Spotify is officially raising its Premium subscription rates in the US come July, following reports of the move in April. The platform is increasing its Individual plan from $11 to $12 monthly and its Duo plan from $15 to $17 monthly — the same jump as last year’s $1 and $2 price hikes, respectively. However, its Family plan is going up by a whopping $3, increasing from $17 to $20 monthly. The only subscribers getting a break are students, who will continue to pay $6 monthly.
Spotify announced the price hikes less than a year after its previous one last July. Before that, Spotify hadn’t raised its fees since launching a decade and a half ago. I guess it was too optimistic to hope the next increase would also take that long, especially with Spotify’s continued focus (and money dump) on audiobooks.
Premium subscribers should receive an email from Spotify in the next month detailing the price hike and providing a link to cancel their plan if they would prefer to do so. Users currently on a trial period for Spotify will get one month at $11 after it ends before being moved up to a $12 monthly fee.
I’m all for pirating, but tbh music streaming apps are a service that is still in the “worth it” range. Not where Spotify is going, but, maintaining a library of high quality music with all the assets, and serving it to all your devices over the Internet is not a small feat to do securely.
I’ll probably switch to tidal for now while I start building up my library to include stuff beyond what I like…
You should check out Plexamp while you bridge the gap. It has tidal support built in, and you can self-host your own collection as you build it up. Then when you’re done with tidal, you don’t have to learn or download a new app.
Plexamp, Lidarr, Lidarr extended, Tailscale. Done.
Done. Until it can’t find a decent quality option for an album you’re searching for.
A guy I know decided to move away from Spotify and pirate music. The amount of effort he went through means it’s something I’ll probably never try.
This is the biggest problem for me. I have thousands of movies and 10s of thousands of TV episodes, but my audio library is still all the same stuff I downloaded from Napster, Limewire, Kazaa 20+ years ago. It’s too hard to find a good selection these days outside of a few private trackers. I’m in several private trackers but I’m not going to sit in a queue for 2 days waiting for an interview time and jump through hoops to join something like RED or PTP tier tracker.
Not to mention I mostly listen to podcasts these days and when I do listen to music, I try to find new stuff that I’ve never heard of rather than searching for a known artist. This would be way too convoluted to do on my own with some self-hosted solution.
I’ve been using deemix, and for the most part it’s been pretty seamless. Stuff direct downloads instantly, but it’s all in 128kbps now unfortunately. Then I have lidarr monitor everything for a lossless version.
USENET. Thank me later
Just some perspective: I’ve been self-hosting stuff for 7y now, started with plex on a nas. I have tried a couple times to get the *arr stack working, one at a time and fuck me it’s complex and the risk of fucking up the config and data crossing the clearnet without a VPN, noooope fuck right off with that. That risk/reward just is too skewed for me.
.
As someone else said: it doesn’t replace streaming even a little. Pirating is replacing buying music directly. Streaming facilitates finding new music and trying it out. Being able to listen to anything at any time. You simply can’t do that with downloads; no one can download everything. Piracy in this case really just works for people still listening to their highschool favs and not people looking for new stuff all the time.
I never had trouble finding new music without those recommandation algorithms.
I used to download exclusively when I was younger, but as I get older I’m trying out new genres from different cultures than my own and I’d miss out on it all without a streaming service.
In my opinion it’s worth it.
Dear lord no. You can still use Spotify, YTM, and a host of other services to discover new music. The argument was valid back in the days of the excellent Google Play Music, but the algorithm has gone to shit since. There are also tons of sources of user curated playlists you can use to fund new music.
I am 51 and if I let algorithms pick my music I would never discover most of what I find and constantly be fed thirty year old music. Just this past month I discovered mehro, King Woman, Sugar High and Parra for Cuva.
It replaces paying for Spotify because its possible to download Spotify premium. Best of both worlds. Use Spotify or YouTube to find stuff, send it to a seedbox, load it later at home.
Biggest downside is most phones don’t have SD card slots anymore.
Sent from my (slightly salty) hacked pixel 7
Yes and no. It’s more cumbersome for sure but I used to find music on YouTube and all that back in the day then download it.
This dude hasn’t heard of pirate streaming services.
Do they have the libraries of Spotify or Apple music?
InnerTune. Its on F-Droid
Or put some effort into finding new music? The algorithms have never suggested me anything good anyway.
I use a cracked Spotify client but if I do legitimately pay, it will be for Tidal. I want that sweet sweet lossless audio people have been talking about.
Spotify locks music is new to me? And for the few Podcasts I personally couldnt care less
Platform agnostic = you own the mp3/FLACC/ect file, and can play it through whatever client you want
Platform Locked = you do not own the files, and they are DRM locked to their proprietary media player (see: spotify, kindle, ect)
Of course there are ways around those locks, but it’s illegal to remove DRM protections (in the us)
Gotcha.
Thought of it in a more of a Exclusive-To-Platform kind of way.Yea I figured, no worries
You can switch to another service any time you want though.
You’ll own nothing and you’ll like it
It’s way cheaper though.
Idk if I owned as many cds as I’ve spent on music subscriptions I’d own more high fidelity music than I’d know what to do with
BS. One new CD is at least 10$. A good band collection is then a year worth of subscription fees. So, do you only listen to a few bands?
Before Spotify I pirated everything. In lossless, ofc. I had 200GB of music, it wouldn’t fit on my ipod classic, and I still was limited.
I pirated at least a lifetime worth of Spotify premium and yet when I switched to Spotify I discovered so many more artists like the ones I already liked. If I now tried to buy all the songs I’ve listened to more than once in the last 5 years, I’d go bankrupt.
Spotify is way cheaper.
(now add ease of discovering new music, listening to whatever your friends want to listen to in a car, collaborative playlists, etc etc)
How does this compare to other music streaming services these days?
Tidal is $11/mo for an individual and $17 for a 6 person family plan. I recently switched because they supposedly give a better cut to artists and serve flac files.
Yeah. Never thought I’d see the day when Tidal was cheaper than crappy Spotify.
If i wasn’t paying for a family play on Spotify, I would have resorted to music piracy at this point. The quality is still garbage, the service is getting worse, but the prices are only going up every half a year
I tried sourcing my own music but man it’s a lot harder than movies and shows. Especially when you like to hear random recommended music how do you get enough
Yeah - credit where it’s due, Spotify did a really good job with their music recommendation engine. It’s just that recently, they’ve started to get into the sad part of the enshittification cycle. I kinda saw the writing on the wall when they started forcing Joe Rogan podcast promos fucking everywhere, without having a config anywhere to disable podcast suggestions (which I don’t use through Spotify)
I’m surprised you’re only getting these now. My recommendations have been mostly garbage for the better part of a decade so all this praise for finding new music confuses me a little. Spotify has many feats, but the algorithm never was one for me, quite the opposite. I find it more annoying than helpful, actually.
My beginning (about 6 years ago) was fine. Still miss the radio feature though.
They kinda brought it back but in a reverse form (former: 4 new 1 old, now: 5 old 1 new).
Playlist shuffle is atrocious but I am not picking them better any better.Oh I started getting them years ago. That’s when the first inkling of “this thing might be going downhill now” entered my mind.
Feel you there. A lot of what i listen to are brand new bands, and finding sources for those is rough
£2 a month for a HiFi subscription if you use a Nigerian VPN.
So if you use a VPN to sign up, then disconnect the VPN, does it block you? Or do you always need to be on VPN?
You don’t need to be connected on the VPN to use it, I find it identical to my previous UK subscription.
Only difference is that your initial recommendations are for Nigerian music 😆 Those disappear quite quickly after you start listening to music you like tho.
Do you need to stay connected to that, or just for payment setup? I’ve already got an account…
Tidal is great but IIRC it either doesn’t support Amazon Echo or the integration is poorly implemented.
Apple Music only raised the price by $1 since the launch in 2015 (9 years ago). But they added cool features like lossless audio quality and Dolby Atmos. They also had lyrics like 6 years before Spotify added them. I think you can even get it for $6 dollars if you’re a student.
They also payout about 2.5X what Spotify does to artists.
Some lyrics are now disappearing from Spotify :-(
The $6 student plan also includes Apple TV+
I feel they’re all fairly similar. I won’t do apple music because I don’t do iOS, and I moved from Google play music when forced to the inferior YouTube music. I wonder if tidal or any other service has comparable pricing.
I’ve been using Apple Music on Android for years, I definitely recommend it. The app is totally fine, I think it’s still better than Spotify’s crappy app. On desktop you can use the Cider app, which is much better than iTunes. It’s even available on Linux.
There is an official Apple Music desktop app for windows now, no need to use Cider.
I switched to AM a couple years ago due to the (better) privacy policy vs YTM. The app is ‘fine’ but it’s painfully obvious that they didn’t want to bother with the android UI guidelines. But it’s a small annoyance, and the price is… palatable, I guess? I think I’d jump ship at $14, but at $12, fine. I don’t use it that much.
Actually, it’d be nice if they would charge based on usage, not flat-rate. I doubt I’m using $3 of that $12 cost.
Hell no…Please not based on usage :o
But I’d be fine with the option to do either
I use YT Music because I get it cheap (VPN shenanigans), you can upload your own music (hello Nintendo soundtracks), and I mod the Android app to stop it being a mess (ReVanced Extended is the GOAT).
Do you always have to have the VPN connected to get the cheaper rate?
Nah just when I bought it. I did this a while ago so I’m not sure if it still works.
I’m gonna cling onto the quid a month rate for dear life.
I use Apple Music, primarily because I need to pay for the higher tiers iCloud storage for my wife’s photo addiction and it’s basically “free” for the family plan.
If I didn’t already have the higher tier iCloud, I would probably prefer tidal for higher quality, or Spotify for the more diverse library.
I use YouTube Music and it’s pretty good, but the best feature is no more youtube ads.
More money More crap nobody wants like audio books Still haven’t seen cd quality streaming yet
I used to happy with Spotify before the enshitificatuon happened…
What annoys me is you still have to pay for audio books.
Tidal is a good alternative.
Cheaper now, and you get access to special editions/higher quality audio included in base price now.
Added bonus they pay artists more then Spotify aswell.
Well considering the last price hike got us gems like the music 8-ball/magic crystal thing, I can barely wait to see what banger they’ll come up with to bloat my music player with next.
It should be audiobooks this time, if I heard correctly.
And removal of much of Spotify curated playlists…
So mad about that part >:(Every “Zusammengestellt für” playlist is a autogenerated playlist and probably not a single human touched that shit. So much less discoverability.
Ahoy!
No, that’s a youtube channel /s
Just canceled my family plan. I like Apple Music more anyways.
Bookmarking this page so I can learn modern sailing techniques. Audiophiles who sail the seven seas, please teach me your ways! My most hasn’t hit the surf in a hot minute.
Deemix-gui + Deezer subscription or SoulSeek/Nicotine+
In theory you can go Deezer method without owning subscription. Plenty of publicly available ARL cookies.
I use the former. How does it compare to the other two?
just PUT some magnets IntO a service
As an audiophile it’s like, way less exhausting to just go with Tidal, over pirating good quality music. Especially if you’re like me and listen to nearly anything and everything.
Yeah, but enshittification will happen there too. It’s just a matter of time.
Xmanager if on Android.
I’m all for going sailing but if there are features you want that that can’t quite replicate, it’s also a great time to look at a VPN service with a server in Turkey… Sign up on a Turkish IP and the exchange rate puts you under $2/month USD. This works for a lot of other things too.
I love you.
I know.
I believe a dude on YouTube for a very popular streamer used an IP from Argentina to get 50 subs for YouTube premium to giveaway for only a couple bucks.
I gotta start direct downloading my music again soon. Spotify has just left me feeling so frustrated lately.
I’ve emailed support thrice for intrusive full screen ads. “these are promotions”. Yeah, ads… “Sorry you don’t like our promotions, we will note it”
Uh huh.
I can’t updoot you enough. I hate that so much too.
https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager/releases for Android
https://github.com/spicetify for PC
You’re supposed to vaguely imply the existence of those, not just give away secrets in public bruh
It’s Lemmy, we’re all friends here.
What is this? I can’t find a description anywhere on GitHub of what this is
Removes ads with the free accounts. You will be limited to free sound quality and other premium features are missing but ya know, good enough for free without ads.
Does this get rid of ads? It just looks like a UX redesign.
The android app for sure gets rid of ads. I just use browser + adblock for PC so unsure there
Yes the PC one has adblock and you can re-skin and use widgets from their marketplace (free)
Who else is still using YouTube Music ReVanced?
Still happily buying music on Bandcamp. Their discovery stuff is pretty good, too.
If switching services, this web service that moves your music between streaming services worked well for me. Paid for one month then canceled https://soundiiz.com/
Same, YTM to AM. Also linked my last.fm if I remember correctly. 1 month for like $5 and canceled after the move.
Worked great when I moved from Google to Spotify due to YTM. A few songs didn’t transfer correctly, a few saved as covers of the original but as they shuffled I’d just manually search them and correct it.
It is worth the extra features, like not being able to remove an unwanted podcast from your play list. Why Spotify, why!?
