What improvement in service does the hike reflect?
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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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
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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.
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$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!
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They sell those at a loss to bring in customers to buy other higher margin items. What else is Spotify selling?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's only been 3 years since they announced it, give them a little time jeez.
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Spotify can go suck a lemon. I dumped them when they paid that right wing piece of crap Joe Rogan $200mil to continue to radicalize simpletons.
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Now might be a great time to join the Fediverse alternative FunkWhale. I've already built up a collection of nearly 10,000 songs on mine, almost all of which i downloaded from deezer.
Can you ELI5 Deezer abd FunkWhale, and how they replace what Spotify is offering?
Deezer is a streaming service like Spotify. Unlike Spotify, you can download directly from Deezer using piracy tools such as Deezloader. The user then presumably uploaded these to FunkWhale, so as to own their own local collection.
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There is a weak defence to be made that they have never raised prices. In the context of our current situation this is just more profiteering.
Salesforce, up 24% https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2022/05/31/q1-fy23-results-update/
Spotify up 14%, 2.8 billion in profits https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-04-25/spotify-reports-first-quarter-2023-earnings/ Edit: Wrong facts by me here as others pointed out. Spotify is in the hole a few hundred million. Maybe rise is justified? Idk. votes 30/1 at time of edit in case you're curious.
Apple, 100 billion in Q2 2023
The list goes on and on. All of these companies have laid off staff. Spotify laid off 200.
I've never liked the subscription pricing model and have avoided all of these services. I can't afford hundreds of dollars a year on things that aren't staple items.
Not to shill for Spotify, but the very link you sent shows they made 3 billion in REVENUE, not profit. They actually lost 180 million dollars.
My guess - these price rises are because the VC tap is getting turned off
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Honestly, it's totally fair imo.
People who hadn't experience before-Spotify times can't really appreciate the value. I'd love all information to be free and all but just the indexing and data hosting service would be worth 11$/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.
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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.
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…
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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.
And yet they still don’t offer high quality audio.
What do they mean first? Family plans went up from $15 to $16 in May 2021.
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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 year~~ TWO 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.
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.
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I stream all my own music for free with my Plex server.
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