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 haven’t had any issues with it personally (not invalidating your experience) What has gotten bad about it?
Had issues downloading for offline. Recommendations are meh. Sometimes I can’t search. Sometimes the app won’t load when on cell data.
I never had issues like those before and then all of the sudden, it’s not even usable. I get having bad cell coverage somewhere, but I would have a strong signal and it will still do it. I had to uninstall and reinstall the app multiple times for it to work.
Tidal is now cheaper and it has everything I would listen to. Before they were missing some bands and deezer had them. Doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
Sounds like they missed some QA testing for your device or something. That sucks.
I do notice that the recommended music at the end of a playlist tends to skew more to whatever the last song was, rather than overall vibe of the playlist. Assuming it didn’t end on a really annoying song, though, I don’t personally mind changing directions a little. That said, can completely appreciate their algorithms not working for everyone.
I do think they’ve been working on improving the algorithms though, as they are definitely not as wonky as they were when I first joined a couple years ago. Nice to know at least some of my payment is going towards improving the platform, unlike Spotify, where it’s going towards buying podcasts I don’t want to listen to.
I pay for the annual subscription, so Deezer is still cheaper for me by about $2/month, but I’m glad you’ve found what you’re looking for in Tidal. And thanks for humoring my curiousity.