Spotify has raised prices for the second time in a year, with no new benefits, after its CEO sparked outrage by claiming the cost of creating 'content' is 'close to zero'

innovate its product features
What. It's meant to stream music. Tf do you mean?
- The bad Ai dj. The car thing they rolled back. The new logo that's the same as the old one, but now border. The cache that causes you to hear the same ten songs multiple times in a week.
  
  the playlist saved for offline playback that will still try to connect to the internet for like 30 seconds when you open it while actually offline. the Discover Weekly playlist that will serve you the song that you've marked as "not interested" over and over and over and
  
  The cache part pisses me off. I'm fucking paying you to stream me music. Not the same fucking shit over and over and over again.
- If anything, they've taken features away from people lately. The quality is still shit. Lossless is still nowhere to be seen. Free users are losing options too. Yet they're making record profits, and jacking up the price
  
  Spotify actually doesn't make that much profit, if any.
  But the record labels are major shareholders and definitely influence the pricing structure. Spotify is essentially a marketing frontend for the record industry.
  
  This is why they have record profits. They attack at both ends. Strip features, increase prices.
- AI generated music based off your likes and listening. It lines up with his statements. There was no innovation here. The same as every "disruptor" technology that just cheapified everything and one it was ubiquitous attempt to remove the core of the business.
- They did add audiobooks.
  Though the interface for audiobooks sucks, so I hope they improve it.
  
  The last thing I ever wanted from Spotify was audiobooks or podcasts. We've had excellent apps available for several years already, we don't need half assed bloat added to (very poorly) replicate the same features
  
  Their podcast and audiobook integration has been so sloppy.
- They haven't ever been profitable with just streaming music.

So now that Tidal has moved its Hi-Fi tier price down to match Apple's wtf is Spotify doing? Charging more than the competition, paying artists less, and not even offering lossless?
- Spotify is less vulnerable to customer churn compared to TV/movie streaming services, as users are less likely to switch music streaming providers due to the hassle of rebuilding playlists and losing personalized recommendations.
  
  There are services for transferring playlists
- And as long as people keep subscribing to them, they'll March right along collecting that sweet money.
- And they don’t offer music videos like Apple does
- Spotify has over 200mill paying subscribers and over 600mill total I believe. They an afford the peel off unfortunately.
  From what I can tell Tidal won’t even publish their subscribers so it must be pretty small.
  
  Nvm I think my app bugged out

Remember: Stealing from big, evil corporations is morally correct.
- Then let them die.
  
  IIRC labels own bits of Spotify, so they get their money that way. They don’t care if their music on the app actually makes a profit.
  
  You see, the music labels know that stealing from Spotify is morally correct.

The average person: Spotify sucks and is making me hate them even more
Shareholders seeing layoffs followed by AI replacements for those workers and then repeated price hikes: 🤑
- The myth of capitalism is that it improves things for the consumer. It's very obvious that it only improves, at best, the next quarter's returns for the investor. Once that husk of a company stops "line going up," the money goes elsewhere and we repeat.
  If the line can't go up through creation it'll go up through destruction.
  
  It worked differently before speech was considered money. Or I like to tell myself that.
  
  The myth of capitalism is that it improves things for the consumer
  So you don’t think your life is better than someone from the 16th century?

Spotify Premium in practice has new benefits!
More specifically: Lyrics that they took away from regular users some time ago.
- They fucked it up for premium users too, though, since they've done that. Half the songs that I knew to have lyrics either no longer have them, or they constantly "fail to load."
- Seriously, damn, that's feels like such a basic thing
- I remember I used to have an add-on (at least I think it was an add-on; didn't Spotify officially support those at some point?) that synced the lyrics of a song to the timestamp. It used user submissions to figure out the timestamps and edit the lyrics. It was pretty cool.

- IIRC this means the family plan costs more than 3 individual plans did like 3 years ago. If not more than it saves you like $.50 in comparison. I would try and look it up but Google search has also turned to shit so I don’t feel like dealing with it.
  The Internet just isn’t fun anymore.
  
  Indie internet is better, hi Lemmy

I suppose I'm a "content creator". I write music.
I WISH all my recording gear was free. Fucking hell. The amount of money I've wasted in the last 30 years... sheesh.
- Btw, thank you for creating. It makes my world a little nicer experiencing new art.
  
  🙇
- Free for Spotify. Not for you. They don’t care about you.
  
  Oh dont I know it.

Apple Music pays multiple times more to artists than Spotify.
Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
You can influence things with your wallet.
- If you can, and they have it on there, buy your favorite albums on Bandcamp, then they are yours forever
  
  I thought that Bandcamp was shutdown?
- Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
  On paper. But in practice...
  On February 27, 2016, Yesh Music, LLC and John Emanuele from the band The American Dollar launched a $5 million class-action lawsuit that claimed Tidal had to compensate the band for any of the royalty payments accrued from the streaming of the band's 116 copyrighted songs. The suit also accused Tidal of using faulty numbers to payout artists while also having undercut these same individuals by 35%. A response from Tidal stated that they were indeed fully up to date on all royalties for the group and had removed said intellectual property from their servers.
  Hollywood accounting and pirate profiteering undercut what artists would normally be paid.
  You can influence things with your wallet.
  You can influence how you feel about your consumer habits, but capitalists are still going to capitalize.
  
  I just switched to Tidal, any recent issues?
  Not loving the delay in Android Auto but the quality difference is truly night and day.
- Any good way to transfer playlists?
  
  Tidal now has built-in transfer of playlists, at least from Spotify.
  
  I used TuneMyMusic when I moved from Apple to Tidal.
  Now this isn’t without its own stupid system.
  So to transfer all your music and not just a limited amount you have to sign up to pay for it. Now I’m fine paying a one off fee for this service as it was seamless, what in against it the only options being an annual fee or a recurring payment.
  It cost me like £3, maybe less in being lazy. But I had to sign up, do the transfer then immediately cancel. I understand some people might be bougie and use multiple services, but not having a one time fee irked me.
  If you go this route, as it is easy as tidal will send you there, please do what I did and send them a complaint afterwards about the ludicrous system and that they should add a one time fee to make it even easier. Heck I would have paid £5 for this as I have so many playlists and liked albums and songs etc.
  I mentioned it on here previously and someone alluded to free services but I can’t confirm.
  
  I used Soundiiz and it works pretty good. Gives you an overview after the import so you can see what’s missing or wrong.
  
  There were apps out there to help with this when I switched from Spotify to Tidal. I can't remember the name anymore though. It just sucks up all your saved songs and playlists, matches them in the other service then adds them. Almost everything I had moved over without a problem. I do miss the social aspect of Spotify, being able to share links with friends. No one I know has tidal except the people on my family plan. There are services that will turn your song link into a linktree like page with links for Spotify, tidal, YouTube music, deezer, etc., but that's clunky.

- Honestly €56 million in profit seems small for an operation as massive as Spotify that has so throughly saturated the market. That does not make it excusable at all. I’m just surprised to see that number.
  
  I'm sure there's tons they've made that their accountants have managed to classify as something other than "profit," so they don't have to pay taxes on it
  
  Who cares what the "company" does when, as CEO, you rake almost $400 MILLION a year
  https://mywage.ca/salary/celebrity-salary/daniel-ek
  PS: and this is while receiving "no salary" (which they sell as if they were running a charity and meager $1.4 million in "other" compensation
  
  Profit is AFTER they pay their CEO and other suit's
  
  They are usually losing money
  https://www.statista.com/chart/26773/profitability-development-of-spotify/
  
  But is that net or gross?
- That's insane... 1000 plays per track?

A "subscriber consent to renew on price increase" law would go a long way
- Looking at you, amazon prime free trial auto renew

So what is their excuses for older musicians that paid for expensive studio time before the day of home studios? Cause they still pay them like shit too

The only reason I keep Spotify anymore is that I've got a family plan with something like six accounts. I gave those to random acquaintances back in the Facebook days - people who are really into music.
If I cancel Spotify, there are five people out there who are suddenly and without warning going to find themselves without music.
I really don't even remember who they are, but I feel like continuing the subscription is my community service
- Pretty sure you can see their email address. This should give you the opportunity to message them stating you'll be canceling the subscription. They'll still be able to subscribe on their own.

I would suggest anyone bothered by this to look into xManager.
- Kind of love and hate that their website doesn’t explicitly say what it does. Like, if you can’t figure it out, you probably shouldn’t do it, even their GitHub is a bit dodgy on what the software is for, you can figure it out, but it’s never explicitly stated what it’s specifically meant for. “We help you install old versions of the app who must not be named” kinda bullshit.
  
  I think it's intentional to avoid eyes on taking it down.
- This is the way.

I hope people just switch to something else or start self-hosting their own music.
- AOL profited for over a decade on people who signed up for the service and simply lost track of it, paying month after month for something they'd forgotten they even had.
  Crazy that these services can just raise premiums whenever they please without even reaffirming that the customer still wants the service. I guarantee that if you needed to re-verify your account on a price increase, firms with big client pools would never raise their rates again.
  
  And now when you card expires, they just change the expiration date on your existing number a few times until it works to keep the subscription going, and that's somehow legal.
  
  Gyms exist solely because of people like that.
- Plexamp is better than any other music app I've tried.
  
  Finamp for anyone using Jellyfin https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp
  
  Plexamp I've only gave subsonic a try. But I'll look into Plexamp.
- iTunes Match is $25/year if you have an iPhone.
  
  Oh so only $100+ a year*

Round #451 of telling people to stop using Spotify and consider one of the many, better alternatives.
- I mean they do have one good thing going for them: you can separate the art from the more controversial artists, because you know for sure the artist isn't getting a damn thing from spotify
- You should list some.
  
  Deezer, Tidal, Qobuz, Apple Music
  
  I purchase the family plan of YouTube Music. In addition to the music, it comes with ad free YouTube videos. I watch a lot of yt so it's a no brainer for me. Never used any other streaming service so I can't compare.
- What are some alternatives? I've heard Tidal is one of the better ones. I'm not necessarily opposed to piracy/ripping my CD collection + self-hosted streaming, but if I can pay someone else for the convenience I'd rather do that.
  Do any services have a comparable family plan too?

I'm so grateful, I have thousands of songs and just hit shuffle and made my own playlists. I always thought internet radio was overpriced 😅

For anyone out there, I recommend giving Tidal a shot and for podcasts, I recommend a FOSS app called AntennaPod. This is the combo I use myself, I've been using Tidal for a bit over two years now and just recently switched to AntennaPod.
- AntennaPod is great, I used it for years. I eventually switched to self hosting AudioBookShelf which does audiobooks, ebooks, and podcasts. One main reason was because podcasts more and more yank the old episodes and put them behind a patreon. AudioBookShelf downloads the episodes to your server so you always have them. About 5 months after starting using it another one of my podcasts pulled that stunt and I was super happy to have all of the old episodes still.
  
  I'll have to keep that in mind, thanks for that. I honestly had no considered some BS like that happening.

Meanwhile every update makes the app worse

I just download to actually have the songs. No DRM, No Ads, No song getting removed from streaming service... I have 500+ songs downloaded in opus format and it only takes 2.5Gb with many of them being longer than 5 minutes. I don't know why people keep using these services while they keep saying they hate it because there are so many ads or why they keep paying for DRM (aka. not owning anything)...
- Opus at max bitrate is only like 1/4th the size of FLAC. At that point, why not just store it in 10GB while keeping the full quality?
  
  That definitely makes sense, maybe I should do that... thanks
- Where do you download them from?
  
  Not OP but I use bandcamp so I can pay the artist a decent amount rather than what ever Spotify does. Not sure if the new owner has increased the cut they take though
  
  Musician here..
  ...I tell people to download both the mp3 and the wavefiles from Bandcamp. Sometimes Soundcloud has a download option (depends on the artist). I still buy CDs where I can.
  
  YouTube Music
  
  Soulseek is still a thing.
  
  Napster
  
  Tidal, Deezer and Quboz all have ways to download the content. The most stupid one being to record the output of the music player, but there's tools that automatically get the full metadata too and ensure the audio is cropped to silence.
  To do it in an intended way, Bandcamp and other services let you pay once to have access to the source file on your account "forever".
- Same here, been collecting since the iPod Mini days, 18,000+ songs and 100gb+ of data (almost all mp3 though)
  Serve them up with Airsonic and i've got my own streaming music service i can use anywhere.
  
  Yeah I also use Jellyfin so I can also stream them from anywhere!

I upgraded to a decent set of headphones with a dedicated DAC, then realised just how terrible Spotify’s sound quality is, even on maximum. I hung on a while for the empty promise of lossless audio then ditched them.
I’m now increasingly glad that I’m giving money to their competitors.
- Spotify's encoding (vorbis 320kbps) should be transparent at the maximum bitrate. However, it's possible that the files uploaded on there are mastered differently, for average consumer consumption instead of the full dynamics of most source material. I know SoundCloud enforces "loudness" mastering with presets when uploading for example.
  The real reason Spotify's quality is inferior to others is that, if you have the music files, you can apply in-app parametric equalization on every platform and compensate for imperfections of your output device.
  
  My problem was by the time it had been through normalisation for equipment and hearing correction, it sounded very artifacty. Maybe a lack of bits and low sampling rate.

Here's a few things that are cheaper!
Soulseek/Nicotine+
Usenet Groups
Libraries (only if your local one has CDs, and often is popular music and no indie stuff) And if you want some album art: MusicBrainz Picard
If you want it on your phone, SD cards are cheaper than ever for big space. Unless you're on iPhone.
- Unfortunately most android phones are slowly phasing away the SD card slot. The only flagship that still supports it is Sony with their Xperia. I don't know of any major mid-rangers models that still support it. The only low end phones now. But the overall experience is painful.
  
  My Xiaomi phone for $400 supports up to 1 TB SD cards, so that's pretty sweet.
  
  On the positive note though, the migration process during the setup wizard copies all your music to the new phone
  
  MOTOROLA

Just for funzies, my Spotify family plan in Canada is $17.84 CAD, which works out to $13.05 USD at current exchange rate.
Usually Canadians are screwed harder on, well pretty much everything, so I'm surprised that Americans are paying more for this. Guess it's "what the market will bear" or similar nonsense. Please discuss.
- Just FYI, Napster’s family plan is only $14.99 CAD

PSA:
Innertune
Vi Music
Spotiflier
Edit: Maybe check out Ri Music, Vi Music's Successor
- ViMusic has not been updated in quite some time. RiMusic is actively being developed.
  
  Thanks!

Another clueless CEO who doesn't know what makes his company's very existence possible.

told them to go fuck themselves and canceled my subscription yesterday. they really didn't stop to consider just how many options people have for music
- I was telling people to try music on spotify and youtube, and then buy it on bandcamp etc. Download a copy. There sometimes comes a time when labels crumble, or streaming sites go bankrupt.

I switched to TIDAL, for this, for the disgustingly low amount of revenue passed along to artists by Spotify (the entire value of their business), and for the fact that they continue to partner with Rogan after all the disinformation he peddles.
Not a huge proponent of streaming services in general, but some are objectively better than others. Spotify is atrocious. Tidal is a lot better.
- I also switched to Tidal after learning about Spotify's dystopian future war AI powered killer robot plans. It's also bullshit how little they pay artists.
  I wish Tidal had podcasts, but I'm happy enough with AntennaPod.
  
  My music app not having podcasts is a bonus for me. They really should give users the option and not force it upon you.
- They do, but not as an exclusive. This year Spotify signed a deal with him worth 250M.
  But also yeah, I can appreciate that sentiment.

Switched to Tidal when Spotify announced their reduction in artist pay, and I can highly recommend it. The interface is much better, although lacking podcasts (but luckily there are many great FOSS podcasts apps out there).
- "lacking podcasts" is a plus for most people, I think. But Tidal's interface is a bit worse for me in one thing: it lacks the "remote control" Spotify has: controlling playback from any device on any device (e.g. playing on the computer and using the phone as a remote) and also the ability to transfer the playback from one device to another - like pausing it on the computer, picking up the phone, connecting it to car and resuming playback.
  
  I use KDE connect for remote controlling, so I never even noticed. But I can see that being an annoying loss.
- what do you mean 'although', that's an added benefit!
  
  I liked having both in the same app until I discovered AntennaPod, which is far superior to Spotify's podcast manager.

Streaming services don't support artists in any meaningful way.
Instead, buy music for download when it's available (Bandcamp and the like).
If not possible, just pirate it and buy merchandise or go to a concert. You will bring as much revenue to the artists this way, than listening to them on Spotify for 200 years non stop, and it will be cheaper for you in the end.

Just another CEO denigrating the work of those who make him rich.

I never did get a music subscription of any kind. Guess I am glad about that now. I just host my own server. Spotify never had a quarter of what I want to listen to anyways so I guess there is that.
Listening to Legion of Mary 12-10-1974 right now.

I cancelled spotify a few months ago, when getting some free Apple music with my Airpods. Not the best, but still happy that I don’t have to use Spotify anymore, will probably shop around after my free period with Apple is done
- I was satisfied with Apple Music myself (until I no longer had need for it), but I keep hearing that Tidal is one of the better services if Apple doesn't quite cut it for you. Supposedly they have a reasonably fair cut for the artists compared to Spotify, and also good audio quality (to be fair, Apple has high quality available too, if you enabled it in the settings)

After watching how similar business practices torched Twitter, I think this dude is underestimating the general public's commitment to just sail the high seas.

I've spent a good part of my life downloading my music and using mp3 playing apps. On time I downloaded Spotify to add songs to a shared playlist with friends. I figured I might try the app since I have it installed.
This is the worst music playing app in the world. (I was on free tier) How could anyone see this and think "oh yeah I will pay a subscription to this service". Seriously

Welp, gonna try Tidal tonight.

I left when I saw how much of our money they gave to Joe Rogan to punch down on trans people. Already paying for YouTube pro for years and finally took advantage of their music app. It's been great. My car and every Google screen in the house have native support. The only disadvantage is everything from tinder to open source crap I run at home only integrate with Spotify.
- Already paying for YouTube pro
  lost me in the second half
- What open source stuff? Asking for a friend
  
  Home Assistant is the biggest

Another day, another moment of being thankful for my dedicated .mp3 player.
- I don't consider this apples to apples.
  Walkman/Discman/MP3 Player. These you need to acquire music yourself, then inject it.
  Spotify/Tidal/YTM/Deezer etc, these are services that add recommendations and allow you to listen to practically anything under the sun. They are no the same thing.

Smh I want to get off Spotify for tidal but I don't feel up to teaching my parents how to use a completely different music app

So is there an alternative that’s comparable? I am done with their price increases.
I assume Apple Music?
- I got grandfathered into YouTube Music since I was using Google Music when it got shut down. While not as good as Google Music, YT Music works well for me and has been building playlists suited to what I want to listen to. Plus, some lesser known local artists that only have their music on YouTube as video uploads will still show up on YouTube Music. I haven't really tried any other serious streaming platforms, and only YT Music and Spotify natively sync to my car with maps.
- https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/best-music-streaming-service-subscription
  Not really. They all cost about the same amount. In that article is right around $11 across the board.
  
  I got Tidal since I read they pay artists a bigger share per track played.
  I like it's hight quality audio but don't like it's suggestions much. I did discover a few good songs but mostly I build my own playlist. To discover music I prefer to start playlist based on a song I like rather than their suggestions but it's not perfect.
- Depends on if you care about making set playlists. That's the feature that generally costs more - Pandora is like $5 a month without that option, and $11 with it. I only listen in the car and don't care about picking exactly what songs are on my stations, so I have the cheaper one, but for other people, that wouldn't cut it.
  
  I have never understood playlists as a 'feature' of these 'services'. If someone wants that, why the hell don't people just download the music and make local playlists? But the entire idea behind playlists has always baffled me - 'yes I want to listen to the same songs in the same order every time I select this' bro you've just made a mixtape from the 80s. And paid for the privilege. Good job.
  For me the one and only appeal of any of these 'services' is to take what I currently like, blend like 3% of 'similar songs/artists' that I likely don't know about, and get the hell out of the way otherwise. I've never had a decent experience with 'let's throw random shit at you and pray you like some of it' 'discovery' systems. I don't care what is popular with the masses, I don't care what your 'djs' have 'curated', I don't want to listen to your reinvention of radio, I don't want to listen to someone talk between tracks, I don't want to even be aware of talk show 'radio' oh my christ. Just give me fucking music, that I like, with a hint of weird. I give you my imported data from X prior service, I give you my entire last.fm data, I cannot make it any easier for you to do this. Just, do, it.
  deep breathing
  Sorry, I went to a place there. After like 20 years you'd think someone would get the formula right.
- I am an audiophile with thousands worth of gear. As far as streaming services go, I find Apple to offer the best bang for the buck. The second best would be probably YouTube. Tidal was unique years ago with hires lossless but that’s not uncommon anymore. Apple offers it as standard. Apple and YouTube also offer music videos which is a nice perk.

Isn't this also on the Publishers? They get paid first before the artist.
- Spotify is usually reported as one of the worst paying for the artists.
  They also don't distribute the value by time listened, but pool in and award the largest artists (don't remember the specifics, you might need to look it up).
  They were also found/accused of using their auto generated playlists with made-up artists who's money goes to 'noone', just shady stuff.

Anyone have an alternative with the same content, offline play, and integration into Android Auto? I would love to switch if something meets my needs.
- I'm downloading Tidal to give it a shot but I would also like to hear other options. Tidal seems promising from a 30 second glance but that doesn't tell me much.
- I went with Tidal, not sure about Android Auto tho, what is that?
  
  Android auto is pretty much when you plug your phone into your car stereo and it runs like it's own os from your phone. Google maps, music, etc. It just doesn't run all apps though. Spotify is currently the key to any music playing in my car, so it's important that whatever I use works with it. Apparently tidal does work with it so I might give it a shot. I will lose all my playlists though. 😔
- If it's worth anything, Tidal has had great offline support so far. I'm missing a handful of tracks, but the offline support might be enough to move to Tidal. It's either generally better quality, better offline, better shuffling, and a dollar less per month, or a console/tv app and a few more albums.

Glad I moved away from Spotify to Apple Music years ago (for different reasons tho)

Who?

Production cost for a full length album STARTS at around $10-15k.
That's a lot more than "zero" in my book.
- In the modern era, that's not exactly true. This number is only relevant if you're outsourcing tracking, mixing and mastering which are all things that can be done in a bedroom nowadays. How do I know? Because I did so myself a number of years ago.
  If you're not learning how to do these things yourself, you're simply wasting money or you're rich enough/your band is supported enough to not give a fuck.
  The only thing we paid for was album art and mastering simply because I wanted one specific engineer to do it just cause. All in all we paid less than $2k for a full release. We could have paid zero if we did our own artwork and I mastered the album myself which is not exactly impossible for the average person to do.
  I get your sentiment, but money is not necessarily needed en masse to release music any more. If you already have your instruments and associated gear, a REAPER license is $60 and you can use the included plugins to create a full professional quality release.
  I had a plethora of plugins a while back but I've wiped them from my drive in favor of REAPER's stock plugins, the available JS plugin libraries and a few choice free plugins along with a single drum VST. That's it. I have pro quality mixes and masters with just that.
  The days of the studio as a necessity are over. Studio time is a luxury, not a necessity.
  I want to end this comment with a big "fuck you" to Spotify anyway because streaming services are cancerous to the music creator scenes.
  
  I totally get where you're coming from, have done the DIY production thing, etc. And with full respect to the piece of art you put your soul into, I have to ask, was it a commercial success? As in, paying the bills at home? Because in my experience, you do end up having to invest those kinds of sums if you want to make a return at that level. I hate how music is commerce, trust me. But that's just what I've seen so far.

Another thing I don't use, and its users with problems I don't have.
There are times when it's good to be asocial.

I just hope that one day Spotify goes premium-only and all of you can go cry somewhere else.
Literally the hero of the music industry, but the whole lemmy takes a dump on them. Man, people on this platform are just all poor and uneducated. So, everything paid is bad, and no idea of what's actually behind the costs.
Go pirate some mp3s and remember, that despite how disgusting music labels are, if everyone did what you do, your favorite artist would've stopped producing their music long-long time ago. So, this simply puts you into the same leeching category with the corpos that you so despise.
- The hero of the music industry? How do you mean? I'm not disagreeing with you re the pirating of mp3s, but I believe artists make far more in touring than streaming revenue - particularly with Spotify, which has very publicly been a sticking point in the past