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.
Spotify pays very little to artists, And the sound quality is not high.
I will be switching to Tidal very soon, as it offers HiFi and it pays more to artists. I believe it pays much more.
Spotify has been greedy and cheap in my most humble opinion!
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
Im just happy my cracked apk somehow still works. Lol
I’m sure this is the last time. 😉
Why does noone here mention Deezer as an alternative? Serious question, cause im currently testing their free trial. They also pay more than Spotify to the artists and have better audio quality. Also i like the flow playlist feature so far. Any reasons against Deezer? Or anything in specific that makes Tidal better?
Their CEO just boasted about how making content for their platform comes with zero cost for the creators. So, why are they raising rates? Is the whole “you pay to support the creators” trope a lie? I am confused.
/s
Any love for Qobuz?
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.
Eh, I just switched to audiobooks. I get them from my library and listen while I drive, work in the yard, ride my bike, etc.
I’d really like a self-hosted smart speaker though that I could call out a song and it would play. So like Alexa, but all the AI is local. I’m willing to pay for the music service, but I need to own the platform and be able to change music services easily. The only time I really listen to music is when entertaining friends/family, and using my phone is getting old.
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.
deleted by creator
Just to let you know, Tidal is not that great either.
Frequently having issues with downloaded albums, where I go into offline mode, pull up an album, and it says “can’t connect” despite being in offline mode and the album taking up storage space on my phone.
Also, the discovery and new releases sections aren’t very well made.
It doesn’t sound great. Maybe I’ll just use Bandcamp only. It’s just some classical albums are only on certain platforms.
High chance they’re all on Slsk as lossless files. That and foobar2000 and you’ll be back in control of your music listening habits. Then buy physical from the artists if you want to support them and they offer a way to obtain it.
Please speak to me like I’m dumb and explain all of this.
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?
nts.live internet radio from London
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!
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!
If you like classical music, give qobuz a try… High quality audio, large selection of classical music.
Thanks for this, never heard of them!
You should get back to apple music, they launched an app dedicated to classical music, and it’s by far the best for this type of music. Also it’s lossless 24 bits
Unfortunately due to licensing there’s a lot of stuff I want they don’t have, and some of it I can’t purchase.
Got the email of subscription increase, just cancelled.
Been trialling Tidal and we’re both pretty happy with it. Integrates almost as well as Spotify with Android Auto and the sound quality is far better.
iBroadcast is what i use. That plus rutracker and you can sail the high seas like it’s 1699.
It’s to support all those artists right? Right?
Quality isn’t good enough to justify the price. Apple Music and Tidal have better quality of sound.
even apart from audio quality, Spotify is just plain terrible as a music library.
For someone who lives in playlists, it might be fine. But I like to pick and choose albums and songs, and be able to sort the whole collection on the fly. Spotify, and unfortunately a whole bunch of the competition, will have three separate lists for “liked” songs, albums, and artists. Only want to save the studio tracks, and not the demos and live versions? Fuck you, you can like the album or not, it’s all or nothing! And the special edition is the only version we have! enjoy the solid hour of shittier versions of the songs you actually wanted!
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.
The problem is that Spotify is losing money each year. They aren’t profitable. And if they are keep focusing on music, they never will. Their deal with the music labels says that they need to give 70 % of each subscription to the music labels. So by getting more people to signup, they only marginally increase their revenue. Same goes for raising their prices.
Thats why they tried focusing on Podcasts and Audiobooks. Those are a lot more profitable, either by adding ads (Podcasts) or by charging a premium (audiobooks).
It’s amazing to think how incompetent their management must be that they’re charging more, delivering lower audio quality, and paying less to artists than competitors like Tidal, yet still aren’t profitable.
They pay less than Tidal claims it pays. So far Tidal has a really bad history of publishing correct numbers.
Hang on. 70% of the subscription before any royalty / streaming costs?
So in a $10 payment, $7 is immediately removed, then another say $1 for streaming costs leaving only $2 for profits which Spotify takes 30%?
From each $10 only $1.40 goes to artists?
From the 10 Dollar, taxes will be deducted. Afterwards Apple or Google take their share (if you subscribe using the App). Of the remaining money the Music labels take 70 %, and Spotify keeps 30 %. The music labels pay a fraction of the 70 % to the artists, depending on the contract and the artist’s share of streams reported by Spotify.
There is an episode of Tech Won’t Save Us (2024-01-25) discussing how weird the podcasting play was for Spotify. There is essentially no way to monetize podcasts at scale, primarily because podcasts do not have the same degree of platform look-in as other media types.
Spotify spent the $100 million (or whatever the number was) to get Rogan exclusive, but for essentially every other podcast you can find a free RSS feed with skippable ads. Also their podcast player just outright sucks :/
deleted by creator
Interesting. I wasn’t aware that they weren’t profitable.
Funny enough, right after your comment I got recommended this video on YouTube talking about the points you mentioned: https://youtu.be/yDWgOwb8kj4
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/yDWgOwb8kj4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Any particular reason you went from Tidal to Apple Music? I see a lot of people here recommending it, so I’d be interested to hear any negatives it has.
The simple reason is because I got a lengthy free trial for it (saving me money on the Tidal sub) and then stuck around.
Apple Music was hot garbage when I started using it but over the months of my trial it improved tremendously - to a point where there isn’t much difference between it and Tidal. App performance is good now, it provides song recommendations for your playlists, many bugs I was facing have been fixed.
The Android Auto experience is better for me compared to Tidal, it has Shazam integration (Spotify does too, Tidal doesn’t) and it has many of the Japanese city pop songs I like that Tidal was missing.
I can always jump ship if needed. Services like Soundiiz and TuneMyMusic make it pretty easy.
I don’t mind paying $0/mo for access to millions of songs with limited skipping and occasional adverts. ,
Hope you like Joe Rogan and the crap he peddles because he is getting a nice chunk of Spotify money… I left because of that particular deal
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.
Plex is also on the route of enshittitfication. Jellyfin is the better recommendation imo. A variety of apps that can connect to it too, for either streaming or music.
For music libraries:
I run both side-by-side, but for me Plex is still the clear winner right now for features and polish.
There is no point to self hosting music streaming in my opinion.
Just have syncthing sync your music folder on your SD card to your server. Everything local and available when you want it.
Plex is slowly being enshittified too it seems, just slower.
Use Jellyfin as an alternative, it’s awesome!
deleted by creator
Plexamp, Lidarr, Lidarr extended, Tailscale. Done.
Done. Until it can’t find a decent quality option for an album you’re searching for.
A guy I know decided to move away from Spotify and pirate music. The amount of effort he went through means it’s something I’ll probably never try.
This is the biggest problem for me. I have thousands of movies and 10s of thousands of TV episodes, but my audio library is still all the same stuff I downloaded from Napster, Limewire, Kazaa 20+ years ago. It’s too hard to find a good selection these days outside of a few private trackers. I’m in several private trackers but I’m not going to sit in a queue for 2 days waiting for an interview time and jump through hoops to join something like RED or PTP tier tracker.
Not to mention I mostly listen to podcasts these days and when I do listen to music, I try to find new stuff that I’ve never heard of rather than searching for a known artist. This would be way too convoluted to do on my own with some self-hosted solution.
I’ve been using deemix, and for the most part it’s been pretty seamless. Stuff direct downloads instantly, but it’s all in 128kbps now unfortunately. Then I have lidarr monitor everything for a lossless version.
Are you saying Deemix only downloads at 128kbps? If so, I’ve been using it as well and download in FLAC. Also, I pay for the family plan which is $15.99/month.
Edit: Ah, I’m guessing you’re not on a paid Deezer plan.
Yeah I’m on the free plan which used to include FLAC and 320kpbs, but they stopped doing that for free plans about a year ago I think.
USENET. Thank me later
Got one or two you might recommend?
Just some perspective: I’ve been self-hosting stuff for 7y now, started with plex on a nas. I have tried a couple times to get the *arr stack working, one at a time and fuck me it’s complex and the risk of fucking up the config and data crossing the clearnet without a VPN, noooope fuck right off with that. That risk/reward just is too skewed for me.
it’s not that complex, really. Yet, the variant I described doesn’t do anything torrenty. It scrapes the songs from tidal.
But how do you handle music discovery?
Since all music services I’ve tried so far are laughably shit at that anyway, Last.fm is your friend. Besides, Plexamp tries to get you into a Tidal subscription and suggests things from there, so you’ll get stuff here nad there.
.
As someone else said: it doesn’t replace streaming even a little. Pirating is replacing buying music directly. Streaming facilitates finding new music and trying it out. Being able to listen to anything at any time. You simply can’t do that with downloads; no one can download everything. Piracy in this case really just works for people still listening to their highschool favs and not people looking for new stuff all the time.
I used to download exclusively when I was younger, but as I get older I’m trying out new genres from different cultures than my own and I’d miss out on it all without a streaming service.
In my opinion it’s worth it.
This dude hasn’t heard of pirate streaming services.
Do they have the libraries of Spotify or Apple music?
yeah actually
Yes and no. It’s more cumbersome for sure but I used to find music on YouTube and all that back in the day then download it.
I never had trouble finding new music without those recommandation algorithms.
It replaces paying for Spotify because its possible to download Spotify premium. Best of both worlds. Use Spotify or YouTube to find stuff, send it to a seedbox, load it later at home.
Biggest downside is most phones don’t have SD card slots anymore.
Sent from my (slightly salty) hacked pixel 7
Dear lord no. You can still use Spotify, YTM, and a host of other services to discover new music. The argument was valid back in the days of the excellent Google Play Music, but the algorithm has gone to shit since. There are also tons of sources of user curated playlists you can use to fund new music.
I am 51 and if I let algorithms pick my music I would never discover most of what I find and constantly be fed thirty year old music. Just this past month I discovered mehro, King Woman, Sugar High and Parra for Cuva.
InnerTune. Its on F-Droid
Just installed this. I love you!
Or put some effort into finding new music? The algorithms have never suggested me anything good anyway.
I’m just here to appreciate the Buccee’s icon, carry on!
I use a cracked Spotify client but if I do legitimately pay, it will be for Tidal. I want that sweet sweet lossless audio people have been talking about.
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 switched to Tidal recently from AppleMusic and I like it.
It should be noted if you’re listening through Bluetooth like most people then you can’t get high quality.
Also, they allow you to copy your music from other services, using a third party service which was great. It does have a charge and annoyingly it is a recurring charge. So I signed up, transferred my music and then cancelled.
I then sent them a message to say it sucks that they don’t have a one of few for doing this. If you use it and agree I would send them a similar message so they get the idea that most people don’t need continuous syncing.
The bluetooth remark is a bit misleading, there are codecs that provide better audio, which is even noticeable on Spotify.
If you have earphones that support LDAC for example (sony XMs are popular where I live), you can even use that with Windows via 3rd party software (search Win A2DP - not free, but can recommend).FiiO BTR5 + LDAC + IEMs have been working super well for me. I don’t really use wireless with Windows, but I’m considering payiny for A2DP regardless, as it worked very well and may come in handy eventually.
Codecs for iOS and Android?
As I imagine that’s where the most people are streaming from.
They’re all proprietary, so it’s less than ideal.
LDAC is owned by Sony and supported by some Androids.
Samsung has their own codec, Apple does too - each vendor locked.
Then there’s Qualcomm’s aptX/HD, which should now be fully supported by Android.I don’t use apple, so can’t comment on other options there.
Thanks. That helps enough for me to search it not on Google
I fucking hate what apple music has become. Their clients are a complete disaster. Im gradually switching to tidal and the only thing that pisses me off is an ad for waze that comes up while you’re driving which cannot be disabled.
Im torn as I listen to many genres and one of them being Classical Music. Apple having a dedicated app for that is a major plus, so I imagine I’ll be going back at some point. Although I do agree the regular music app is not great.
In fact I love using iPhone as I geek out with my job but I want my phone to be stress free, just I don’t use many Apple stock apps.
What the fuck kind of service is that? Aren’t there free ones—there were the last time I checked.
Tune My Music.
To be honest I didn’t search for any, and just used where Tidal sent me. It was £3 to transfer it all.
Him. There’s another one I don’t remember its name.
Soundiiz. I used it to transfer my playlists one by one, for free.
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.
