Spotify is about to cost more with a price increase planned for next week

Mustafa Albazy@programming.dev to Technology@beehaw.org – 109 points – Spotify is about to cost more with a price increase planned for next week
9to5mac.com

According to the report, Spotify will raise its standard subscription rate by $1 next week, bringing the monthly cost from $9.99 to $10.99.

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I'm all for bashing corporations, but y'all, this is a $1 increase for the first time in years. Not only is that reasonable, If anything, the rate of inflation is such that this is still effectively cheaper than it has been just a couple years ago.

Does the calculation showing that it's cheaper when accounting for inflation also account for wage stagnation? ~Strawberry

Pretty much inevitable I've been amazed they went this long. $10 just does not seem sustainable.

Im fairly sure they manage because they have so many subscriptions from people that barely use it.

They basically pay out per song played - and server costs are also largely dependent on active users. So they balance out a very active person that might incur 15$ in cost with 5 inactive people that incur not even a dollar.

Then there are people like me who do use Spotify a lot, but I'm mostly listening to the same stuff most of the time. Unless I'm trying to find new things or listen to a podcast, it's most likely all cached on my device.

Well, they pay artists 0.03¢ every 1000 play or something...

I guess I don't really know exactly how their model works, but I'm guessing that is only for independent artists. I bet they paid big bucks to the major record labels.

To record label yes, to artists, no

Yes and thats my point. The $10 a month is likely not sustainable because of their contracts with record labels.

They were the last to do this. Can’t even be mad about it.

the reason i used spotify was their reccomendation system and now it is the worst of any other platform. Even if they make it free I won't use it ever again. I don't want to listen to Unholy after every fucking song.

You mean it repeats a lot of stuff? Thats what I found :( A lot of the liked music lists it generated just seems to be stuff I already liked ages ago

I'm trialing Apple Music, but, only thing is it doesn't let you download all of your liked songs on your phone it seems

What I ended up doing was making a smart playlist on desktop, that contains all of the songs in your library. Then it’s a single button tap to download everything.

Just tested it. Seems to be downloading. Thanks

Thanks, I'll take a look at that

I'm sure it did on my iPhone, I relied on it to play music in the car since I don't have cell coverage for the most part. I'm not sure about the Android app, and my subscription is lapsed now so I can't check.

You seem to be able to do it for each playlist, but not all.. But someone else has a solution it seems

I'm fairly certain there was a setting to just download all songs you've added to your library. Then from the songs section of your library, you can shuffle play all. No need for a playlist.

Same, i used to sub with Spotify, in the last 2 years i've been on Apple music, they even have better collection and playlists of non-english music. Spotify is full of rap music and so hard to discover anything else unless you know what you are searching for.

Pandora has amazing stations that randomize like music. I've found lots of new artists this way and love it.

Wow I completely disagree. Are you actually liking and disliking songs? And AI DJ is fantastic. I just recently learned about it and have been loving it. I use Apple Music some, but it’s for curation, not recommendation.

yes i have like 5000 liked songs now. Been on spotify for 8 years already. It was way more amazing before. I use to play a song then the next song will be something that other people listened but also liked the song I played.

Fast forward now. No matter what I pkay the next song is always a song I have heard before ESPECIALLY unholy by sam smith. I use to love that song but I loathe it now. I am playing a japanese song. Next song is unholy. I mean what the hell. Then I searched why is this happening.

The cause came out to be cache management. Of they have a song cached in your device spotify will play that. Guck the recommendations. So I thought lets remoce the cache. That does not work because their CDN has that songs cached now and I still get that god forsaken song instead of a true song.

I use to pay spotify yearly basis thats how much I used to use it. Now I have 4 months remaining but don't use spotify on my android. Only on desktop.

hm. very strange. I've never seen the same. Wonder if it's an iOS vs Android thing? I can completely understand not using it if that happened though. That sounds terrible.

I have both ios and android, also tried this on desktop and web player

What do you recommend for playing deeper tracks from artists I follow? I don't like to like songs, I either want to like entire artists or just listen. I'm also relying pretty heavily on daily and weekly mixes synced to my phone, for the car, since I don't have cell service around where I liv nowe. Like, at all, and spotty for hundreds of miles.

I used Google Play Music back in the day, and they were great about this, but YT Music took a major step back. Even if it's better now, I'm trying to extricate my life from Google.

Pandora has this concept of modes, where you can choose to listen to Deep Cuts, Crowd Faves, New Releases or Discovery for a given station. The problem is:

  • It still gets redundant within the given mode

  • Managing stations grows to be a pain in the ass

  • I don't want to listen to all new, more loosely related, or popular tracks; and it won't let me set mode preferences for the standard station

  • I really dislike Sirius XM as a company, and don't want to support them.

I used Apple Music for maybe 18 months between Spotify stints, after YT Music. I was trying to switch over to the Apple ecosystem, but am moving back to AOSP Android and Linux. I do like that the depth played from a given artist is a good bit better than Spotify, but I dislike that I can't either follow artists instead of liking songs, and can't easily get a list of liked songs to unlike in the future.

There is not a single app for this. For recommendations I now sometimes use last.fm and for songs I use blackhole (even though i have 4 months of spotify premium remaining). Blackhole luckly has a song download option and I can use it with any of my media player and I can't believe I am saying this but it has a better song recommendation then spotify.

But if you want to spam 1 artist I would say just search on spotify. you will get a playlist like "this is (artist name) ". That has good songs and you can download that playlist too. But What i do is just search it on blackhole and go to town. Download what I like and jam all the way.

I've started using Youtube Premium more since I get music, podcasts, and ad-free Youtube for 5 people. Much better deal. :)

I just wish YouTube Music would get better integration with more services. I really enjoy being able to seamlessly play Spotify on my PS5 while I'm playing games, and listening along with friends on Discord is also way easier on Spotify. If YouTube Music could get similar integrations, I'd probably drop Spotify, since I'm already paying for YouTube Premium as it is.

I subscribed to YouTube Premium a few days ago, after being a long-time Spotify subscriber. It really does seem like a viable alternative.... except for the lack of something like Spotify connect. I can't even control the playback on my computer or TV from my phone. It's like every YouTube Music device is on their own, knowing nothing about the others. With Spotify I could seamlessly continue the playback of the song I was listening to in my car on my phone and later on the smart speaker in my apartment.

I've tried out YouTube Premium a few weeks ago with the intention of replacing Spotify, but it just doesn't do the job. I have a use case where I have one computer playing music, but I want to control it with another computer. I've yet to find another service that does what I need other than Spotify.

Yup, that's another feature I get extensive use out of, too. I'll sometimes queue up some music from my phone to play on my Nest speakers, and switch tracks from my watch. It's just not as seamless of a process on YTM as it is on Spotify, unfortunately. Which is a shame, because Google could really be a serious contender in the music streaming space if they just invested a bit into the product.

Well. Even more of a reason for me to keep not listening to music anymore.

I cannot imagine life without music. I've met people that have told me "I don't really listen to music at all," and I never really understood that frame of mind.