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Businesses Music

Spotify Hikes Prices of Premium Plans (hollywoodreporter.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the everything-more-expensive dept.
In its latest attempt to boost revenue and cut losses, Spotify unveiled a widely telegraphed move to raise prices for its premium paying subscriber base. From a report: The new monthly cost for U.S. users will be $10.99, the company said. The hike brings Spotify in line with rivals Apple Music ($10.99 a month) and Amazon Music ($10.99, though cheaper for Prime members), which both raised prices last year. Slightly cheaper: YouTube Music ($9.99 a month), which has steadily built a major presence in the space with more than 80 million-plus combined music and premium subscribers. The price of the Premium Duo plan will go up by $2 to $14.99 per month, while the Family plan and Student plans rise by $1 to $16.99 and $5.99, respectively.

"The market landscape has continued to evolve since we launched. So that we can keep innovating, we are changing our Premium prices across a number of markets around the world," the company said in a statement. "These updates will help us continue to deliver value to fans and artists on our platform." Spotify had 210 million global paying subscribers (a 15 percent increase year-over-year) and 515 million monthly active users as of March 31. Yet the audio giant has been operating at a loss and has been looking for ways to cut costs amid what CFO Paul Vogel called in late April a "very modest underperformance in advertising" revenue in its first quarter of 2023.
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Spotify Hikes Prices of Premium Plans More

Spotify Hikes Prices of Premium Plans

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  • Yay (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Renting music sure is awesome

    • Re:Yay (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Monday July 24, 2023 @02:11PM (#63711854)

      Honestly, there's a really compelling argument to be made for renting music. Some people (like myself) are collectors. I have a vast library of purchased music in different forms, from vinyl to digital download. I certainly spent a whole lot more than $14/month in my lifetime. Even if you could every single month of my life from birth to now. But many people have neither the time nor the interest in maintaining a library. To have access to the bulk of all regional music for a trivial amount of money meets the needs of those folks perfectly.

      There is so much more music than there is time, that if you consider the worst case scenario - that a piece of music you love is no longer available on the service - other than a momentary pang of sadness, there is NO impact to your life whatsoever. You won't "run out" of music. And you could choose to buy those outliers if you absolutely can't live without them.

      The same goes for streaming services. Once the 4K HD problem was defeated, the need for physical media is mostly gone. The compelling reason for it would be for people with sporadic internet access (or none at all).

      I gifted my sister and her family with over 500 DVDs and almost 600 Blu Rays a couple of years ago. And my countless boxes of CDs got marched over to Good Will and were donated.

      Streaming is absolutely a great deal. Period.

      • Streaming is absolutely a great deal. Period.

        The radio is free, piracy easy, and you get cool art to hangup if you buy the CD.
        Maybe don't collect the album with that one song you heard that one time at that one place only to listen to it once more and never again.

        • I don't know who would hang up CD art... :) My collection is carefully curated. Music is much larger in my life than it is for the average person.

          Yes, you're right. Piracy is easy.

          • Me. I have some of the tool and Chevelle album art striped from the casing and put into a poster frame since I bought a 2 pack but had one poster.

            I also see specify frames specific for records. Put the record in, in or out the sleeve, and hang it. My uncle has a few of those.
      • I keep trying Premium every 6 months or so with my friends for the group session feature. But it is crazy glitched out. Otherwise it would be cool just so one person doesn't control the music.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

        I own the music I care enough to keep.

        I rent the music I want to explore. This is how I discover new songs or even albums I wish to own.

        Works well for me.

        • Same here. There've been a few times where I heard something new on Spotify and then went out and bought the album so I can have my own copy.

    • No you're right, streaming must be awful. That must be why so many people choose to do it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

      It's a fucking shame we're forced to do it, with absolutely no other options.

  • All streaming is about to spike in prices (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Monday July 24, 2023 @01:04PM (#63711696)

    With the WGA and SAG strikes being primarily over streaming royalties and residuals when this eventually gets resolved the already inflated costs for streaming services will cost even more so something will have to give (because the studios are not going to simply make less money and pay the creatives more) so the increased costs will end up passed to consumers.

    Music services will probably be next as we've been hearing for a long while that how artists get pennies at a time for thousands or millions of play son Spotify. It will be tricker though as music artists are not organized like actors and writers but somethign will have to break eventually.

    It's starting to seem like the "streaming revolution" is about to hit some walls very soon.

    • One of the big difference is streaming companies like Netflix historically have not reported a trailing 12 monthly net loss since going public back in the 00s, while Spotify and the likes are loosing $500m per year.

      Apple and Amazon are at a distinct advantage in that they can provide an integrated service and very likely take a loss on their music service. Apple and Amazon refuse to break out their music businesses in their earnings report and lump them in with various others services effectively hiding pot

  • How does streaming music cost as much as movies? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by unrtst ( 777550 ) on Monday July 24, 2023 @01:42PM (#63711794)

    Licensing costs aside, if I stream a movie in any reasonable quality, it's more data than I'll stream in music all month long. How the heck do they justify a subscription price equal to some of my streaming video subscriptions??? And with artists making so very very little per song streamed, there's an awful large percentage of revenue going to operational costs.

    One hour...
    * 4k video = about 14 GB
    * 1080p video = about 3 GB
    * mp3 music = about 17 songs, about 0.072 GB (72 MB)

    14 GB (1hr 4k video) = about 3400 songs (estimating 4.2 MB per song), duration around 200 hours.

    • You're right. Movie streaming should be more expensive than it is.

    • Who ever said the artists were getting the payment directly? The record companies own most of the music, and they set the streaming costs. Then they distribute whatever the artist has negotiated for the streaming of their content -- which if they are a newer artist is probably little to nothing.

    • Price what the market will bear. You'll pay that much and like it.

    • Re:How does streaming music cost as much as movies (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Njovich ( 553857 ) on Monday July 24, 2023 @03:14PM (#63712056)

      Netflix has like 10k content items. Spotify has 100M. Neither of them pays for the vast majority of their bandwidth so what exactly are you trying to calculate?

    • Licensing costs aside

      But to answer your question you can't put licensing costs aside. None of these costs have anything to do with bandwidth. That's like saying "spectral absorption of the atmosphere aside, why is the sky blue?"

    • You have to consider that people can consume more music than they can consume video. You can listen to music while driving, biking, doing the dishes, etc., but you cannot watch a movie while doing that. Also, you can't put aside the licensing costs.

    • Licensing costs aside, if I stream a movie in any reasonable quality, it's more data than I'll stream in music all month long. How the heck do they justify a subscription price equal to some of my streaming video subscriptions??? And with artists making so very very little per song streamed, there's an awful large percentage of revenue going to operational costs.

      One hour...
      * 4k video = about 14 GB
      * 1080p video = about 3 GB
      * mp3 music = about 17 songs, about 0.072 GB (72 MB)

      14 GB (1hr 4k video) = about 3400 songs (estimating 4.2 MB per song), duration around 200 hours.

      For consumer grade AWS data transfer is $0.02 / gb [amazon.com]. (I'm not certain how to read that doc, but if the number is $0.05 then their bandwidth costs are ~$14/user).

      Apparently people watch 3.2hrs of HD video per day [backlinko.com], some simple math says

      30days * 3GB * 3.2hrs/day * $0.02/GB = $5.76

      So that's a decent chunk of the subscription fee.

      I suspect there's some combination of:

      a) Netflix's rate hikes make more sense now.
      b) Most people stream at way less than 1080p.
      c) Netflix is really clever at conserving bandwidth and ne

    • The costs of streaming the data are a small fraction of total costs for both music and movie streaming services. Most of the cost is licensing the content. Spotify pays out about 70 cents out of every dollar of revenue for music licensing, so this price increase is a much bigger boon to the record labels than it is for Spotify itself.
    • Data is virtually free. The vast majority of the cost of these subscriptions is licensing fees for the intellectual property.

  • In line with? (Score:3)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday July 24, 2023 @03:24PM (#63712106)

    The hike brings Spotify in line with rivals Apple Music

    The price hike does not such thing. Apple Music offers significantly more for the price including lossless, high res (if you're into that), and Spatial recordings including a lot of music specifically mastered for the service.

    This price hike brings it out of line with the competition given the competition offer a superior product. If you want to actually make money maybe you shouldn't have pissed $200million at Joe Rogan's worthless waste of bandwidth.

    • The price hike does not such thing. Apple Music offers significantly more for the price including lossless, high res (if you're into that), and Spatial recordings including a lot of music specifically mastered for the service.

      That's interesting.

      Does Apple have the same size catalog approximately that Spotify does?

      I'm just into music...mostly classic, some of that is a bit niche, one hit wonder, etc.....so, wondering if Apple has most of what Spotify does, I'd be interested in checking out the HIDev and

      • The classical things I read have advertisements for streaming service Qobuz. you might want to check it for comparison purposes. They allow lossless downloads and do not include DRM.

        • Qobuz is awesome. At this point they're not much more expensive than Spotify anymore while offering a much better service. It's a bit wonky sometimes because it's run by a small team. But it's a team of music nerds and it shows, by how responsive they are and the things they focus on. Classical and jazz were always their strength which distinguished them from the competition, but these days their popular music catalogue is not considerably worse than the bigger competitors anymore. I find most of the new r
        • LOL....when I said classics...I meant classic rock.

          I should have been a bit more precise.

      • They throw in a cloud library which can hold an extra 100,000 tracks, similar to what Google used to offer. Anything you add to it can be matched from the legacy iTunes Store if you upload a rip of the song you want. It uses a system similar to AcoustID, so if you have ever used Picard, you will already know how this works. If the file is matched, then Apple will give you a DRM-free copy to keep forever. Yes, that means if you already have your own collection of ripped MP3s, you can replace them with the sa

      • > Does Apple have the same size catalog
        > approximately that Spotify does?

        I can't say for sure. But aside from some really niche stuff from my punk and raver days ages ago I can't even recall the last time I looked for a song/album/artist and couldn't find what I wanted. It's really quite nice. And, as another poster mentioned, iTunes Match is still available to legitimize anything illicit you still might have from the days of Napster and Gnutella.

        If you're into classical, Apple also recently introd

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

        They offer a 3 month trial if you want to try it out.
        https://www.apple.com/apple-mu... [apple.com]

      • Does Apple have the same size catalog approximately that Spotify does?

        Catalogue size is irrelevant. What is relevant is if the catalogue specifically contains the kind of music you are into and what you wish to listen to. The reason I mention this specifically is because:

        I'm just into music...mostly classic, some of that is a bit niche

        Apple is by far the best streaming service for classic music having bought another streaming service that used to specialise in only that music and even dedicated a whole unique app to the genre: https://www.apple.com/newsroom... [apple.com]

        But to answer your original question, both Apple and Spotify claim their current

  • There is a cheaper option (Score:5, Funny)

    by sir1963nz ( 4560389 ) on Monday July 24, 2023 @03:27PM (#63712120)
    Just call any large corporation and get hours of FREE music while you are on hold.
    • Wait, large corporations still have free to call business numbers? How can they miss out on bleeding the customers dry on that end? I find this hard to believe...

  • Wait Hold Up (Score:3)

    by Your Anus ( 308149 ) on Monday July 24, 2023 @03:53PM (#63712188) Journal
    People pay actual money for Spotify?

    • Yes because Spotify ads are infuriating and worse than cable companies, Spotify's audio quality on free tier is atrocious, and many Spotify connect devices only work if you have a premium account.

  • I don't care, I listen to Spotify all day long, I have hundreds of playlists. I work from home and I use different playlists for different things, different moods. There is no way I could afford to buy all this. Nothing else even compares. They could raise it $5 and I'll still pay.
    • I agree, I use spotify quite a lot too and I don't think I could live without it. I got so used to listening to my playlists at certain moments throughout the day, I wouldn't really know what to do without it.
  • The excuse "So that we can keep innovating, we are changing our Premium prices" is annoying. It's just music, we don't need innovation. I push play and music is heard. I'm perfectly happy with how Spotify works now and see no need for "innovation". Raising the price during an economic down turn only works to put the spotlight on if I should continue my subscription.
  • "So that we can keep innovating, we are changing our Premium prices across a number of markets around the world." That's rich, coming from the streaming service which spent the last 8 years (give or take) not *adding* any features, but continuously *taking away* features they already had. For crying out loud, they're about the only streaming service left that doesn't offer lossless quality, for all the years they've been promising it. Back when I was still a subscriber, I kept a running list on their comm

  • Youtube Premium is a better deal (Score:3)

    by schweini ( 607711 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @01:51PM (#63713930)
    I don't understand why Spotify is still so popular.
    Youtube Premium gets a lot of hate, but I think it's a great and fair deal. You get Youtube without ads, Youtube Music (which has basically all the music, but you can also listen to Youtube videos as if they are music), and, especially with the family plan, it's a great deal.
    I know there are workarounds to get all of this from Youtube in a more pirate-y way, but I think that if someone charges a fair price for something, there is a certain ethical obligation to not sail the high seas for that service.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

      It's probably stupid logic, but in my mind, Apple and Google shouldn't get any more of my money or information than they already have

    • For a lot of people the content or price is irrelevant. If I compare Spotify to Youtube here's the only difference that matters to me: With my phone I click Spotify and if I push the little button next to the volume icon I see the word "living room". If I press that music magically comes out of my hifi. I cannot do that with Youtube. And how long can I pay for a Spotify subscription for the cost of some streaming box that supports Youtube Music (assuming that is even a thing, since I've only really seen sup

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