Spotify is officially raising its Premium subscription rates in the US come July, following reports of the move in April. The platform is increasing its Individual plan from $11 to $12 monthly and its Duo plan from $15 to $17 monthly — the same jump as last year’s $1 and $2 price hikes, respectively. However, its Family plan is going up by a whopping $3, increasing from $17 to $20 monthly. The only subscribers getting a break are students, who will continue to pay $6 monthly.
Spotify announced the price hikes less than a year after its previous one last July. Before that, Spotify hadn’t raised its fees since launching a decade and a half ago. I guess it was too optimistic to hope the next increase would also take that long, especially with Spotify’s continued focus (and money dump) on audiobooks.
Premium subscribers should receive an email from Spotify in the next month detailing the price hike and providing a link to cancel their plan if they would prefer to do so. Users currently on a trial period for Spotify will get one month at $11 after it ends before being moved up to a $12 monthly fee.
I’m all for pirating, but tbh music streaming apps are a service that is still in the “worth it” range. Not where Spotify is going, but, maintaining a library of high quality music with all the assets, and serving it to all your devices over the Internet is not a small feat to do securely.
I’ll probably switch to tidal for now while I start building up my library to include stuff beyond what I like…
You should check out Plexamp while you bridge the gap. It has tidal support built in, and you can self-host your own collection as you build it up. Then when you’re done with tidal, you don’t have to learn or download a new app.
I don’t mind paying $10/mo for access to millions of songs on demand, even if the caveat is that I don’t own anything at the end of my subscription.
I understand costs have gone up, so I can accept a $1 increase in subscription. The problem is that Spotify wants to do a bunch of side projects at my expense. I have no interest in podcasts or audiobooks yet I must fork up the extra money to fund it. I have no say in what my money is being used for and I hate that.
It’s why I moved from it to Tidal and then to Apple Music (even though I’m on Android). Both have their own issues but at least they’re focused on music.
I don’t mind paying $0/mo for access to millions of songs with limited skipping and occasional adverts. ,
Well considering the last price hike got us gems like the music 8-ball/magic crystal thing, I can barely wait to see what banger they’ll come up with to bloat my music player with next.
It should be audiobooks this time, if I heard correctly.
About 10 years ago I got rid of most of my cd’s because I thought I would just use spotify. Now I’m slowly gathering a cd collection again from thriftstores (or buy albums in store if it’s newer music and I want to support the artist). I rip them all to flac and add them to my Plex.
I’ve noticed I listen to music more now. I find new cool songs by artists by listening through whole albums again. Because of the time commitment of ripping and physically flipping through cd’s, I actually care again about the music that I gather and listen.
There should be a app that worked with most music players and with the data suggest new things to try. Something that worked with local players, streaming players, etc. Something like the concept of last.fm but with good suggestions.
I can’t believe that these days we don’t get one app like that. Even streaming apps with all the data they got from listing hours and still fail around 40 to 60% with my suggestions, and rarely suggest something that I haven’t heard before.
Nowadays with the state of efficient AI in learning from patterns, and still nothing mind-blowing like a kind of MiniMe that has almost the same tastes but have heard more stuff than you and can recommend as a more educated version of you. That is something that I would want to, hell if it worked so well and to have it, I would have to pay , then I would pay up to a price.
Although not tied to your collection, you might find Everynoise cool and interesting.
Holy crap, yes. This is amazing. Thank you.
I’m all for going sailing but if there are features you want that that can’t quite replicate, it’s also a great time to look at a VPN service with a server in Turkey… Sign up on a Turkish IP and the exchange rate puts you under $2/month USD. This works for a lot of other things too.
I love you.
I know.
I gotta start direct downloading my music again soon. Spotify has just left me feeling so frustrated lately.
I’ve emailed support thrice for intrusive full screen ads. “these are promotions”. Yeah, ads… “Sorry you don’t like our promotions, we will note it”
Uh huh.
Just a reminder that the Tidal family account at the maximum subscription “grade” costs €16.
So you and 4x buddies can get very high quality audio for €3.20/mth.
I tried tidal for a bit, but ran into a number of issues with the various privacy methods I used and the lack of a Linux native client made it difficult to justify staying.
I am currently running a navidrome server and supporting artists directly for their music where possible.
I listen to a lot of smaller black metal bands. Can Tidal keep up?
Best way to find out is to search for all of them inside Tidal. I don’t know if you need to make a free account or what to do it.
They usually have great black Friday deals though. I think I paid like €2/mth for my first year.
I was a Google Play Music person and loved it, and then they changed to YouTube. I got mad and tried Apple Music, but as a classical music lover it’s vastly less than ideal for several reasons, so I went to Spotify and realized they liked to shuffle Britney Spears into me listening to lieder, so I went back to YouTube because at least they didn’t do that. But it’s just so basic compared to the absolute perfection that was GPM, and difficult to navigate. I don’t know where to go next. I’ve been buying records on Bandcamp but I also like the streaming service to discover music with.
I was also a Google music enjoyer and also find the other streaming options pretty crappy. I’ve actually moved over to more curated options like internet radio for when I’m not in the mood for anything specific. Shout-out to NTS, I love you.
What is NTS?
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If you like to upload your own music (like Google music), iBroadcast is the tippy tops. You can still use bandcamp (with or without yt-dlp) for discovery, and then upload what you like to iBroadcast.
Nice suggestion thank you!
Maybe try Napster: https://www.napster.com/ Sounds a bit like a joke, but it’s not. It used to be Rhapsody, but was re-branded.
I’m ok with that!
For anyone who hasn’t checked their Spotify subscription for a while, I recently discovered a new basic tier created underneath the premium one that is a little cheaper simply by not including the ‘free’ 15 hours of audiobooks. I’ve never used it and don’t intend to. YMMV.
Is the audio quality the same?
Yeah! It’s ‘premium’ in all ways except that audiobook offer. Prettttyyyy shitty behaviour from them.
Im just happy my cracked apk somehow still works. Lol
If your library supports it, there’s Freegal music. It’s the library version of Spotify.
Nice!
I’m sure this is the last time. 😉
Surely it’s because they want to increase the amount they pay the musicians.
Just canceled my family plan. I like Apple Music more anyways.
If switching services, this web service that moves your music between streaming services worked well for me. Paid $5 for one month then canceled https://soundiiz.com/
Same, YTM to AM. Also linked my last.fm if I remember correctly. 1 month for like $5 and canceled after the move.
Prices will continue to go up until the number of subscribers lost due to the price increase outweighs the additional profit from the subscribers who agree to pay the higher amount.
Capitalism machine goes brrrrrrr
