Is music and iTunes free or paid?

If you want to subscribe to the Apple Music streaming service – which provides access to an enormous catalog of recorded music, for as long as you keep subscribing – you will need to pay for the subscription. It is not free. Like Amazon Music Unlimited, the Apple Music streaming service is ad-free, and for those of us who have broad tastes in music, and prefer listening to music to listening to ads, either service is a bargain.

If you want to purchase individual songs or albums from the iTunes Music Store, you will need to pay for the songs or albums. This is a one-time expense, but again, the music is not free.

If you have purchased music on CD, and want to listen to it on your iPhone, you can copy the music onto your Mac or PC, and then "manually" synchronize it onto the iPhone. There is no extra charge for this (above the money you spent to purchase the CDs), although you will need a CD, CD/DVD, or CD/DVD/Blu-Ray computer drive.

As for Pandora, the only "free" service they offer is one with ads. If you want to listen to music, free from ads, with the same ability to jump between songs at will that you would have on Apple Music or Amazon MP3 Unlimited, you must pay for a Pandora Premium subscription.

The site says that subscription is $10.99 USD/month – or, as much as Apple and Amazon charge for their offerings.

Pandora

Amazon has a "free" streaming service, but you don't get as much with it as with Amazon Music Unlimited. It looks to me as if Amazon Music Free has ads and does not allow unlimited skips between songs.

Amazon – Amazon Music Free