selling several million watches every quarter, Pandora has a sizable market to tap into for people who want an alternative to Apple Music. Most people seem to still use their Apple Watch in conjunction with their iPhone, rather than leaving their phone behind. So while direct music streaming to the Watch is still a bit of a niche use case, Pandora is setting itself apart a bit from many competitors in the music and podcast department with this move.

The circumstances surrounding this latest investment couldn’t be more different than the last time SoundCloud raised money. By its own admission, the company was close to running out of runway in 2017. That July, it cut 40 percent of its workforce, laying off 173 people and closing down its San Francisco and London offices as it tried to cut costs. Later that same year, SoundCloud secured a $170 million investment. Almost three years later, SoundCloud says it’s moving toward generating more than $200 million in yearly revenue. It plans to use the $75 million to create new products, as well as further build out the services it already offers.

It’s tempting to see the investment as the prelude to a possible acquisition. In 2018, SiriusXM bought Pandora one year after it invested $480 million into the company. There’s also an obvious synergy between the companies. SoundCloud and Pandora already work closely together to sell ads in the US. And by acquiring SoundCloud, Sirius would have even more content to play across all of its platforms.

The defendants include Amazon, Apple, Deezer, Google, iHeartradio, Pandora, Rhapsody, 7digital, SoundCloud and YouTube, so this is a wide-sweeping effort on the part of PMR. The company says it has been proactive in the matter, offering licensing deals to all 10 defendants and educating them about their obligations regarding copyright laws. These efforts had little to no effect, though — the services have continued to stream the tracks without paying royalties.

PMR calls their actions a “blatant disregard of the Copyright Act.” The company is seeking “the maximum $150,000 for each act of willful infringement with respect to the copyrights involved in the action.” It’s unclear whether the company is seeking $150,000 per unlicensed track available on a given service or for every time one of those tracks has been streamed. PMR represents both emerging and chart-topping artists, including Wiz Khalifa, Gucci Mane and Fall Out Boy, so the company could be suing the defendants for huge sums of money, either way.

Royalty collection firms like PMR have their work cut out for them — major changes to the music industry have them navigating uncharted water. And while many of these shifts have been beneficial to musicians — just about anyone can have their music published alongside big acts thanks to companies like DistroKid — there are also new opportunities for big companies like Apple and Spotify to take advantage. Whether companies like PMR stand a chance against the legal defenses of tech giants remains to be seen.

Over the course of the decade, streaming has surpassed both digital downloads and physical products , now accounting for 80% of the market. #RIAAMusicData pic.twitter.com/q04FeQBT5a

— RIAA (@RIAA) December 30, 2019

Spotify landed in the US in 2011 and Apple Music debuted in 2014. There are many other streaming options around, including Tidal, Pandora, YouTube Music and Amazon Prime Music to name a few. Around 81 percent of Americans now have a smartphone, compared with about 35 percent in 2010. Since it’s much easier to use a streaming service than buy digital albums or load MP3s onto a phone (or carry around a separate music player), smartphone adoption has played a key role in the streaming shift.

In 2010, physical sales accounted for 52 percent of the US music market and digital sales 38 percent. Both are now down to a nine percent share. The market share of synch (i.e. licensing music for use in other media) hasn’t changed over the last nine years at three percent. But while people aren’t buying CDs so much anymore, vinyl’s back on the up. Sales rose from a little over $50 million in 2009 to almost $450 million in 2018.

What was once considered a classic format of listening to music, has made a resurgence. Vinyl album sales continue to grow. #RIAAMusicData pic.twitter.com/SIo7f4NKdD

— RIAA (@RIAA) December 30, 2019

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift (who famously pulled her music from Spotify for a while), Adele and Drake claimed eight of the top ten selling albums of the decade between them. It’s not quite clear how their sales figures break down between streams and digital/physical album sales. However, given some of their songs have hundreds of millions of plays on various services, streaming certainly played an important factor.

Podcasts have been booming over the last few years — Stitcher, Apple, Spotify and plenty of others have been building out their services while Pandora seemed to struggle. The company hopes to differentiate itself with the Podcast Genome Project, which uses a mix of algorithms and manual curation to suggest both shows and individual episodes to listen to. Pandora also offers some exclusive shows from SiriusXM hosts like Kevin Hart and Hoda Kotb, and upcoming scripted series based on Marvel superheroes.

With Pandora having played second fiddle to Spotify for years now, the company may need more impressive features to attract users and retain existing ones. That said, selection and convenience are two of the more important elements for streaming services to cover, and Pandora seems to be putting more effort into both those fronts.

Each of the scripted series will be 10 episodes long. In turn, the first four will focus on Wolverine, Hawkeye, Black Widow and Star-Lord, with the fifth and final series seeing the four superheroes teaming up. As for what else you can expect from the company, Marvel says one highlight will be a regular talk show series that will feature celebrity interviews. The two companies also plan to host themed live events as part of the multi-year partnership.

Once the series launch, SiriusXM subscribers will be able to listen to them on any device that supports the platform, including the Apple TV, PlayStation 4 and Sonos speakers. If you don’t have a SiriusXM subscription, they’ll also be available to listen to on the Pandora mobile app for both paid and free users.

If the quality of Marvel’s Wolverine: The Long Night podcast is any indication of what fans can expect from the company’s new slate of audio productions, then they’re in for a treat. The Long Night was a slick production that featured Castlevania‘s Richard Armitage voicing Wolverine. If you’ve already listened to The Long Night, Marvel’s latest podcast, Marvels, is set to premiere this fall.

The music streaming service added Spanish support during Latinx Heritage Month — it recently added a station called El Detour to highlight artists at the forefront of Latin music. Along with requesting a song, album, artist, genre or station with your voice, you can thumbs up/thumbs down a track and use the typical playback controls.

If the move seems like it was a long time coming, it’s worth noting Amazon only added Spanish language support to Alexa in the US this month.

It offers access to all tiers of the service: free, Pandora Plus and Pandora Premium. You can use keyboard shortcuts to control playback and see notifications that detail the artist, song, and album title for whatever you’re currently playing. You can also use the Pandora Modes feature, through which you can customize the kinds of songs you hear on stations.

However, it seems you won’t be able to play podcasts through the app just yet. Podcast support should arrive later.