Spotify is increasing US prices again
theverge.com
theverge.com
I don't care about your innovation. I haven't cared about a single new feature that's come out from Spotify in the last 5-7 years. I find myself listening to Spotify less than ever these days anyway. These prices are too much for me, so after ~10 years of premium Spotify, I'll be cancelling this month because I'm not getting enough value. I'll find other avenues of discovering new music.
Benn Jordan predicted the demise of Spotify last year, and I'm starting to believe he might be right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
I agree, and I'd personally extend it to say the same about almost every other subscription-supported software product I've rented in the last 10 years.
From my perspective as a user, "innovation" broadly means changing my product to chase some other users who were previously reluctant to buy in when I did. Sometimes I'll get something beneficial myself, but the more likely outcome is that I'll be paying to see my interface cluttered with countless things I was content not having around and the specific UX details or features I did like massaged out through A/B tests focused on these later adopters.
A content subscription model generally makes sense for catalog-streaming products like Spotify, but the software subscription model is often ruinous to user experience for long-term subscribers.
Somehow the base functionality has been stuck in a one-step-forward-one-step-back loop for the past 5 years or so.
Streaming music just does not make sense to me economically. Listener doesn't win, the musician doesn't win... the only winner is the useless gatekeeper.
I dropped Spotify 3 or 4 years ago now, and I am glad I did.
So this is about one album per month. The accumulation of music might be slow at the beginning, but I could imagine that 3-4 years in you have quite some collection.
Spotify just works (for us). It's got almost everything we want to listen to. There are no tasks required for me to listen to anything. IMO, this is worth any extra costs.
Serious question - Do the DRM free albums represent a broad swath of music? Or is it just a niche "a few artists do this" kind of thing? I suspect you're not comparing apples to apples, but I haven't looked into album prices since I started using streaming services.
It's out there if you look, especially if you're looking outside of mainstream, radio-played artists.
It'd be awfully nice if the all the major labels offered a site where you can exchange a a reasonable amount of money for any track in their catalog, but it seems market forces make that a non-starter.
All that being said, I'm not buying the "innovation" bullshit excuse they're throwing at us and I think such a large price hike for the family plan is too high, but it's still at a price point for me that doesn't justify moving to something else. There is a limit though, and at some point I will just move back to the high seas (like I did with movies).
Individual tracks tend to cost me $1.29 or less so that's well over 10,000 songs even assuming only 4% annual increases.
Some people might listen to a huge variety, but others certainly use music streaming services to listen to a small set of songs.
If you stick that in an ETF for 30 years, you expect to get investment×(returns-inflation)^years = 12.9k×(6%-2%.)^30 = 12.9k×(1.04)^30 = 41.8k. (Does someone have a formula for a 90% confidence interval at, say, 30 years?)
It doesn't quite pay for the streaming service but it goes a long way. If you decide to buy music and rent or buy a server instead, there's additional costs to factor in
Edit: wait I don't think I factored in the inflation correctly. It should not be a factor in ETF returns, only in the cost of commercial streaming services right? So the amount should be higher, making commercial streaming services comparatively more attractive? Might need to factor in 30% income tax or something though. Hmm... meh, I'm going to call it close enough (typing this out on mobile is a bit of a pain)
$12/mo invested to return ~6% over 30 years:
End balance: $11,751.08
Total Interest: $7,431.08
Total not spent on Spotify: $4,320.00
End balance: $43,155.05
Total Interest: $35,955.05
Total not spent on Spotify: $7,200.00
Maybe those boomers are onto something about avocado toast /s
Spotify is fast entering that size of product where users who use it most all use different subsets of features. I’m there for the music and just thinking of Spotify as a podcast player feels weird. Yet I have friends who use it for nothing but podcasts.
It also ignores multiple aspects of discoverability. If I hear a song I like from an artist, I can spend zero marginal dollars to find out if I like anything else they've made. Or the algorithms can suggest new things similar to other things I like.
I don't use Spotify, but only because I watch enough youtube that I view youtube music as "free" with youtube premium. But if that weren't the case, I'd still consider streaming to be a pretty good deal to avoid the perpetual hassle.
The value of my labor and storage efforts are worth both the control I have over my collection and my ability to ensure that I will keep what I want for as long as I want to.
>It also ignores multiple aspects of discoverability. If I hear a song I like from an artist, I can spend zero marginal dollars to find out if I like anything else they've made.
I can easily do this with any number of already-existing tools, including Bandcamp.
The same credentials I use to buy new music: my password manager master password.
> and making it accessible to each device you want to listen from.
Syncthing directory; set and forget just works on all my devices.
> If I hear a song I like from an artist, I can spend zero marginal dollars to find out if I like anything else they've made.
Streaming services don't vanish when I primarily listen to DRM free music. Sometimes I find new music on Youtube. I usually find new music from word of mouth.
I don't know, I just don't see any of these as limitations that I run into.
You can build a nice little collection on your phone/laptop that's offline first (offline only), won't track you, doesn't have a horrendous UI (vanilla music on android > spotify).
Also, yes, you're saving hundreds every year.
Maybe you can use that money to buy some merch or tickets to a show. That will give more to the artists you listen to than the pennies spotify cough up.
Of course, if you're open to supplementing an owned archive with ad-supported streaming for discovery, special listens, etc then the math changes again. But you're usually inviting lower quality streams, less control over what you hear, and all the annoyance of interstitial ads.
It's like the radio. Yes, there are some classics you always go back to but there's also a constant stream of new music entering the mix as other music exits it. Not to mention the underavailability of music on a service like Bandcamp. What % of the top Spotify tracks can actually be bought there?
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Spotify. But streaming music ushered in a new way for people to interact with music. I personally think it's worse but clearly plenty of people disagree. And I think we wear rose tinted glasses when looking at the past. I’m old enough that I actually did buy albums back in the day, I have a great memory of running out to get Radiohead’s Kid A then sitting in my room listening to it in its entirety. But if I were to actually take stock of how many of those albums I still listen to today… I can’t even remember a load of them. There were a bunch of misses on there that I’d probably have been better off not buying.
Oregon Trail says you can die from too much of it.
When they can agree on revenue sharing that doesn't neglect the artist on which their service is built upon I'll start looking at them again.
I know. My music listening habits have changed since I dropped Spotify. I am not less happy for it. In fact, I value the music that I listen to much more now, since the music I listen to is pretty exclusively a set of music that I thought was good enough to pay money for specifically.
> Not to mention the underavailability of music on a service like Bandcamp. What % of the top Spotify tracks can actually be bought there?
When you add 7digital and Amazon music, I think the % is over 100. I have never not been able to find a DRM free distribution of an album or song that I wanted.
Spotify integrates cleanly with my Android Auto so I can use it to listen to my playlists on my car speakers when driving
I don't want to have to hack something together to do that myself
The only way I can play music in my car is radio or USB storage. There is an aux port that is broken, and bluetooth only works for call audio. I play my music from a USB drive.
I'm just not that into my music habit
iTunes Match gives you access to all of your music
on all of your devices, even songs that you've
imported from other sources such as CDs.
I mean, sticking the money that 1500-odd songs would cost me to purchase into an ETF instead is also an option. Sure, Spotify's rate will increase as years go by, maybe more than inflation or maybe less, but there's also a cost to this up front purchase plus the running costs of a server with backups plus the time investment of: server maintenance, music discovery, music purchasing, and music uploading
I'm all for DRM-less solutions and applaud anyone who runs their own music server with Opuses they've fairly bought, but it's a bit too simple to say anyone should do this lopsided math and use that to compare prices
> I dropped Spotify 3 or 4 years ago now, and I am glad I did.
That's cool! I expect this is a win for the artists you love and I'm glad you're happy with the decision from a user's perspective as well. I play with the idea sometimes as well and also have a small collection from my teenage years still (that I occasionally listen to when without internet), but not sure this is for me overall
Other than their recently added AI DJ, which is basically just a slightly tuned shuffle algorithm, I'm not seeing it.
On the contrary, Spotify lacks a lot of features that were in applications going back decades, i.e. winamp, foobar2000, etc.
It actually blows my mind how limited their feature set actually is. It's like the I-pod Shuffle of music software.
And on another note, I actually had to remove Spotify from most of my devices because streamers started abusing the podcast feature by uploading their youtube content as podcasts. My kids figured this out, and there's no way to disable podcast content through parental controls, or otherwise.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Premium-Family/How-can-I-fi...
That said, I wish Youtube Red would have even a fraction of the discoverability of Spotify, and I'd jump ship immediately.
Then you get to pick a player that works best for you, I use Feishin which you'll find familiar if you're a Spotify user.
I know I'm pulling a Dropbox with "just spin up Navidrome" but if you've got an afternoon to get it going, you can save yourself a lot of cash with price hikes to pay for AI DJs.
"Daily Mix 2" is better with 30 bands, with the top band having 4 songs across 2 albums. Coincidently 62% of songs are also by artists with more than one song in the last, but the most common artist only has 4 songs across 2 albums. 19 unrecognized bands, so that's something.
That's the one. To follow the above, knowledge of a public cloud (take your pick) and installing software are going to be needed.
That web UI on mobile is so good, I don't know why I'd ever want anything else. Who needs an app when you got this right in the browser! I also fell in love with the first song I picked, Sad Robot by Pornophonique (what's that name though lol) and, eh, added it to Spotify
Conversely, though, trying to search for something from my Spotify (like 30 Seconds to Mars) on Navidrome, it predictably comes up with no results.
It is not as simple as "just spinning up". It is starting a new hobby because that money spent does not solve your problem. You first have to deal with getting your hands on the music and discovering what music you even want to be buying. Someone sends you a song name (that they discovered on whatever platform) and the first thing you have to do is see if it's on an ad-supported platform somewhere like in YouTube or if you can find the artist's website to preview it before buying it outright to even listen once (and the age of 30-second previews is also mostly gone)
That's very different from typing it into your subscription service and 95 out of 100 times being able to listen to it without further complications, or being able to click "more like this" on the song you're currently loving and getting music with at least some resemblance, even if 3/4ths that Spotify suggests does not share the quality I was looking for it is still the source of most new songs I add to my favorites list
FWIW, today, at $12 per month, the service is trivially cheap and unsustainable. A coffee costs 5 bucks.
Complaining about price increases when a product is dirt cheap makes no sense. The price most people are willing to pay is much higher IMHO.
Spotify is actually a great value, but they keep making it worse and worse. If they had announced a price increase along side of an announcement of "we're doing this to compensate for the expected loss of income that will occur when we remove podcasts from the UI as we refocus on our core competency of delivering you amazing music and helping you discover amazing new music" we'd be cheering the price increase.
But no, the price will go up, and they'll F-up the UI even further to make it even harder to actually find music in it, and they still won't offer high quality streams.
"Get what you pay for" is fine, but what they're giving me is getting closer and closer to what I'd expect to get for free.
They have to do both: raise the price and deteriorate the service on their march to a sustainable value/price ratio.
The number of people spending five or more dollars on a single cup of coffee can't possibly be so high that it brings the overall average to five dollars, could it?? That would make me sick.
FWIW is not even a particularly expensive place in the US.
I have both an Apple Music family plan as well as Spotify individual for several years, but will probably migrate off Spotify (if only to send a pricing signal to them). My kids have an iPad set up with my apple account, so I'll have to migrate them off to their own account first.
Spotify won't lose their core listeners, but folks like me who were probably already spending too much will realize they've wasted years of sparse usage.
If I find Apple Music isn't working I can always migrate back.
It strikes me as being a relatively simple project, especially given the existence of the web UI, but somehow it's very hard to find. All projects taken down by DMCA?
I don't remember what the tool was called but it was just a static webpage that talked to the Spotify api, dead simple to use if you know how to register a developer token. Looking for it now, ironically I only find things that will download the songs for you... that need ffmpeg etc... Here's the first github link I found in case that's what you're looking for https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader but it's not the one I meant/used. I'd have to check on my desktop later if you're interested
As soon as you have any sort of remix or whatever it will happily download the wrong song.
I'm curious as to why extracting the actual song data is so hard, it is playing on my machine after all.
My family can buy a lot of CD's over a year for $20/month.
From one botnet to another.
I hope your library includes "Head Like A Hole".
It felt like a threat to never let premium lapse, or they'll start selling/tweaking a whole new category of sensitive data.
This announcement follows a trend of squeeze-abuse by every other platform out there. Enough is enough.
I've already established a trend of deleting accounts that have proven to follow an abusive relationship model. The list of sites and sectors is quite large at this point.
I think its time for Spotify. It wasn't a good dog.
They don't own any of the music they resell.
They have no alternative supplier of the same products.
I don't remember Spotify increasing their prices in many years, as a Dutch-ish customer that is, but maybe in the USA they did?