Spotify officially hikes its Premium prices – here’s how it compares now
A untimely Spotify price bump has just landed for most
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If you’re aSpotify Premiumsubscriber in the US, UK and Australia, get ready to start paying more for the privilege: the music streaming service has just raised its individual plan prices.
The price hike was detailed on theSpotify blog, where it was also announced that markets worldwide would be affected. It further stated that “existing subscribers in these markets will receive an email explaining what this means for their account.”
We saw a bunch of Spotify price hikesback in 2021, but the only plan that saw a price increase in the US was the Family plan – it went from $14.99 to $15.99. Now it’s individual subscribers who are going to be paying more.
The move isn’t completely unexpected: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek hinted that price riseswere on the wayback in April of this year. Here are the details of the new subscription costs in the US, and how they compare to other services:
The cost of streaming
The music streaming services are clearly struggling to make the financial sums add up, while company executives havegone on recordas saying that these platforms can potentially push their prices higher without losing too many subscribers.
Last yearApplebumped up the monthly costof both Apple Music and Apple TV Plus, which the company said was due to “an increase in licensing costs”. Apple also said that artists would be better compensated for their music because of the price increases.
Back in February,AmazonMusicincreased the costof its own subscriptions, and thenTidal followed suitearlier this month. Taking those trends into account, it’s really no surprise that Spotify is makiing these changes.
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The shift we’ve seen from physical to digital media, and then to a monthly subscription streaming model, have obviously upended the music industry over the last couple of decades – and the new platforms are still working out what a fair price for instant access to tens of millions of songs should be.
Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you’ll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.
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