Premium has been $9.99 per month in the US since it launched.
    • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1524·
      1 year ago

      This guy asking the real questions. They’re already fucking over their artists, please give me a reason to start pirating music again.

      Please.

      • slavojrizzek@lemm.eeEnglish
        62·
        1 year ago

        They have an estimated 212 million premium users. That’s an additional 2.5 Billion dollars they’re looking at per year.

        • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
          76·
          1 year ago

          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

        • RedAggroBest@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          1 year ago

          Theyre also in the hole and interest rates went up again to nobody’s surprise. This price hike is not out of the blue and imo pretty reasonable.

        • surrendertogravity@wayfarershaven.euEnglish
          12·
          1 year ago

          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…?

          • metaStatic@kbin.social
            14·
            1 year ago

            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.

      • generalEdo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        71·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • GONADS125@lemmy.worldEnglish
        71·
        1 year ago

        I’ve been using a cracked spotify android APK with no ads and unlimited skips for years now.

      • arglebargle@lemm.eeEnglish
        31·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Spazsquatch@lemmy.studioEnglish
      324·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Bleeping Lobster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • dinckel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      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

  • Dankry@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6310·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Gravitywell@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    441·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • Madbrad200@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • HeyJoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Gravitywell@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • HeyJoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Not personally, but I have seen it. I just have so much stuff I never found the need to have other people to connect with for stuff I am missing so it didn’t seem worth it. The only stuff I find I want is stuff that’s new release and get it within a few weeks when I have time.

          I use navidrome and it uses the subsonic API so I’m guessing funkwhale should still work with it but I never looked into it. I host for myself really, my wife, father, and a few friends will use it from sparingly.

  • JIMMERZ@lemm.eeEnglish
    32·
    1 year ago

    And I’m sure that’s to better compensate the artists, right?… right?

  • trainsaresexy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    321·
    1 year ago

    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/ Edit: Wrong facts by me here as others pointed out. Spotify is in the hole a few hundred million. Maybe rise is justified? Idk. votes 30/1 at time of edit in case you’re curious.

    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.

    • daveycee@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      1 year ago

      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

      • Gerbler@lemmy.mlEnglish
        103·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • asparagus9001@lemmy.worldEnglish
          51·
          1 year ago

          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.

          One case that comes to mind is a guy with a small construction company who had funneled over a half a million dollars to his personal house, calling it business expenses. I took this to my boss - who signed a code of professional ethics and has a professional license on the line - and their reply was “he’s defrauding the government out of about a quarter million dollars but we’re not the accounting police and that’s why we don’t sign his tax returns.”

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • SuperSpruce@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      The link you provided says that Spotify actually lost ~$170 million. $3 billion is the revenue.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4623·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Caesium@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      1 year ago

      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!

    • Carter@feddit.ukEnglish
      2116·
      1 year ago

      Eh I find music streaming services to be massively overpriced. Second hand CDs are dirt cheap and offer better quality than Spotify does.

    • whatsarefoogee@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3229·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Squirrel@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        547·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I really wonder about the age of the posters. I remember when the norm for music was $1 a song, which very quickly became $1.29. Spotify is so incredibly dirt cheap compared to that. But if people didn’t experience that heyday of $1 per song, they’re looking at this from a completely different perspective.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        243·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • gengar@lemmy.mlEnglish
          44·
          1 year ago

          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.

  • soulifix@lemmy.worldEnglish
    277·
    1 year ago

    Everyone’s ‘okay’ with it until it’s $5 more. Then another $5. Then another $5.

    This is what’s happening with all of these streaming services. They’re all doing the gradual boiling water trick. They know if they turned the dial all the way to hot to make the water boiling, metaphorically speaking, that nobody in their right mind would want to jump in. But if they just turn the dial slowly, let the temperature build up by hiking these prices bit by bit, it wouldn’t cause that much of a stir and people will be complacent with it.

      • Colitas92@infosec.pubEnglish
        71·
        1 year ago

        And when someone is short on money or just too tired of keeping track of which services having what media and switching chairs all the time ? remember there is always the way of Jack Sparrow, and go sailing to the 7 seas. ARRRGH!

          • ZodiacSF1969@lemmy.worldEnglish
            42·
            1 year ago

            I agree with you, but this site is full of people who hate the idea of companies having to make money and just steal shit all the time. It’s a lame attitude to have I think, they believe they are entitled to others work because they don’t like the distribution model.

            • Acid@startrek.websiteEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              It’s the quality of service that they offer, I don’t mind paying £60-70 a month for all my tv/movies but when the services don’t even work well, have terrible experiences and constant caveats to using them it’s just not worth it. Go spend the money on a self-hosted solution for a better experience and be done with it. It’s not exactly cheaper either it’s just less of a headache.

          • Colitas92@infosec.pubEnglish
            31·
            1 year ago

            If i was in a righteous mood, i would say :

            1 - Paying for consuming media older than 30 years is a perversion of the intellectual property idea, of supporting artists for a short window of time by artificial restriction of the right to culture and knowledge, and then to release the works to the public domain for the enjoyment of society. That the capitalists extended said window to be the death of the autour + 70 years, and then invented the idea of owning the art-invention-etc made by worker-artists is the real robbery of the situation. The current phase of studios trying to leverage AI tools (and AI tools that are essentially industrial scale pirates AND plagiarists) to make even more exploitation of artists is not surprising to me.
            I forgot to add: the original north american idea was 14 years + 14 years, if the artist made a request for extension to get the 2nd period. Imagine if we had 14 years copyright now, everything made 14 years ago would be released and available to watch or even to make derivative works…

            2 - I am not north american, i am third worlder (Brazil). So, since i have the money and time to spend, i prefer to spend money on domestic artists and domestic works to benefit my nation, which is a lot poorer than western artists and populations, and with much less famous cultural works. Instead of giving (more) money to Disney, i can go on music shows or theater here, or sign up one of the local streamers, and pirate the foreigner’s content i want. Brazilian artists, that really need the money and attention, i try to pay whenever possible (if it is even available). For films made by disney (and equivalents) … they will make enough money from cinema release here and from their foreign rich country, no need to give then a monthly transfer on top. The book Open Veins of Latin America is something of a reference in this type of reasoning.

          • Acid@startrek.websiteEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Some of us have very good reasons for pirating, I was paying for every service under the sun in the UK last year and I dropped them all simply because the moment I went on holiday practically none of them worked. At that point, I realised that they just weren’t worth it and I could build something out and self-host a far better service.

            So I spent something like 2 grand doing that knowing at least I’ll never have that issue again, Piracy is always a service issue first and foremost and most of these services are crap. Netflix still at least has a reasonable interface and a good experience across every device but Prime video is atrocious, P+ is likewise terrible and don’t ever get me started on NowTV.

      • Techmaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        1 year ago

        It’s what the software industry calls dumping. Microsoft got in trouble for doing it with IE. They give something away for free or cheaper than the competition, basically subsidizing the cost with another lucrative division of the business. We make a bunch of money selling Windows, so we can afford to give away IE for free. And eventually we’ll put the competition out of business, then we can increase the price once we no longer have any competition.

  • soot_guy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    1 year ago

    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

    • ThrowThrowThrewaway7@lemm.eeEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      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…

      • hayes_@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • zumi@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Bongles@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • soot_guy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • zumi@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.

  • ZeroDrek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    202·
    1 year ago

    I was worried for a second until I read the article. $1 more/ is not a huge price increase and I’m ok with it considering they haven’t increased the price as long as I’ve been subscribed and I’ve been subscribed for at least a decade. Also, I use Spotify daily…for hours at a time.