Premium has been $9.99 per month in the US since it launched.
    • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1204·
      2 years ago

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

      Please.

      • slavojrizzek@lemm.eeEnglish
        51·
        2 years ago

        They have an estimated 212 million premium users. That’s an additional 2.5 Billion dollars they’re looking at per year.

        • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
          56·
          2 years ago

          How else will they grow insatiably like the rest of these capitalist pigs??? They have to predict everything, do everything, be in everything, become your fucking God

          Shit ain’t cheap

        • RedAggroBest@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          2 years ago

          Theyre also in the hole and interest rates went up again to nobody’s surprise. This price hike is not out of the blue and imo pretty reasonable.

      • generalEdo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        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.

      • GONADS125@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        2 years ago

        I’ve been using a cracked spotify android APK with no ads and unlimited skips for years now.

      • arglebargle@lemm.eeEnglish
        31·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • Bleeping Lobster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • dinckel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      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

  • Dankry@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4710·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Gravitywell@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    341·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • HeyJoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • Gravitywell@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • HeyJoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          Not personally, but I have seen it. I just have so much stuff I never found the need to have other people to connect with for stuff I am missing so it didn’t seem worth it. The only stuff I find I want is stuff that’s new release and get it within a few weeks when I have time.

          I use navidrome and it uses the subsonic API so I’m guessing funkwhale should still work with it but I never looked into it. I host for myself really, my wife, father, and a few friends will use it from sparingly.

  • trainsaresexy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    271·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • daveycee@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      2 years ago

      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

      • Gerbler@lemmy.mlEnglish
        93·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • asparagus9001@lemmy.worldEnglish
          41·
          2 years ago

          Spotify is a publicly traded company. Their financial reports are required to be audited every single year. They really are losing money. There’s no way around that.

          The studios, most of which are also publicly traded, report billions of dollars in profit every year. Hollywood accounting is about using shell companies to move money around (back to the main studio) while ensuring that nobody ever gets paid out on the profits of the movie by the LLC they set up to produce the movie.

          I finally got out of accounting. It’s really hard to commit fraud at any scale when you’re a publicly traded and audited company. People are gonna call bullshit on that but I’m serious. I would be in favor of requiring every “small business” to be audited on a regular basis because I don’t know the exact percentage but I would testify in front of Congress right now that easily over 50% of all the small business clients I ever had were committing fraud somewhere.

          One case that comes to mind is a guy with a small construction company who had funneled over a half a million dollars to his personal house, calling it business expenses. I took this to my boss - who signed a code of professional ethics and has a professional license on the line - and their reply was “he’s defrauding the government out of about a quarter million dollars but we’re not the accounting police and that’s why we don’t sign his tax returns.”

    • SuperSpruce@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      The link you provided says that Spotify actually lost ~$170 million. $3 billion is the revenue.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • JIMMERZ@lemm.eeEnglish
    25·
    2 years ago

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

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4322·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Caesium@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      2 years ago

      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!

    • Carter@feddit.ukEnglish
      1816·
      2 years ago

      Eh I find music streaming services to be massively overpriced. Second hand CDs are dirt cheap and offer better quality than Spotify does.

    • whatsarefoogee@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2726·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        223·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • gengar@lemmy.mlEnglish
          24·
          2 years ago

          Not everyone wants to listen to music illegally? And not everyone has unlimited data or can afford it for youtube/etc. Wealth distribution and a lack of social security are huge problems but like, bro it’s not a good look to criticize working class folks for (rightfully) complaining about yet another round of inflation.

  • soulifix@lemmy.worldEnglish
    236·
    2 years ago

    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.

      • Techmaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        2 years ago

        It’s what the software industry calls dumping. Microsoft got in trouble for doing it with IE. They give something away for free or cheaper than the competition, basically subsidizing the cost with another lucrative division of the business. We make a bunch of money selling Windows, so we can afford to give away IE for free. And eventually we’ll put the competition out of business, then we can increase the price once we no longer have any competition.

  • soot_guy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    2 years ago

    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

    • ThrowThrowThrewaway7@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      2 years ago

      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…

      • hayes_@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        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.

  • ZeroDrek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    141·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • FireWire400@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Action Bastard@lemmy.world@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • DulyNoted@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • DisconnectedChild@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      2 years ago

      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

      • toolverine@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • Kuma@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • FireWire400@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        I mean that largely depends on your headphones and whether or not they (and your playback device) support decent Bluetooth codecs

        • Kuma@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          This is what I mean. This is why ppl would buy Spotify premium instead. Most do not hear a difference because of the devices they use. I am also pretty sure most do not hear much of a difference so that the price would justify it.

    • messem10@lemmy.worldEnglish
      62·
      2 years ago

      320kbps is basically indistinguishable from lossless, even with insanely good headphones/amplifier/DAC/speakers.

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        LOL, audiophiles always want the best, far past the point of diminishing returns. Kinda like PC builders. (I’ve been guilty of the later.)

        • RedAggroBest@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          2 years ago

          Audiophiles put PC peeps to shame imo. Never do i experience more overkill and gatekeeping.