Spotify subscribers: prices are soon going up, says CEO

Spotify is planning to increase subscription costs, possibly within the next year.

That’s according to CEO Daniel Ek while speaking during the company’s third-quarter earnings call this week.

During the Question-and-Answer section, the first question revolved around Spotify’s thoughts on pricing in a market that has seen recent price increases at Apple Music and YouTube Family.

Ek’s response was that a U.S. increase is “one of the things that we would like to do,” while going on to say he “[felt] really good about… …this upcoming year and what that means in pricing.”

That certainly sounds like we should expect a price increase. That may not be surprising. Inflation is driving everything else up, so why not music streaming?

After all, the $9.99 subscription fee was designed to match Blockbuster’s physical video-rental subscriptions. Blockbuster is gone, and music streaming subscription costs are still low.

We’re all for subscription costs increasing – but only on one condition

The artists and songwriters that create the songs get more money. Music streaming has historically offered a mere pittance for per-stream numbers, often fractions of a cent.

That payout is before the platform takes a cut, the rights holder, and any other people involved, like the songwriters, etc. The big problem is that Spotify is beholden to investors to drive revenue.

The only way to pay artists, songwriters, and others more is to increase the subscription fees. That looks like it’s going to happen, and happen soon.

The impending increase in Spotify’s subscription fee is an industry-wide change to increase revenue. Peleton is reducing the hardware costs but offsetting this by increasing the monthly subscription to use its workouts.

Apple isn’t just increasing prices on its subscriptions. The App Store now allows auto-renewing subscriptions to increase in price without confirmation from the subscriber.

If you want to avoid paying for subscriptions after price increases, we’ve got a series of guides to help.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere. His hobbies include photography, animation, and hoarding Reddit gold.