> “So that we can continue to invest in and innovate on our product features and bring users the best experience, we occasionally update our prices,”
I don't care about your innovation. I haven't cared about a single new feature that's come out from Spotify in the last 5-7 years. I find myself listening to Spotify less than ever these days anyway. These prices are too much for me, so after ~10 years of premium Spotify, I'll be cancelling this month because I'm not getting enough value. I'll find other avenues of discovering new music.
> I don't care about your innovation. I haven't cared about a single new feature that's come out from Spotify in the last 5-7 years.
I agree, and I'd personally extend it to say the same about almost every other subscription-supported software product I've rented in the last 10 years.
From my perspective as a user, "innovation" broadly means changing my product to chase some other users who were previously reluctant to buy in when I did. Sometimes I'll get something beneficial myself, but the more likely outcome is that I'll be paying to see my interface cluttered with countless things I was content not having around and the specific UX details or features I did like massaged out through A/B tests focused on these later adopters.
A content subscription model generally makes sense for catalog-streaming products like Spotify, but the software subscription model is often ruinous to user experience for long-term subscribers.
Cancelled years ago. What they call innovation is re-inventing the UI and making it actively worse (which led me quitting). They don't understand that I just want shit to work as efficiently as possible in the background.
They haven’t added anything useful in quite a while. Sometimes I get on there and play some old playlists I enjoyed years ago and haven’t bothered to export, but maybe I should . I’ve been just using the free version. All ever really wanted or needed was a way to make lists, a good search engine, a good “what is this song, and access to community created playlists.
I used to care about Spotify's innovation but they still haven't made anything close to as interesting as the APIs and dev platforms they used to promote and then killed. Also Echonest.
Somehow the base functionality has been stuck in a one-step-forward-one-step-back loop for the past 5 years or so.
It's someone poetic that the last generation saw companies crumble from failing to innovate and now a new generation of companies is heading towards ruin from over innovating.
There are a million way I'd like improve Spotify (mostly implementing better management of the music I already like rather than funneling me towards new music) but I also remember a time not too long ago when hearing a new album was much more expensive and difficult. I used to pay $17 a pop for new CDs regularly, and as a kid in the 90s, that was real money! We might argue that the current equilibrium is unsustainable for and unfair to artists, but for consumers, Spotify/priced streaming is a huge advancement.
If you're young, I really suggest you do the math for how much Spotify will cost you for the rest of your life at current prices, consider that that number is a minimum, and then look at the one time prices for DRM free albums on sites like Bandcamp or 7digital.
Streaming music just does not make sense to me economically. Listener doesn't win, the musician doesn't win... the only winner is the useless gatekeeper.
I dropped Spotify 3 or 4 years ago now, and I am glad I did.
This doesn't really reflect the way a lot of people listen to Spotify.
It's like the radio. Yes, there are some classics you always go back to but there's also a constant stream of new music entering the mix as other music exits it. Not to mention the underavailability of music on a service like Bandcamp. What % of the top Spotify tracks can actually be bought there?
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Spotify. But streaming music ushered in a new way for people to interact with music. I personally think it's worse but clearly plenty of people disagree. And I think we wear rose tinted glasses when looking at the past. I’m old enough that I actually did buy albums back in the day, I have a great memory of running out to get Radiohead’s Kid A then sitting in my room listening to it in its entirety. But if I were to actually take stock of how many of those albums I still listen to today… I can’t even remember a load of them. There were a bunch of misses on there that I’d probably have been better off not buying.
The only way I ever listened to as many artists as I do on Spotify is through borrowing friends' hard drives to copy their music, and my selection was much more limited. Spotify pays the artists something and it lets me know when there are concerts too. I'm not saying it's good, but it is uniformly better I think.
> This doesn't really reflect the way a lot of people listen to Spotify.
I know. My music listening habits have changed since I dropped Spotify. I am not less happy for it. In fact, I value the music that I listen to much more now, since the music I listen to is pretty exclusively a set of music that I thought was good enough to pay money for specifically.
> Not to mention the underavailability of music on a service like Bandcamp. What % of the top Spotify tracks can actually be bought there?
When you add 7digital and Amazon music, I think the % is over 100. I have never not been able to find a DRM free distribution of an album or song that I wanted.
I played 5000 songs through spotify just last year. I don't listen to the same songs over and over. It would cost an insane amount of money, time, and space for me to discover even close to the same amount of music without Spotify (or some other streaming service). I consider Spotify an insane value at most any reasonable price because I really love listening to and finding new music nearly instantly.
This seems to be the point most people are ignoring. I'm on the Spotify family plan, with 4 people using it almost all day. The amount of songs we've discovered, played, etc is absurdly high. We churn through music constantly, so even if I pirated everything, it would be ridiculously time consuming and not worth the effort to curate things the way I have with Spotify. A good batch of the music I listen to isn't even available to pirate; back in the day I had to use youtube-dl to find and download those and sometimes the quality was terrible.
All that being said, I'm not buying the "innovation" bullshit excuse they're throwing at us and I think such a large price hike for the family plan is too high, but it's still at a price point for me that doesn't justify moving to something else. There is a limit though, and at some point I will just move back to the high seas (like I did with movies).
Yeah, me too. I'm constantly going down unheard paths. For me it's Youtube Music, but my life would be considerably less enjoyable if I had to weigh the cost of buying every CD I listen to. I also wouldn't have discovered a ton of music for groups whose albums I have since purchased. Without it I would have never discovered 90% of the artists I now love.
You're devaluing your own labor and perpetual storage costs for eternally maintaining your own library, and making it accessible to each device you want to listen from. With streaming, there's just a single set of credentials to manage, and then I can access anything I want from any device I want. I don't have to store new music anywhere, or pull it down to other devices.
It also ignores multiple aspects of discoverability. If I hear a song I like from an artist, I can spend zero marginal dollars to find out if I like anything else they've made. Or the algorithms can suggest new things similar to other things I like.
I don't use Spotify, but only because I watch enough youtube that I view youtube music as "free" with youtube premium. But if that weren't the case, I'd still consider streaming to be a pretty good deal to avoid the perpetual hassle.
>You're devaluing your own labor and perpetual storage costs for eternally maintaining your own library, and making it accessible to each device you want to listen from. With streaming, there's just a single set of credentials to manage, and then I can access anything I want from any device I want. I don't have to store new music anywhere, or pull it down to other devices.
The value of my labor and storage efforts are worth both the control I have over my collection and my ability to ensure that I will keep what I want for as long as I want to.
>It also ignores multiple aspects of discoverability. If I hear a song I like from an artist, I can spend zero marginal dollars to find out if I like anything else they've made.
I can easily do this with any number of already-existing tools, including Bandcamp.
> With streaming, there's just a single set of credentials to manage
The same credentials I use to buy new music: my password manager master password.
> and making it accessible to each device you want to listen from.
Syncthing directory; set and forget just works on all my devices.
> If I hear a song I like from an artist, I can spend zero marginal dollars to find out if I like anything else they've made.
Streaming services don't vanish when I primarily listen to DRM free music. Sometimes I find new music on Youtube. I usually find new music from word of mouth.
I don't know, I just don't see any of these as limitations that I run into.
For that first one, it should be read as "the only thing to manage is a single set of credentials", not focusing on the numbers of credentials per se. Good examples of things you don't have to manage with streaming: how to setup syncthing on any devices, any storage to hold the media, or any configuration to make the storage available over the internet. Maybe it's not that hard if you know what you're doing, I'm confident I could manage, but it's darn nice having to bother. It certainly takes far more marginal work to manage than streaming, if only because streaming requires no marginal work to manage.
Just doing a bit of back-of-the-envelope math: 40 years of Spotify assuming 4% annual increases would end up being around $13,700. However, if prices increase a little faster, the price goes up fast. 6% annual increases makes it over $22,000 and 10% annual increases would make it nearly $64,000.
Individual tracks tend to cost me $1.29 or less so that's well over 10,000 songs even assuming only 4% annual increases.
Some people might listen to a huge variety, but others certainly use music streaming services to listen to a small set of songs.
It doesn't make sense to assume 4% annual increase, unless you're assuming it will outpace inflation by 4%. Just ignore the inflation and do everything in "todays" dollars, and then you'll get an answer that actually makes sense to you. Right now you've assumed inflation in the calculation, but then got a result that is pretty meaningless, because $13,700 today doesn't mean what it will mean in 40 years.
10'000 songs × 1.29 $/song = 12'900$ to spend on music as a one-time up-front purchase. That's certainly an interesting proposition.
If you stick that in an ETF for 30 years, you expect to get investment×(returns-inflation)^years = 12.9k×(6%-2%.)^30 = 12.9k×(1.04)^30 = 41.8k. (Does someone have a formula for a 90% confidence interval at, say, 30 years?)
It doesn't quite pay for the streaming service but it goes a long way. If you decide to buy music and rent or buy a server instead, there's additional costs to factor in
Edit: wait I don't think I factored in the inflation correctly. It should not be a factor in ETF returns, only in the cost of commercial streaming services right? So the amount should be higher, making commercial streaming services comparatively more attractive? Might need to factor in 30% income tax or something though. Hmm... meh, I'm going to call it close enough (typing this out on mobile is a bit of a pain)
You can build a nice little collection on your phone/laptop that's offline first (offline only), won't track you, doesn't have a horrendous UI (vanilla music on android > spotify).
Also, yes, you're saving hundreds every year.
Maybe you can use that money to buy some merch or tickets to a show. That will give more to the artists you listen to than the pennies spotify cough up.
It's responsible to do the calculation, but for those who have diverse and curious tastes in music, it often won't add up in favor of buying over streaming. I spent a lot more purchasing music before streaming became widely available than I have in the decade+ since.
Of course, if you're open to supplementing an owned archive with ad-supported streaming for discovery, special listens, etc then the math changes again. But you're usually inviting lower quality streams, less control over what you hear, and all the annoyance of interstitial ads.
As someone who has gone through cassette tapes, CD albums, and other fun audio tech over the years (hi Sony Minidisc!), I am very happy to pay Spotify for their collection, new music discoverability, and availability, while also hating their podcast junk, poor user interface, and ignored feature requests. There's no perfect solution for everyone and it's especially true in this space. Even though Spotify has good discovery, I really miss Pandora for its channels that were amazingly tuned.
> happy to pay Spotify for their collection, new music discoverability, and availability, while also hating their podcast junk
Spotify is fast entering that size of product where users who use it most all use different subsets of features. I’m there for the music and just thinking of Spotify as a podcast player feels weird. Yet I have friends who use it for nothing but podcasts.
If you're young, I really suggest you look at the price of CDs in the 90s, calculate for inflation, and _get off my lawn_!
Serious question - Do the DRM free albums represent a broad swath of music? Or is it just a niche "a few artists do this" kind of thing? I suspect you're not comparing apples to apples, but I haven't looked into album prices since I started using streaming services.
A broad genre of music, yes. I have all sorts of styles I've purchased from Bandcamp: Harpsichord suites, Breakcore, Video Game themed music, remixes, I've purchased a few major-label items from Beatport as well, all drm-free.
It's out there if you look, especially if you're looking outside of mainstream, radio-played artists.
Genre seems like a funny way to qualify that. If I want Metallica I'm not going to be happy that it only has Creed just because it fits in the same rough genre. I certainly like searching through genres, but if I'm looking to buy music I'm buying it based upon an artist and album I like, not because it's also harpsichord.
Right, of course. Rightholders make it difficult for some of these catalogs to offer EVERYTHING as a consistent DRM-free product at a reasonable price, so they play games with only offering some of their catalog here, and other parts there. (And some parts, not even at all)
It'd be awfully nice if the all the major labels offered a site where you can exchange a a reasonable amount of money for any track in their catalog, but it seems market forces make that a non-starter.
Between Bandcamp and 7digital I almost never am unable to find what I want. When I am, I have been able to get what I want DRM free from Amazon Music. So, no, it is not a niche thing.
I find myself contemplating this more and more now, especially as my interest in discovering new music has declined significantly as I enter middle age. My biggest concern would be replicating the cloud aspect of streaming music. Is there a good solution for having access to my library on all my devices as well as my sonos system?
I can listen to my DRM free music from anything with speakers by just converting my FLACs and copying files where they need to go.
The only way I can play music in my car is radio or USB storage. There is an aux port that is broken, and bluetooth only works for call audio. I play my music from a USB drive.
That's fine, but going and sourcing DRM free versions of everything I want to listen to, managing the conversions, making it available in a cloud streaming setup of some kind, all of that just sounds like more work than I really want to do
By that calculation Spotify is way cheaper. If I kept up my CD purchase habit at the same rate as I did in the 90s and to accommodate my exploration of music that Spotify et al have enabled I would have many thousands by now.
> rest of your life at current prices, consider that that number is a minimum
I mean, sticking the money that 1500-odd songs would cost me to purchase into an ETF instead is also an option. Sure, Spotify's rate will increase as years go by, maybe more than inflation or maybe less, but there's also a cost to this up front purchase plus the running costs of a server with backups plus the time investment of: server maintenance, music discovery, music purchasing, and music uploading
I'm all for DRM-less solutions and applaud anyone who runs their own music server with Opuses they've fairly bought, but it's a bit too simple to say anyone should do this lopsided math and use that to compare prices
> I dropped Spotify 3 or 4 years ago now, and I am glad I did.
That's cool! I expect this is a win for the artists you love and I'm glad you're happy with the decision from a user's perspective as well. I play with the idea sometimes as well and also have a small collection from my teenage years still (that I occasionally listen to when without internet), but not sure this is for me overall
So this is about one album per month. The accumulation of music might be slow at the beginning, but I could imagine that 3-4 years in you have quite some collection.
For me, it's not the cost of the albums. It's the delivery system. Many years ago, I ripped my albums (300+), made them enabled on a media server. It was unintuitive and required maintenance. It did not pass the wife-acceptance test.
Spotify just works (for us). It's got almost everything we want to listen to. There are no tasks required for me to listen to anything. IMO, this is worth any extra costs.
I don't normally listen to more than two songs from one album (maybe four at most). Amazon sells individual songs at $1.29, so $11.99 would cover nine songs a month, and after three years you'd have 324 songs. That would be far more than all of my current Spotify playlists (including the ones I never listen to).
Interesting to think about. I did the math quickly, assuming you take the ~$12 and invest it instead here's what you end up with
$12/mo invested to return ~6% over 30 years:
End balance: $11,751.08
Total Interest: $7,431.08
Total not spent on Spotify: $4,320.00
Over a 50 year time horizon, the numbers become more fun:
End balance: $43,155.05
Total Interest: $35,955.05
Total not spent on Spotify: $7,200.00
Of course, bunch of assumption, 6% return, past performance doesn't indicate future return etc etc, and I doubt Spotify is going to exist in 30 in its current form, small probably it does, but odds are against that if I had to bet.
Maybe those boomers are onto something about avocado toast /s
Other than their recently added AI DJ, which is basically just a slightly tuned shuffle algorithm, I'm not seeing it.
On the contrary, Spotify lacks a lot of features that were in applications going back decades, i.e. winamp, foobar2000, etc.
It actually blows my mind how limited their feature set actually is. It's like the I-pod Shuffle of music software.
And on another note, I actually had to remove Spotify from most of my devices because streamers started abusing the podcast feature by uploading their youtube content as podcasts. My kids figured this out, and there's no way to disable podcast content through parental controls, or otherwise.
Invest and innovate but not paying the artists more. Their innovation should be covered, how much innovation is there and their investment should pay off.
The royalties they pay to labels are a percentage of revenue, so price increases will scale accordingly. That's actually been the profitability hurdle since the beginning.
I'm pretty sure they're going to charge what they think is the optimal price point for their product, independently from any product blunder they've had in the past.
TIL there's a product called Spotify Duo that I could downgrade to from my family plan. Unfortunately I won't save money, but at least I'll avoid a price hike.
I guess that's why they're saying it won't save them money: by switching, they save compared to the individual subscriptions even if they still pay as much as before due to this increase and so don't save in that sense
Not enough people realise you can spin up a cheap Hetzner instance, install Navidrome and use that as very functional Spotify-like experience. Bring in your music you've got on a USB, Bandcamp and others in one place.
Then you get to pick a player that works best for you, I use Feishin which you'll find familiar if you're a Spotify user.
I know I'm pulling a Dropbox with "just spin up Navidrome" but if you've got an afternoon to get it going, you can save yourself a lot of cash with price hikes to pay for AI DJs.
That’s odd. I was just talking about how Spotify falls into the same cul du sacs that all similarity based recommendations fall in. Like it might show you some decent stuff for a few days if you give it a hard kick by finding something outside of Spotify first, but soon it’s the same three bands and two albums.
That has definitely not been my experience. The Made For Your section shows me tons of artists I've never heard from. I suppose it could be limited if you listen to a very specific niche where they don't have a large dataset on. I love finding new artists and then suddenly diving into a rabbit hole of discovering their older stuff.
Weird. As an anecdote my "Daily Mix 1" has 50 songs, and only two bands I didn't recognize. 62% of the songs are by artists with more than one song in the list. The most songs by an artist? 7 songs over 3 albums. Of the 50 songs, only 4 were put out this decade, only two bands did I not recognize.
"Daily Mix 2" is better with 30 bands, with the top band having 4 songs across 2 albums. Coincidently 62% of songs are also by artists with more than one song in the last, but the most common artist only has 4 songs across 2 albums. 19 unrecognized bands, so that's something.
Are you saying that this will take a few hours for somebody who doesn't know what Hetzner, Navidrome, or Feishin are, or are you implicitly speaking to the subset of HN with experience broad and deep enough to already have the skillset represented by this stack?
That web UI on mobile is so good, I don't know why I'd ever want anything else. Who needs an app when you got this right in the browser! I also fell in love with the first song I picked, Sad Robot by Pornophonique (what's that name though lol) and, eh, added it to Spotify
Conversely, though, trying to search for something from my Spotify (like 30 Seconds to Mars) on Navidrome, it predictably comes up with no results.
It is not as simple as "just spinning up". It is starting a new hobby because that money spent does not solve your problem. You first have to deal with getting your hands on the music and discovering what music you even want to be buying. Someone sends you a song name (that they discovered on whatever platform) and the first thing you have to do is see if it's on an ad-supported platform somewhere like in YouTube or if you can find the artist's website to preview it before buying it outright to even listen once (and the age of 30-second previews is also mostly gone)
That's very different from typing it into your subscription service and 95 out of 100 times being able to listen to it without further complications, or being able to click "more like this" on the song you're currently loving and getting music with at least some resemblance, even if 3/4ths that Spotify suggests does not share the quality I was looking for it is still the source of most new songs I add to my favorites list
I think what triggers most of us to complain is the fact that the price goes up while the value goes down.
Spotify is actually a great value, but they keep making it worse and worse. If they had announced a price increase along side of an announcement of "we're doing this to compensate for the expected loss of income that will occur when we remove podcasts from the UI as we refocus on our core competency of delivering you amazing music and helping you discover amazing new music" we'd be cheering the price increase.
But no, the price will go up, and they'll F-up the UI even further to make it even harder to actually find music in it, and they still won't offer high quality streams.
"Get what you pay for" is fine, but what they're giving me is getting closer and closer to what I'd expect to get for free.
You can migrate off Spotify right now with an app like Songshift - try out other music apps like Apple Music and see they work for your collection/playlists.
I have both an Apple Music family plan as well as Spotify individual for several years, but will probably migrate off Spotify (if only to send a pricing signal to them). My kids have an iPad set up with my apple account, so I'll have to migrate them off to their own account first.
Spotify won't lose their core listeners, but folks like me who were probably already spending too much will realize they've wasted years of sparse usage.
If I find Apple Music isn't working I can always migrate back.
The number of people spending five or more dollars on a single cup of coffee can't possibly be so high that it brings the overall average to five dollars, could it?? That would make me sick.
Spotify is the only subscription I pay for and it's getting harder to justify. I listen to smaller artists that don't get much income from Spotify anyway. Perhaps I should continue buying their music on Bandcamp and get rid of Spotify altogether.
Does there exist a solution for ripping music from Spotify?
It strikes me as being a relatively simple project, especially given the existence of the web UI, but somehow it's very hard to find. All projects taken down by DMCA?
What I do is back up a list of songs. I don't want another Grooveshark event, which went down from one day to the next with all my music gone. (I didn't see it coming because, from my point of view, it was like YouTube: artists can sign up to get paid, or to take down their music piecemeal as people reupload it.) Too bad if Spotify disappears and I need to spend a weekend re-adding everything to another service, but that's the legal and easy and low-storage way to back this up
I don't remember what the tool was called but it was just a static webpage that talked to the Spotify api, dead simple to use if you know how to register a developer token. Looking for it now, ironically I only find things that will download the songs for you... that need ffmpeg etc... Here's the first github link I found in case that's what you're looking for https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader but it's not the one I meant/used. I'd have to check on my desktop later if you're interested
Ive been subscribed to Spotify for a very long time. There was a point, years back, where I learned they used listening data to do emotional profiling of listeners for ad-based manipulation.
It felt like a threat to never let premium lapse, or they'll start selling/tweaking a whole new category of sensitive data.
This announcement follows a trend of squeeze-abuse by every other platform out there. Enough is enough.
I've already established a trend of deleting accounts that have proven to follow an abusive relationship model. The list of sites and sectors is quite large at this point.
I think its time for Spotify. It wasn't a good dog.
I'm not sure it's raising prices anymore... it's more like inflation alignment. I was at a company that didn't realize inflation was really like 100% at this point, and everyone just left. All the developers just... left. No pay raises.
The most recent inflation reading in the US is 3.4%. "Inflation alignment" would put Spotify Premium at $11.36 not $11.99, Duo at $15.50 not $16.99, and Family at $17.57 not $19.99.
I don't care about your innovation. I haven't cared about a single new feature that's come out from Spotify in the last 5-7 years. I find myself listening to Spotify less than ever these days anyway. These prices are too much for me, so after ~10 years of premium Spotify, I'll be cancelling this month because I'm not getting enough value. I'll find other avenues of discovering new music.
Benn Jordan predicted the demise of Spotify last year, and I'm starting to believe he might be right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU