Show HN: Spotify International Pricing Index | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Spotify International Pricing Index

mts.io

29 pointsmts_15 comments

Why do internet services always seem to be more expensive in the UK? Surely they should be able to be provided at approximately the same cost as the US.

For example, Steam games are consistently well above the US price + 20% for VAT.

Netflix is £5.99 a month, which is over ten USD.

I'm sure there are many more examples.

There can be lots of reasons, not all of them just "that's what the market will bear".

There is a genuine cost of doing business in the UK, for instance, in that you can't fire staff on a whim, have to pay national insurance for them and so on.

For Netflix (and Spotify, I'd imagine) rights issues can also be expected to come into play: rights holders may charge more for UK clearance than they would US.

Steam I'm not sure about - they don't seem to have a UK operation. Perhaps they join Adobe in the "squeeze them till they hurt" camp.

Spotify Philippines is super cheap. But I didn't realized how cheap it really is until I saw the site. I think they just launched last month with a really low price. Spotify Premium here in PH only costs 129 pesos[1]. How cheap is it?

Today, $1 = P44.28 so P129 is just $2.91.

Of course it was adjusted with the market value here in PH. It was really a good deal. They also partnered with the telcos here to boost their presence. And I think, they don't have much competition here in PH.

[1] http://www.rappler.com/technology/news/55045-spotify-philipp...

Nice.

It might be better for the upper map to select a colour scale that has a zero point on it - this would represent countries that have the same price as the dollar.

A diverging colour scale would make it easier to distinguish which countries are cheaper and which are more expensive. For example:

http://colorbrewer2.org/?type=diverging&scheme=BrBG&n=7

Great idea!

I actually had no clue how to do the color scale, and I ended up doing it with 5 different colors based on quantile. Did a small write up with my thoughts about it: http://mts.io/2014/05/07/spotify-pricing-index/

Will revisit the map with these color changes.

I would find it more intuitive if the most expensive countries had the light green rather than dark green i.e. reverse the colour scale

It'll never cease to amaze me that all these countries, including many underdeveloped countries, get to have great internet services such as Spotify, but somehow Canada is never one of those.

There's something seriously wrong with this country...

most probably the licensing deal didn't go through

That's why I'm saying this. Licensing deals go through in pretty much every country except Canada. There's an issue...

It's clearly priced according to the cost of living/wage level.

Except HongKong, US, Singapore and Australia. Anyone knows why those are outliers?

Do different areas have the same music library available though?

Nope, the author explains that in a blog post here: http://mts.io/2014/05/07/spotify-pricing-index/

so has anyone managed to sign up to Spotify Philippines?

I signed up for Spotify Malaysia when I lived there and continue to pay the lower subscription fee now that I am living in Singapore. The only differences are a minor difference in selection and the fact that, for some reason, all my iPhone push notifications from the Spotify app are in Bahasa Malay (Malaysia's primary language)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com