Spotify’s first US price hike for Premium is coming next week

What improvement in service does the hike reflect?

This guy asking the real questions. They’re already fucking over their artists, please give me a reason to start pirating music again.

Please.
- They have an estimated 212 million premium users. That’s an additional 2.5 Billion dollars they’re looking at per year.
- I've found more new artists in a few weeks with Nicotine+ than years of the Spotify algorithm.
- I've been using a cracked spotify android APK with no ads and unlimited skips for years now.
- The quality is pretty good and dl speeds are superb if you get it from spotify. Only need a free account and plenty of good apps to assist in getting playlists, podcasts and full discographies.
- I never paid for Spotify and only rarely used it on the desktop if I was interested in hearing something someone mentioned or to look up something.
  
  But I also gave up the buying music thing too, expect for very rarely. There is so much freely traded music, and tons of live music, and icecast and other radio stations are still a thing. There is more than I could listen to already.
  
  Podcasts have replaced the vast majority listening time in the car.
  
  Then at home while working it is SOMA FM radio. I do give them money I guess, but its all donation.
- LOL you stopped?
$10 in 2011 would be $13.56 today.

Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2011?amount=10

Per the article, the service hasn't changed in price in 12 years, while the platform has certainly received a decent number of updates, new features, new artists, etc.

If it isn't worth $11/month to you, don't pay it? But it doesn't seem right to insinuate that they're doing something outrageous by raising prices once in 12 years?
- If Costco can sell glizzies for a buck fifty a pop I don’t wanna hear it
- This is the same group of people who will rampantly upvote graphs showing how wages haven't followed inflation, but when it's the other side of the coin can't seem to grasp it.
- Streaming services have an enormous amount of fixed costs. It might cost them several billion dollars/year to operate the necessary infrastructure even with zero customers, but the marginal cost to serve a customer might be on the order of $2/month on that $10/month subscription.
  
  It's why streaming and digital storefronts are such a sink/swim industry. Either a company gets over user number+sales threshold to override their fixed costs, upon which they become profitable and all further growth makes them exceedingly profitable. Or the company fails to do so or barely does so, and makes somewhere between giant losses to minimal profits.
  
  From a quick search, Spotify's user count should have grown somewhere in the neighborhood of ten times over since 2015.
  
  This is not a cost increase that is mandated or justified by inflation. It never is. It's a cost increase from a very, very, very simple fact: companies want profit, and Spotify's leadership has concluded that they will gain more profit by increasing prices than they will by not doing so.
- If you’re so enthusiastic about paying a corporation making 25 billion a year even more owing to inflation why aren’t you asking about the corresponding minimum wage hike for the people they get that 25 billion from?
- How many more years could they have held back on the price hike if they hadn't blown hundreds of millions on a failed attempt to lock up the podcast industry inside their walled garden.
At the current rate it’s not cost effective to fly the helicopter between the yacht and the mainland more than twice daily. This is only the first step, but the goal is non-stop service by 2027.
They'll find another means to serve ads to Premium customers. I pay for it because it's very convenient access to lots of music, and the rights holders are compensated (albeit not as much as I'd like).

I'm already pissed off that they blatantly insert ads in the middle of sentences in podcasts (if you check the premium wording, it says "ad free music"). Might consider cancelling if they hike the price.

Lol, when is uncompressed coming?

They are releasing that under a more expensive subscription option. Wish I was joking

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/20/22746337/spotify-hifi-lossless-new-premium-tier-supremium
- Apple offers lossless audio standard
- Tidal has been doing that for a while. The hi-fi option is/was double the price of the standard.
It's only been 3 years since they announced it, give them a little time jeez.
http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ must be propaganda by Big Audio to sell more hifi equipment because I can’t tell a damn difference between lossy and lossless. I’m ashamed.
- I'd be curious to hear other people's experience with this test. Personally, the two quality levels are completely indistinguishable for me. And that was sitting in a quiet room, using decent quality wired headphones, and really concentrating.
  
  At least I know there will be no need for me to upgrade my subscription if Spotify ever does start offering uncompressed.
- I can, but I do get it. Not everyone has the ears. But when you can hear it, it’s a curse lol

So artists get more money right?

...right?

Artists now get even less money, ironically. They're strongly pushing towards this system where the algos will push your songs to users, resulting in some amount of more listens, except the downside is that you cut your own pay. If you're signed on a label, you get even less than nothing now

Spotify can go suck a lemon. I dumped them when they paid that right wing piece of crap Joe Rogan $200mil to continue to radicalize simpletons.

Did the exact same thing and switched to Apple Music. Unfortunately for some unknown reason, AM isn’t nearly as good in my experience. I have songs that were working and then come up as unavailable later. The recommendations are terrible like Apple is trying to push what they want me to hear not what I am interested in. Using it on multiple devices is painful as I sometimes try to play it on my win10 machine, my Mac, and my iPhone and it can’t figure out that while I am I lay playing it in one location at a time it thinks I am trying to play more than one simultaneously. Maybe I’ll try Amazon music next. I do wonder if Tidal is any good.
- I would fully switch to Apple Music but this lofi selection is baddddddd

Now might be a great time to join the Fediverse alternative FunkWhale. I've already built up a collection of nearly 10,000 songs on mine, almost all of which i downloaded from deezer.

Can you ELI5 Deezer abd FunkWhale, and how they replace what Spotify is offering?
- Deezer is a streaming service like Spotify. Unlike Spotify, you can download directly from Deezer using piracy tools such as Deezloader. The user then presumably uploaded these to FunkWhale, so as to own their own local collection.
Holy shit, deezer still exists?
- Yeah it’s where most pirated FLAC content comes from these days
- Yeah, I just unsubscribed 2 months ago because they removed their regional pricing which caused rates to increase 4-6x in some countries.
I am still using private bitorrent sites for my music. Use Navidrome which seems to be the best alternative to the abandoned subsonic app and been collecting since 2005. I am somewhere near 300k in songs at this point. I tried Spotify once when I got 6 months free and found I was just to used to my way of discovering new music that I kind of hated how Spotify tried to do it.

I keep having hope that someone continues to improve the few apps we have left dedicated to personal music libraries otherwise one day I may have to switch.
- Have you given funkwhale a try? I used to host subsonic years ago but i dropped it at some point, started my collection back up after i found out about funkwhale, It also has support for subsonic clients although i havent personally tried that myself yet.

And I’m sure that’s to better compensate the artists, right?… right?

I had to scroll way too far to see someone mention this.

There is a weak defence to be made that they have never raised prices. In the context of our current situation this is just more profiteering.

Salesforce, up 24% https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2022/05/31/q1-fy23-results-update/

Spotify up 14%, 2.8 billion in profits https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-04-25/spotify-reports-first-quarter-2023-earnings/ Edit: Wrong facts by me here as others pointed out. Spotify is in the hole a few hundred million. Maybe rise is justified? Idk. votes 30/1 at time of edit in case you're curious.

Apple, 100 billion in Q2 2023

The list goes on and on. All of these companies have laid off staff. Spotify laid off 200.

I've never liked the subscription pricing model and have avoided all of these services. I can't afford hundreds of dollars a year on things that aren't staple items.

Not to shill for Spotify, but the very link you sent shows they made 3 billion in REVENUE, not profit. They actually lost 180 million dollars.

My guess - these price rises are because the VC tap is getting turned off
- Hollywood accounting. None of them make a "profit" because they're taxed on profits. Now it's possible that they really are losing 180 million (a lot of startups like uber coast on investors with the assumption they'll turn a profit at some point) but I wouldn't take their word at face value.
Spotify and Amazon Prime are my only two services. Piracy covers movies and TV.

Spent over 20-years managing my digital music library, always painful. It's a relief to drop all that and just search what I want, receive tunes.

Damned convenient to queue up a playlist when I'm at camp screwing around, singing kaya yoke with my gf, working around the house, all that. Plus, I can download all my songs to a local device about as fast as I can click. I'm often in the boondocks with no internet, but I always have music.
Maybe they shouldn't have paid Joe Rogaine $200 million.
- Yeah, mr."selfmade" there. /s
The link you provided says that Spotify actually lost ~$170 million. $3 billion is the revenue.

Honestly, it's totally fair imo.
People who hadn't experience before-Spotify times can't really appreciate the value. I'd love all information to be free and all but just the indexing and data hosting service would be worth 11$/mo. People being a bit silly here ngl. If you can't afford 11$ for this service then honestly you either don't need it or you need re-evaluate your budgeting.

yeah the price increase isn't too awful for me. I use Spotify all the time so premium is totally worth it for me. and I know rates aren't that high but I'm happy to know I'm actually paying the people I listen to somewhat!
anyone ever heard of x-manager?
- I use it.
Eh I find music streaming services to be massively overpriced. Second hand CDs are dirt cheap and offer better quality than Spotify does.
- Sounds like you don't need it!
Ah yes, poor people and people living on minimum wage don't need music. And if they really needed it, they would just skip a meal.

Indexing and data hosting is worth $11 per month? Music uses very little space and bandwidth. Listening to 3 hours every day for a month ends up being around 10gb of bandwidth. If they were using expensive on-demand AWS bandwidth, that would cost them 50 cents. They aren't, they have edge caches all over and almost certainly pay less than 10 cents.
- Don't... need... music...? There are plenty of free streaming options, or even the damn radio. Premium Spotify is far from the only option.
  
  Being able to listen to anything you want whenever you please is 100% a luxury -- and one that wasn't available until pretty recently.
- As if piracy, free youtube etc. doesn't exist. If you can't afford 11$/mo and can't afford to invest time to get around it then you really have bigger problems to complain about like lack of social security and wealth distribution. Complaining about this just appears like a comical waste of energy tbh.
- Arr me hearties, thar be more ways than one to score yonder plunder.
- The entitlement is strong

Meanwhile, ad-free Spotify through X-Manager remains free.

Spicetify on desktop can also block ads.
Here's another alternative: YouTube Music with adblock
through X-Manager?
I dont get it, how does it work? Am I supposed to install spotify AND this other app?
- No, you don't install the official app. You install x-manager, then install a patched version of Spotify through the x-manager app.

Everyone's 'okay' with it until it's $5 more. Then another $5. Then another $5.

This is what's happening with all of these streaming services. They're all doing the gradual boiling water trick. They know if they turned the dial all the way to hot to make the water boiling, metaphorically speaking, that nobody in their right mind would want to jump in. But if they just turn the dial slowly, let the temperature build up by hiking these prices bit by bit, it wouldn't cause that much of a stir and people will be complacent with it.

Nice! Thanks for the heads up. ATT just told me my paperless discount is getting halved, so this is the perfect opportunity to even out my costs. Everyone of these tech companies is making a money grab this summer and I’m fed up

Prices on so many of these mega tech companies (DoorDash, UBER, etc.) have been kept artificially low for years by basically unlimited amount of venture capital.

They’re following the Walmart model- keep prices stupid low to establish dominance and drive out any competitor. Once there’s nobody left to compete you can jack up the prices to -hopefully- recoup your investment.

Great for the consumers at first… until their bills come due. Then we get massively screwed over. A tale as old as time…
- I'm still salty from when this happened to Google photos
- I wouldn’t group doordash in with the others.
  
  They barely provide a service; leach off of restaurants, forcing them to raise their prices to maintain razor thin margins; and lobby for shitty legislation to not pay or give people benefits.
  
  I agree with the general point, though.
That txt from ATT about the paperless discount was so poorly worded. Took me forever to realize I can still get the $10 discount if I switch the autopay to a debit card. It's only the credit card autopay/paperless that is getting reduced to $5.
- Interesting, t mobile is removing their 5 dollar autopay discount unless you use a debit card too. I wonder what the deal with that is.
- The email I just got from them said to expect a rate increase for my august billing cycle of 2.50 a line. So, even switching to a bank account from a credit card won’t help. They were just trying to make me more comfortable while bending me over.

I was worried for a second until I read the article. $1 more/ is not a huge price increase and I’m ok with it considering they haven’t increased the price as long as I’ve been subscribed and I’ve been subscribed for at least a decade. Also, I use Spotify daily…for hours at a time.

And yet they still don’t offer high quality audio.

Imagine paying to hear Joe Rogan

You don't have to pay to listen to him, that's free. The paying comes to skip the adverts.
Imagine paying to listen music

What do they mean first? Family plans went up from $15 to $16 in May 2021.

Tidal increased their prices recently too, by the same amount. And for that I'm getting the high-quality audio Spotify keeps on promising for over ~~a year~~ TWO YEARS now.

Don't get me wrong, Tidal still has its own problems but I don't get why people still choose to have Spotify over one of its competitors.

As someone who tried to use Tidal for nearly a year because it paid better rates, it's literally just 2 things: Artist Discovery and Algorithm Degradation towards a mass consumer mean.

Spotify actually feeds me tons of great indie artists I've never heard before. Tidal was a constant struggle to purge mass produced giant record label pop from constantly infiltrating every single station and it almost never gave me some little artist who maybe has 5k listens total. I get those literally every single day from Spotify though.
- Yeah, this has been my experience as well. Discovery on Spotify is really good. I'll listen to something new and be like "how haven't I heard of these guys!" And then I check their artist page and yeah it's like a few thousand listens total.
I actually hate Spotify as a company and find their app/service to be frustrating to use, thanks to them almost constantly dicking around with things.

But... I still use them. Why? Because unfortunately with my needs and preferences, it's the only music streaming app on Android that doesn't have a completely shitty experience when either using it with AndroidAuto, or when casting music to my home stereo receiver. Their app offers the best experience and features against all the other apps I've tried (and I've tried them all).

Tidal's AndroidAuto experience is so minimal it's not funny. No "like" button, no "add to library" button, no "dislike" button, so that killed them for me.

Apple Music on Android is quite buggy when trying to cast to my home stereo. And their AndroidAuto experience is also buggy and lacking too many features I want.

Deezer is pretty much the same as Apple Music from my experiences.

Amazon Music is just "Bleh!" overall.

Qobuz was really lacking in features I want the last time I tried it.

YouTube Music drives me nuts with the way it integrates with regular YouTube.

So I'm stuck with Spotify. And I don't like it. But it's the least problematic for me when compared to the alternatives.

If I used an iPhone (but I prefer Android), I'd switch to Apple Music in a heartbeat because on iOS, Apple Music actually works quite well.

My one hope, at the moment, is the forthcoming music streaming service from Tiktok. I have no idea how good/bad it will be, but I'm eager to try it when it hits the US, just because I'm praying it will finally enable me to kick Spotify to the curb.

/rant
- I used my YouTube username account for YouTube videos and my email account for YTM. It's works perfectly.
  
  I know what you're talking about, using a single account for both ruins the already bad preference tuning. You would think they would address this problem with a setting by now.
- Agreed. I love Spotify, but it ain't for the UI. What a mess.
My guess is most are like me, I use Bluetooth headphones and are on the go if I listen to anything. So higher quality doesn't really matter.
- I mean that largely depends on your headphones and whether or not they (and your playback device) support decent Bluetooth codecs
Spotify and YouTube Music are the only streaming services I have found that make it easy to integrate songs that aren't on streaming into your collection, and I don't like YouTube Music so Spotify it is.
It’s been over two years now. It was announced at the start of 2021 😅
320kbps is basically indistinguishable from lossless, even with insanely good headphones/amplifier/DAC/speakers.
- but mah 192KHz!!!!!!!!!
  
  Never mind that the first step in playing that stuff involves filtering all that extra shit out because a) I can't hear it, and b) the speakers can't reproduce it. All because I refuse to believe in the sampling theorem.
  
  /s
- LOL, audiophiles always want the best, far past the point of diminishing returns. Kinda like PC builders. (I've been guilty of the later.)
You could use something like Qobuz or Deezer that actually has lossless audio.

I stream all my own music for free with my Plex server.

To the people who are talking about Spotify not offering high quality, what's wrong with Spotify Premium's 256kbps AAC? That's pretty dang high quality...

Spotify can increase the price to $100 and it wouldnt affect me because I download and store all my songs on my phone. Oldskool but works even when I turn off mobile data.

I just use YouTube Music and patch it with ReVanced for no ads. I used to download all my music too but it became too much hassle and I didn't have time for it anymore. My music taste is also quite obscure so its hard to find high quality audio files for it. I still download my favorite songs for when I lose service though.

Oh no, they're increasing the price from free to free! How will I ever manage the price increase!?

yt-dlp+mpv

Where's Spotify Hi-fi my man?

99% of the userbase doesn't even know what Hi-Fi music is, so doubt adoption will be a thing. Look towards apple music, deezer, tidal, etc for hi-fi music.
- Honestly hifi isnt practically useful. It's extremely difficult to tell the difference between flac and 320kps mp3 (very high quality setting in Spotify). Most people can't tell the difference even with audio equipment costing a fortune.
  
  I used to be obsessed with getting the very best quality but frankly I gave up because there just is no discernable increase in fidelity (I use a dac+Sennheiser hd 600)
  
  *Hifi isn't practically useful for most listening
- I'm using Qobuz atm, but I heard Spotify is better for playlists and discovering new music :/

Sounds like they need more money to purchase more podcasts to put behind their walled garden

My Spotify bill literally just went through. Not sure if the family plan is going up as well, but it looks like I escaped it for a month if it does.

Yeah, I use spotify family plan for a years and it's been so cheap for years. I don't get how people can get even upset outraged about it.

Now I'm even more glad to have ditched the streaming sub model to buy music instead. Of course new releases may follow and go up by $0.10 per song.

Is the service you are using allow you to download the music DRM free, or is it only streamable?

If it’s the latter, might want to reconsider. Just like movies purchased on these platforms (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, …), the license holder of the intellectual property (IP), usually the record/music company, can pull their content from these platforms at any time and you will not be reimbursed.
- I get most of my music off of Bandcamp which is DRM free. The catch it that Bandcamp is mostly independent or small artists. For artists that are not on Bandcamp I usually buy MP3 albums on Amazon which are DRM free.
- I've downloaded music for free for a while now. Mostly off of YouTube.

On this note how do I make a list of all of my music that I have liked to find on the high seas later? Ask for a friend.

Tell your friend that Lidarr can connect to Spotify to get your followed artists, playlists and saved albums.
Spotify doesn't allow access to the info for free because it makes it too easy to leave. None of the streaming services do. There are services with access to the info used for switching to other services that you can pay for.
- Spotify doesn't allow access to the info for free because it makes it too easy to leave. None of the streaming services do. There are services with access to the info used for switching to other services that you can pay for.
  
  Another EU win. I have literally never seen a paid service for that being advertised. All basic data export should be able to be done for free, and in an interchangeable format between the different services too!

There is a good cracked Spotify apk out there.

Ribbit
- 128 kbps or 256 is what they use, no higher or lower.
- Idk if it uses max quality but XManager is great. I don't use Spotify

If they carry on through for the rest of the world I'll likely drop my Spotify subscription.

they already hiked the family plan in Aus last year a few bucks

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Switch to Apple Music. It has all the music Spotify has, the music is higher quality (all the way up to the highest quality you can get), exclusive radio shows you can’t get on Spotify, handmade playlists that are curated by a real human, a completely separate classical music site included at no extra charge, and more all for $10 bucks a month.

What are the data rates for streaming FLAC?
- So Apple uses ALAC, which is it’s own version. Do you mean how much data is used when streaming? If so, I’m not sure. If you mean what’s available it’s:
  
  High Quality (AAC 256 Kbps)
  
  Lossless (ALAC up to 24-bit/48 kHz)
  
  Hi-Res (ALAC up to 24-bit/192 kHz)
Nah, YouTube music.

Shit software (like utter garbage), iffy catalog, generally trash experience, but it fucking includes YouTube premium which is just incredible especially if you use vr.

Also they're doing something weird where sometimes you can play video Playlists on audio only players like smart speakers. And you can always upload shit.

wow a lot of people pay for music. crazy.

Yeah?