Spotify claims the higher fees will help "benefit artists."

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.

  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    71·
    12 hours ago

    Streaming two days for about 2-3h in Symfonium:

    And Spotify is with streaming some podcasts with video. For the whole month

    • LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Presumably Symfonium is streaming lossless files whereas Spotify probably isn’t. That and Spotify is probably caching a lot more.

    • bootstrap@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      12 hours ago

      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?

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        3·
        10 hours ago

        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 cellular

        I 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.