I don’t understand subscribing to music. Maybe it’s just my age, but this isn’t the '90s where you hear a track you like and that one song is going to run you $20 at Tower Records. I like a song, I pay $1.29 and then it’s stored locally. Also cuts way down on data usage while driving. I struggle to get anywhere close to my 5GB data allowance.
After a dozen years of keeping subscription prices stable, Spotify has issued three price hikes in 2.5 years.
Spotify informed subscribers via email today that Premium monthly subscriptions would go from $12 to $13 per month as of users’ February billing date. Spotify is already advertising the higher prices to new subscribers.
Although not explicitly mentioned in Spotify’s correspondence, other plans are getting more expensive, too. Student monthly subscriptions are going from $6 to $7. Duo monthly plans, for two accounts in the same household, are going from $17 to $19, and Family plans, for up to six users, are moving from $20 to $22.
Spotify’s Basic plan, which is only available as a downgrade for some Premium subscribers and is $11/month, is unaffected.
For years, Spotify subscribers enjoyed stable prices, but today’s announcement marks Spotify’s third price hike since July 2023. Spotify last raised prices in July 2024. Premium individual subscriptions went from $11 to $12, Duo subscriptions went from $15 to $17, and Family subscriptions increased from $17 to $20.
I feel like the main thing these subscription services need to do is keep it chill. The fastest way to get me to question whether a service is worth it or not is if the monthly cost keeps being thrown in my face. Grandfather in old prices for a lot longer or something to keep people hooked longer. That’s probably why I’ll never be a C-level exec.
Spotify’s been fine but it’s just obnoxious at this point and THEY are pushing me to look elsewhere at this point.
Maybe it’s just my age – I presume you were born in 1987 – but subscriptions are anathema to me. I rarely buy $10 in music in a given month, so there’s no value there to me. Add in the AI tracks, and, well … what would I be paying for?
My millenial is showing with my username :D
We’re at a spot where we’ve more or less switched off subscriptions with a few exceptions (some of which enable us to not have OTHER subscriptions in the first place). Spotify is in a weird place where our kids have a playlist of music they like and they’re more or less the primary user of our Spotify playlist now. I’ve got all of my music self-hosted and my intention with this latest news is to try and bring the kids’ music over too.
When I had stepkids, I very quickly turned to piracy for their shows to avoid the endless “I need this because I saw it in an ad” routine. They were allowed to watch TV all night, and each morning was “what demand are they going to have now?”
Individual plans are a rip-off yeah, Spotify is one of the only services I subscribe to and that’s because I have a family plan, so it’s not so easy for me to just cancel it, when others are relying on it. It works out at €3.40/month ($3.95) per member. The value there is really good.
Spotify lets you just listen to anything, I can put a playlist on and it will keep going forever and I have discovered many tracks I would have never listened to, or even known they existed. Buying music is great, but only when you know exactly what you want, I’m not a big music person, I like listening to it, but I don’t really have a dialled in taste. Spotify is great for that.
There will obviously be a tipping point though when they inevitably raise the price too far and I will abandon ship.
Using a free listener supported radio app that is curated by human DJs has been how I’ve enjoyed music for years now. Examples are KEXP, The Current and Radio Paradise.
I’m sure that more money is going towards the artists /s
TIDALs continued awesomeness suggests suitable alternatives.
Spotify pays Joe Rogan how much? And pays artists how little?
TIDAL does music.
I changed a few years ago, and all I miss are the integrations.
I’m lucky that I have decent speakers & dac on my desktop, and decent IEMs. So I can listen to music where I want.
But I can’t buy a “tidal speaker” in the way I could buy a “Spotify speaker”.
But I’m arrogantly confident enough to waste some money solving this with home assistant, some rpi/nucs, and some speakers. I feel I don’t need (I actually don’t want a vendor locked in) “just works” solution, and I’m happy rolling my own.Streaming two days for about 2-3h in Symfonium:
And Spotify is with streaming some podcasts with video. For the whole month
You must be streaming flac or something from your server then?
over a whole month of playing music for roughly 8 hours a day i have 10gb of data from symfonium with 320kbps ogg transcoding.
Either that or you might have music cached on spotify but not using the cache on symfonium?
Yup, Flac streamed :p Some of it is cached but I listenend to new stuff.
And yes, Spotify is mostly cached. But I set the quality to high (audio) and middle (video) on cellularI still have not been able to mostly import my library from spotify into Jellyfin so my main way of listening is still within Spotify but I have reached critical mass where I could do it.
Lidarr is your friend, my friend
Well…Creating the songs on muaicbrainz (even with harmony) is less fun if it’s >1000 single entries
Oh wow your catalogue is that fringe is it? Ive only had to add a few entries and I consider my tastes very broad and pretty niche for a lot of it!
I checked my library of what I managed to download across all my libraries (before Annas archive made Spotify change something in the authentication logic):
Size: 21GiB
Files: 3655
Directories: 3448
Structure: Artist/Album/song.mp3 (and additionally an lrc if synced liyrics were available)So probably 2000-2500 music files in total I need to check with musicbrainz, import if not available, wait for about 7 days, rinse and repeat.
I was burned out enough after importing the “Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies HQ Project”, the Disney animation collection, the Tom and Jerry animations and matching the Pokémon season 1 and 2 DVD with the localized titles (which have changed) to the TVDB order.
I really don’t have the endurance to do that for long. Maybe some day but not right now :p
I started my mp3 collection in 1997. Metadata was nonexistent, and online databases weren’t yet a thing. (I was mostly downloading 112kbps from IRC F-servs).
It is a bitch to get your collection in order, even with a tool like MusicBrainz Picard, but worth it in the end. It took me about a week to actually complete that project. The new stuff I download already has the metadata, so it’s a solved problem.
Yea I dont think many soundtracks would be in musicbrainz that might be a bit difficult.
Lidarr handled my 60k tracks collection like a dream though!
Presumably Symfonium is streaming lossless files whereas Spotify probably isn’t. That and Spotify is probably caching a lot more.
Welcome to inflation. If a price isn’t going up regularly someone is getting ripped off.
When my boss gives me a raise I always compare that to the yearly inflation rate - it has more than once turned what looks good into a loss for me. (I might accept it once in a while, but I’m looking for new jobs soon if they don’t fix)
Rent goes up 15%, and you get a 2% raise. Fucking thrilling.
Pandora is still $10
If you do want to use Spotify then find 5 friends who also want to and set up a family plan
I’ve been paying Spotify $5/mo for years but i quit anyway. Y’all are sticking with it and paying full price? Crazy.
$20 was the cost of a whole CD Album, I don’t remember singles selling for that much. Or maybe you’re referring to the phenomenon of having to buy a full Album just for the one song you like?
I prefer to buy Albums, and these days new Vinyl usually comes with a lossless digital download redemption code.
At the same time, I still subscribe to music streaming services. I’ve got some ambient / background music playlists that are days and even weeks long - I’m not going to allocate make local storage space to them, let alone pay $9,000
These services are amazing for music discovery. I live having an album or playlist finish and then getting “radio” of similar music to hear and discover.
OK, try buying the single you want from Tower in 1997. I actually spent $500 at Virgin in Vancouver to discover new music, but the ROI just wasn’t there.
