In all the talk about Apple’s spate of announcements at WWDC, the company’s offer of a "family pricing" deal for its Apple Music streaming service has received a surprisingly modest amount of attention. Under the new plan, for $14.99 a month, you’ll be able to share an Apple Music account among as many as six people via the company’s preexisting iCloud Family Sharing program. (The other, more conventional option is to pay $9.99 a month for an individual subscription—the same price you’d pay for an individual subscription to Spotify Premium.)

Granted, the family plan was also an option on Beats Music, which Apple acquired when the company purchased Beats Electronics for $3 billion last year. However, Apple gave the streaming service enough of an overhaul while turning it into Apple Music that the tier was by no means a foregone conclusion. They didn't have to do it, but they did. So what does this new, family-shaped wrinkle in the media market mean? Five theories:

It’s a strategic concession to the realities of How We Consume Media Now.

According to a 2014 survey by Consumer Reports, about 46 percent of people who use streaming services share their passwords with someone outside their household. For the most part, media distributors have accepted, but not embraced, this behavior. HBO’s longstanding practice has been to turn a blind eye to people sharing their parent’s, ex-roommate’s, and second cousin’s HBO Go logins. And Netflix allows up to four simultaneous streams on one account, though it prefers those streams to be shared among actual family members.

Apple

This new move by Apple would appear to be an attempt to encourage, capture, and monetize all this account sharing. It’s also a play against type for a company that has historically made it difficult to share, say, the contents of an iTunes library even among one’s own devices, let alone among friends. (The company declined to comment further on the family pricing plan until closer to the time of Apple Music’s actual launch.)

It’s one more downward turn of the pricing ratchet.

Earlier this week, the Verge reported that Apple initially hoped to undercut Spotify by charging individuals between $5 and $8 a month for access to Apple Music. The music labels, not surprisingly, dug in their heels against that move. But considering that a family plan can give six people access to the whole Apple Music library for about $2.50 a head, as the music industry analyst Bob Lefsetz pointed out, Apple still managed to give people a way to pay less for their music.

Once Apple’s news was out, Spotify wasted no time in announcing that it would match Apple’s family deal, saying that it would offer a group pricing plan with pretty much the same details. So among all the other things that happened the day of WWDC: the market price of music slipped downward. Which leads us to the idea that....

It’s rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, because the economics of digital content are fundamentally broken.

In today’s world, any piece of digital content—whether it’s a song, a piece of journalism, a movie, or a recipe—has arguably become what economists call a non-rival, non-excludable good.

A non-rival good is one that I can consume without making it any less available for you. There's no scarcity. It can't be depleted through use, and so the marginal cost of each new person enjoying the good is nothing. The air we breathe is a non-rival good. So are the infinitely reproducible digital files we read, listen to, and watch.

A non-excludable good is one that can’t effectively be fenced off from non-paying customers. Views of the Empire State Building in New York are effectively non-excludable; it would be nigh impossible to consistently charge admission for a glimpse. Digital files are pretty much the same way: Though we try to charge admission for them, they do tend to get around.

According to Michael O’Hare, a professor of public policy and arts policy at the University of California at Berkeley, this non-rival, non-excludable pickle is why the music industry’s revenues have declined by about half since the late ’90s—and why it’s forever going to be difficult, if not impossible, to build a truly functional market for digital creative content. "They're making the price of the product approach marginal cost, which is always nice, but it's just such a kludge," says O’Hare. In other words, Apple’s move toward family pricing is a clever maneuver, but it’s not enough.

It’s a wrongheaded attempt to play catch up.

However cheap $2.50 a head might seem in comparison to $10, it's still a fortune compared to $0. And the two biggest global streaming providers—Spotify and YouTube—offer on-demand access to music for free, with advertising. Apple won’t be offering the same.

Spotify has 75 million users, only 20 million of whom pay for the company’s ad-free premium service. It’s also been operating this way since 2008; in other words, we're years past the last time people really expected to pay for their music. Cut-rate family pricing or no, Apple’s bet that consumers will happily pay now is a long shot, says Lefsetz: "What they’re trying to do is get people to move back into the past." And while a retro aesthetic can often come into vogue, actual retrograde motion doesn’t tend to happen much in technology.

It’s an inadvertently telling case of deja vu

If you stare back through the mists of time (okay, if you search for "Apple" and "family pricing" on Google), you’ll find that the company has already tried offering a family pricing option for a piece of intellectual property. Way back in 2002, when the Jaguar edition of OS X came out, Apple offered a special family pricing plan for the operating system—which was received by reporters at the time as a great way to stick it to Microsoft, which charged for each software package individually. Now, of course, we take it for granted that operating system updates come free and automatically, just part of the package that’s bundled together with the devices we pay for.