What improvement in service does the hike reflect?
This guy asking the real questions. They’re already fucking over their artists, please give me a reason to start pirating music again.
Please.
They have an estimated 212 million premium users. That’s an additional 2.5 Billion dollars they’re looking at per year.
How else will they grow insatiably like the rest of these capitalist pigs??? They have to predict everything, do everything, be in everything, become your fucking God
Shit ain’t cheap
I’ve found more new artists in a few weeks with Nicotine+ than years of the Spotify algorithm.
I’m curious, how are you discovering new music this way? my understanding of soulseek and nicotine+ is that they’re great for finding music by artists you already know, but idk how they would work for discovery…?
You look for stuff you already know and then browse the users library, if they have stuff you already like then anything you don’t recognize is probably also to your taste, especially if they’re sharing a smaller collection.
Perhaps I’m lucky that there’s not much I don’t like because it’s a similar strategy I used to use for traditional media, buy something I like and get something out of the bargain bin I’ve never heard of and 9/10 it was pure gold.
The quality is pretty good and dl speeds are superb if you get it from spotify. Only need a free account and plenty of good apps to assist in getting playlists, podcasts and full discographies.
I’ve been using a cracked spotify android APK with no ads and unlimited skips for years now.
I never paid for Spotify and only rarely used it on the desktop if I was interested in hearing something someone mentioned or to look up something.
But I also gave up the buying music thing too, expect for very rarely. There is so much freely traded music, and tons of live music, and icecast and other radio stations are still a thing. There is more than I could listen to already.
Podcasts have replaced the vast majority listening time in the car.
Then at home while working it is SOMA FM radio. I do give them money I guess, but its all donation.
$10 in 2011 would be $13.56 today.
Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2011?amount=10
Per the article, the service hasn’t changed in price in 12 years, while the platform has certainly received a decent number of updates, new features, new artists, etc.
If it isn’t worth $11/month to you, don’t pay it? But it doesn’t seem right to insinuate that they’re doing something outrageous by raising prices once in 12 years?
If Costco can sell glizzies for a buck fifty a pop I don’t wanna hear it
Fwiw Costcos main profit is from membership sales…which they’ve been cracking down hard on right now!
Wait - what are they doing?
Making sure you have a membership before you can buy things. Shocking…
Haven’t they always done that?
They’ve been more strict about it recently, especially with people that share memberships and self checkout stations.
They sell those at a loss to bring in customers to buy other higher margin items. What else is Spotify selling?
Ads on podcasts, even for premium members
Costco doesn’t have high margins on any of their items. They have like a max of 15% markup. They make their money off the membership.
Ads on podcasts, even for premium members
To be fair (and understand I hate corporations and am speaking through clenched teeth), Costco loses money on those glizzies. They make the majority of their money on their memberships, and have made the bet that they gain more customers than they lose money on cheap hotdogs.
“If you raise the price of the hotdog i will fucking kill you”
Streaming services have an enormous amount of fixed costs. It might cost them several billion dollars/year to operate the necessary infrastructure even with zero customers, but the marginal cost to serve a customer might be on the order of $2/month on that $10/month subscription.
It’s why streaming and digital storefronts are such a sink/swim industry. Either a company gets over user number+sales threshold to override their fixed costs, upon which they become profitable and all further growth makes them exceedingly profitable. Or the company fails to do so or barely does so, and makes somewhere between giant losses to minimal profits.
From a quick search, Spotify’s user count should have grown somewhere in the neighborhood of ten times over since 2015.
This is not a cost increase that is mandated or justified by inflation. It never is. It’s a cost increase from a very, very, very simple fact: companies want profit, and Spotify’s leadership has concluded that they will gain more profit by increasing prices than they will by not doing so.
To quote my insurance company when I asked why my rates went up, “well, everything is costs more. Other places are charging more too.”
This seems like a similar situation.
Enormous fixed cost, yes. Billion not so much. The size of their entire catalog isn’t even going to be that significant. Music is tiny even the flac stuff just isn’t that big. The streams are so small they probably don’t even need peering agreements with most services. I’d be surprised if they’re burning more than 10 million a month in infrastructure. Now Netflix, YouTube, live video streaming services, totally different story. Those poor bastards end up maintaining servers inside other people’s networks.
Fixed costs isn’t the cost of having a single server with the storage. I’m thinking everything they need to have built up with the intent of having between N1 and N2 MAU, in order to make that viable.
It’s the cost of developing the software stack, of hiring the lawyers and accountants that (1) acquire the music rights and (2) handle the music payouts, it’s the lawyers that handle the different legal requirements across every major global economy, it’s the servers located in all of those countries with as many sub-national locations as necessary, it’s the IT staff that manage that server uptime, it’s the software developers that maintain that system and improve upon it so rivals don’t jump too far ahead… Etc.
Building a streaming platform that expects to have multiple billions of dollars in revenue across hundreds of millions of users is going to have enormous fixed costs that cannot be trivially scaled down if user counts are lower. If they plan around a much lower user count they can scale it down at that planning phase, but not after the fact (at least not easily).
Here’s a good estimate on their hosting, streaming and licensing costs
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/oct/08/spotify-internet
They tack it down to about 6 million a month that is of course excluding lawyers and other salaries.
Interesting. That’s dated October of 2009 and says Spotify had 5m users. Looks like they have ~200m users today. At a linear scaling it’d be twenty times larger, or £120m=$154m per month. That’s $1.85b/year.
In reality it wouldn’t scale linearly, but it also accounts for zero salaries, which was the major component of my comment.
Look I appreciate the downvotes and all, but didn’t you just say that fixed costs don’t go up and down with users?
If you’re so enthusiastic about paying a corporation making 25 billion a year even more owing to inflation why aren’t you asking about the corresponding minimum wage hike for the people they get that 25 billion from?
Because that’s not what the article is about? Why is this hard for people to grasp? Not every comment is about everything in the world.
This is the same group of people who will rampantly upvote graphs showing how wages haven’t followed inflation, but when it’s the other side of the coin can’t seem to grasp it.
Yep, there’s a large contingent who simultaneously believe that corporations shouldn’t be allowed to exist and also that they should be provided everything in life for free, as compensation for existing.
I’m not saying that nothing should be done to rein in corporate profits, as those are also out of control, but economic forces cut both ways and it feels disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
Probably the same assholes that think Netflix no longer allowing password sharing is an overreach.
At the current rate it’s not cost effective to fly the helicopter between the yacht and the mainland more than twice daily. This is only the first step, but the goal is non-stop service by 2027.
They’ll find another means to serve ads to Premium customers. I pay for it because it’s very convenient access to lots of music, and the rights holders are compensated (albeit not as much as I’d like).
I’m already pissed off that they blatantly insert ads in the middle of sentences in podcasts (if you check the premium wording, it says “ad free music”). Might consider cancelling if they hike the price.
Lol, when is uncompressed coming?
They are releasing that under a more expensive subscription option. Wish I was joking
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/20/22746337/spotify-hifi-lossless-new-premium-tier-supremium
Apple offers lossless audio standard
They won’t stop till they push even Android users to AM.
Tidal has been doing that for a while. The hi-fi option is/was double the price of the standard.
It’s only been 3 years since they announced it, give them a little time jeez.
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http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ must be propaganda by Big Audio to sell more hifi equipment because I can’t tell a damn difference between lossy and lossless. I’m ashamed.
I can, but I do get it. Not everyone has the ears. But when you can hear it, it’s a curse lol
Some of it has to do with the audio equipment too.
Like I can hear the difference on my high quality headphones when connected to a decent USB audio interface device or my Denon home theater system with Technic speakers. Barely, while a difference is there. But can’t tell on my gaming headset or PC speakers.
And my ears are messed up. Had two sets of ear tubes when I was a kid and have some scar tissue on my eardrums which resonates with odd frequencies sometimes.
I’d be curious to hear other people’s experience with this test. Personally, the two quality levels are completely indistinguishable for me. And that was sitting in a quiet room, using decent quality wired headphones, and really concentrating.
At least I know there will be no need for me to upgrade my subscription if Spotify ever does start offering uncompressed.
So artists get more money right?
…right?
Artists now get even less money, ironically. They’re strongly pushing towards this system where the algos will push your songs to users, resulting in some amount of more listens, except the downside is that you cut your own pay. If you’re signed on a label, you get even less than nothing now
Spotify can go suck a lemon. I dumped them when they paid that right wing piece of crap Joe Rogan $200mil to continue to radicalize simpletons.
Did the exact same thing and switched to Apple Music. Unfortunately for some unknown reason, AM isn’t nearly as good in my experience. I have songs that were working and then come up as unavailable later. The recommendations are terrible like Apple is trying to push what they want me to hear not what I am interested in. Using it on multiple devices is painful as I sometimes try to play it on my win10 machine, my Mac, and my iPhone and it can’t figure out that while I am I lay playing it in one location at a time it thinks I am trying to play more than one simultaneously. Maybe I’ll try Amazon music next. I do wonder if Tidal is any good.
Now might be a great time to join the Fediverse alternative FunkWhale. I’ve already built up a collection of nearly 10,000 songs on mine, almost all of which i downloaded from deezer.
Can you ELI5 Deezer abd FunkWhale, and how they replace what Spotify is offering?
Deezer is a streaming service like Spotify. Unlike Spotify, you can download directly from Deezer using piracy tools such as Deezloader. The user then presumably uploaded these to FunkWhale, so as to own their own local collection.
Holy shit, deezer still exists?
Yeah it’s where most pirated FLAC content comes from these days
Yeah, I just unsubscribed 2 months ago because they removed their regional pricing which caused rates to increase 4-6x in some countries.
You can get ARL’s for free pretty easily, no need to pay either company: https://rentry.org/firehawk52
I am still using private bitorrent sites for my music. Use Navidrome which seems to be the best alternative to the abandoned subsonic app and been collecting since 2005. I am somewhere near 300k in songs at this point. I tried Spotify once when I got 6 months free and found I was just to used to my way of discovering new music that I kind of hated how Spotify tried to do it.
I keep having hope that someone continues to improve the few apps we have left dedicated to personal music libraries otherwise one day I may have to switch.
Have you given funkwhale a try? I used to host subsonic years ago but i dropped it at some point, started my collection back up after i found out about funkwhale, It also has support for subsonic clients although i havent personally tried that myself yet.
Honestly, it’s totally fair imo.
People who hadn’t experience before-Spotify times can’t really appreciate the value. I’d love all information to be free and all but just the indexing and data hosting service would be worth 11$/mo. People being a bit silly here ngl. If you can’t afford 11$ for this service then honestly you either don’t need it or you need re-evaluate your budgeting.Ah yes, poor people and people living on minimum wage don’t need music. And if they really needed it, they would just skip a meal.
Indexing and data hosting is worth $11 per month? Music uses very little space and bandwidth. Listening to 3 hours every day for a month ends up being around 10gb of bandwidth. If they were using expensive on-demand AWS bandwidth, that would cost them 50 cents. They aren’t, they have edge caches all over and almost certainly pay less than 10 cents.
Don’t… need… music…? There are plenty of free streaming options, or even the damn radio. Premium Spotify is far from the only option.
Being able to listen to anything you want whenever you please is 100% a luxury – and one that wasn’t available until pretty recently.
As if piracy, free youtube etc. doesn’t exist. If you can’t afford 11$/mo and can’t afford to invest time to get around it then you really have bigger problems to complain about like lack of social security and wealth distribution. Complaining about this just appears like a comical waste of energy tbh.
Not everyone wants to listen to music illegally? And not everyone has unlimited data or can afford it for youtube/etc. Wealth distribution and a lack of social security are huge problems but like, bro it’s not a good look to criticize working class folks for (rightfully) complaining about yet another round of inflation.
Arr me hearties, thar be more ways than one to score yonder plunder.
The entitlement is strong
anyone ever heard of x-manager?
I use it.
yeah the price increase isn’t too awful for me. I use Spotify all the time so premium is totally worth it for me. and I know rates aren’t that high but I’m happy to know I’m actually paying the people I listen to somewhat!
Eh I find music streaming services to be massively overpriced. Second hand CDs are dirt cheap and offer better quality than Spotify does.
Sounds like you don’t need it!
There is a weak defence to be made that they have never raised prices. In the context of our current situation this is just more profiteering.
Salesforce, up 24% https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2022/05/31/q1-fy23-results-update/
Spotify up 14%, 2.8 billion in profits https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-04-25/spotify-reports-first-quarter-2023-earnings/
Apple, 100 billion in Q2 2023
The list goes on and on. All of these companies have laid off staff. Spotify laid off 200.
I’ve never liked the subscription pricing model and have avoided all of these services. I can’t afford hundreds of dollars a year on things that aren’t staple items.
Not to shill for Spotify, but the very link you sent shows they made 3 billion in REVENUE, not profit. They actually lost 180 million dollars.
My guess - these price rises are because the VC tap is getting turned off
Hollywood accounting. None of them make a “profit” because they’re taxed on profits. Now it’s possible that they really are losing 180 million (a lot of startups like uber coast on investors with the assumption they’ll turn a profit at some point) but I wouldn’t take their word at face value.
Spotify is a publicly traded company. Their financial reports are required to be audited every single year. They really are losing money. There’s no way around that.
The studios, most of which are also publicly traded, report billions of dollars in profit every year. Hollywood accounting is about using shell companies to move money around (back to the main studio) while ensuring that nobody ever gets paid out on the profits of the movie by the LLC they set up to produce the movie.
I finally got out of accounting. It’s really hard to commit fraud at any scale when you’re a publicly traded and audited company. People are gonna call bullshit on that but I’m serious. I would be in favor of requiring every “small business” to be audited on a regular basis because I don’t know the exact percentage but I would testify in front of Congress right now that easily over 50% of all the small business clients I ever had were committing fraud somewhere.
Spotify and Amazon Prime are my only two services. Piracy covers movies and TV.
Spent over 20-years managing my digital music library, always painful. It’s a relief to drop all that and just search what I want, receive tunes.
Damned convenient to queue up a playlist when I’m at camp screwing around, singing kaya yoke with my gf, working around the house, all that. Plus, I can download all my songs to a local device about as fast as I can click. I’m often in the boondocks with no internet, but I always have music.
Meanwhile, ad-free Spotify through X-Manager remains free.
Spicetify on desktop can also block ads.
Here’s another alternative: YouTube Music with adblock
through X-Manager?
I dont get it, how does it work? Am I supposed to install spotify AND this other app?No, you don’t install the official app. You install x-manager, then install a patched version of Spotify through the x-manager app.
Ok, i’ll try it thanks!
Nice! Thanks for the heads up. ATT just told me my paperless discount is getting halved, so this is the perfect opportunity to even out my costs. Everyone of these tech companies is making a money grab this summer and I’m fed up
Prices on so many of these mega tech companies (DoorDash, UBER, etc.) have been kept artificially low for years by basically unlimited amount of venture capital.
They’re following the Walmart model- keep prices stupid low to establish dominance and drive out any competitor. Once there’s nobody left to compete you can jack up the prices to -hopefully- recoup your investment.
Great for the consumers at first… until their bills come due. Then we get massively screwed over. A tale as old as time…
I’m still salty from when this happened to Google photos
I wouldn’t group doordash in with the others.
They barely provide a service; leach off of restaurants, forcing them to raise their prices to maintain razor thin margins; and lobby for shitty legislation to not pay or give people benefits.
I agree with the general point, though.
That txt from ATT about the paperless discount was so poorly worded. Took me forever to realize I can still get the $10 discount if I switch the autopay to a debit card. It’s only the credit card autopay/paperless that is getting reduced to $5.
Interesting, t mobile is removing their 5 dollar autopay discount unless you use a debit card too. I wonder what the deal with that is.
The email I just got from them said to expect a rate increase for my august billing cycle of 2.50 a line. So, even switching to a bank account from a credit card won’t help. They were just trying to make me more comfortable while bending me over.
Weird. My txt said the following:
“Hi, it’s AT&T. As early as Oct. 2nd, the AutoPay and Paperless discount for customers paying by credit card will decrease from $10 to $5 per line. If you prefer to use your credit card, no action is required to receive a $5 discount.”
Sounds like your offer is different. One quick tip if you are looking for other ways to save on AT&T. If you sign up for AARP you can get an additional $10 off of the top plan in addition to the paperless discount on AT&T.
What do they mean first? Family plans went up from $15 to $16 in May 2021.
And yet they still don’t offer high quality audio.
And I’m sure that’s to better compensate the artists, right?… right?
Tidal increased their prices recently too, by the same amount. And for that I’m getting the high-quality audio Spotify keeps on promising for over
a yearTWO YEARS now.Don’t get me wrong, Tidal still has its own problems but I don’t get why people still choose to have Spotify over one of its competitors.
My guess is most are like me, I use Bluetooth headphones and are on the go if I listen to anything. So higher quality doesn’t really matter.
I mean that largely depends on your headphones and whether or not they (and your playback device) support decent Bluetooth codecs
I actually hate Spotify as a company and find their app/service to be frustrating to use, thanks to them almost constantly dicking around with things.
But… I still use them. Why? Because unfortunately with my needs and preferences, it’s the only music streaming app on Android that doesn’t have a completely shitty experience when either using it with AndroidAuto, or when casting music to my home stereo receiver. Their app offers the best experience and features against all the other apps I’ve tried (and I’ve tried them all).
Tidal’s AndroidAuto experience is so minimal it’s not funny. No “like” button, no “add to library” button, no “dislike” button, so that killed them for me.
Apple Music on Android is quite buggy when trying to cast to my home stereo. And their AndroidAuto experience is also buggy and lacking too many features I want.
Deezer is pretty much the same as Apple Music from my experiences.
Amazon Music is just “Bleh!” overall.
Qobuz was really lacking in features I want the last time I tried it.
YouTube Music drives me nuts with the way it integrates with regular YouTube.
So I’m stuck with Spotify. And I don’t like it. But it’s the least problematic for me when compared to the alternatives.
If I used an iPhone (but I prefer Android), I’d switch to Apple Music in a heartbeat because on iOS, Apple Music actually works quite well.
My one hope, at the moment, is the forthcoming music streaming service from Tiktok. I have no idea how good/bad it will be, but I’m eager to try it when it hits the US, just because I’m praying it will finally enable me to kick Spotify to the curb.
/rant
Agreed. I love Spotify, but it ain’t for the UI. What a mess.
I used my YouTube username account for YouTube videos and my email account for YTM. It’s works perfectly.
I know what you’re talking about, using a single account for both ruins the already bad preference tuning. You would think they would address this problem with a setting by now.
As someone who tried to use Tidal for nearly a year because it paid better rates, it’s literally just 2 things: Artist Discovery and Algorithm Degradation towards a mass consumer mean.
Spotify actually feeds me tons of great indie artists I’ve never heard before. Tidal was a constant struggle to purge mass produced giant record label pop from constantly infiltrating every single station and it almost never gave me some little artist who maybe has 5k listens total. I get those literally every single day from Spotify though.
Yeah, this has been my experience as well. Discovery on Spotify is really good. I’ll listen to something new and be like “how haven’t I heard of these guys!” And then I check their artist page and yeah it’s like a few thousand listens total.
Spotify and YouTube Music are the only streaming services I have found that make it easy to integrate songs that aren’t on streaming into your collection, and I don’t like YouTube Music so Spotify it is.
It’s been over two years now. It was announced at the start of 2021 😅
320kbps is basically indistinguishable from lossless, even with insanely good headphones/amplifier/DAC/speakers.
LOL, audiophiles always want the best, far past the point of diminishing returns. Kinda like PC builders. (I’ve been guilty of the later.)
You could use something like Qobuz or Deezer that actually has lossless audio.
I stream all my own music for free with my Plex server.
Sounds like they need more money to purchase more podcasts to put behind their walled garden
