- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
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What improvement in service does the hike reflect?
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
Theyre also in the hole and interest rates went up again to nobody’s surprise. This price hike is not out of the blue and imo pretty reasonable.
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.
I’ve been using a cracked spotify android APK with no ads and unlimited skips for years now.
The quality is pretty good and dl speeds are superb if you get it from spotify. Only need a free account and plenty of good apps to assist in getting playlists, podcasts and full discographies.
I never paid for Spotify and only rarely used it on the desktop if I was interested in hearing something someone mentioned or to look up something.
But I also gave up the buying music thing too, expect for very rarely. There is so much freely traded music, and tons of live music, and icecast and other radio stations are still a thing. There is more than I could listen to already.
Podcasts have replaced the vast majority listening time in the car.
Then at home while working it is SOMA FM radio. I do give them money I guess, but its all donation.
LOL you stopped?
I was quite satisfied with Spotify, further it’s only going up a dollar so Idrgaf anymore
$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!
Wait - what are they doing?
Making sure you have a membership before you can buy things. Shocking…
Haven’t they always done that?
They’ve been more strict about it recently, especially with people that share memberships and self checkout stations.
They sell those at a loss to bring in customers to buy other higher margin items. What else is Spotify selling?
Ads on podcasts, even for premium members
Costco doesn’t have high margins on any of their items. They have like a max of 15% markup. They make their money off the membership.
Ads on podcasts, even for premium members
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.
“If you raise the price of the hotdog i will fucking kill you”
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.
Yep, there’s a large contingent who simultaneously believe that corporations shouldn’t be allowed to exist and also that they should be provided everything in life for free, as compensation for existing.
I’m not saying that nothing should be done to rein in corporate profits, as those are also out of control, but economic forces cut both ways and it feels disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
I honestly can’t be mad about it. I know quite a few corporations likely used the guise of inflation to profiteer, but significant inflation did still happen. A $1 increase in this economic situation, with having never raised the price before, is reasonable. The inflation comment suggests $12 or even $13 could be reasonable. The gains made over the years in workers pay is really small compared to inflation, but I think it’s actually on par with this.
Probably the same assholes that think Netflix no longer allowing password sharing is an overreach.
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.
Enormous fixed cost, yes. Billion not so much. The size of their entire catalog isn’t even going to be that significant. Music is tiny even the flac stuff just isn’t that big. The streams are so small they probably don’t even need peering agreements with most services. I’d be surprised if they’re burning more than 10 million a month in infrastructure. Now Netflix, YouTube, live video streaming services, totally different story. Those poor bastards end up maintaining servers inside other people’s networks.
Fixed costs isn’t the cost of having a single server with the storage. I’m thinking everything they need to have built up with the intent of having between N1 and N2 MAU, in order to make that viable.
It’s the cost of developing the software stack, of hiring the lawyers and accountants that (1) acquire the music rights and (2) handle the music payouts, it’s the lawyers that handle the different legal requirements across every major global economy, it’s the servers located in all of those countries with as many sub-national locations as necessary, it’s the IT staff that manage that server uptime, it’s the software developers that maintain that system and improve upon it so rivals don’t jump too far ahead… Etc.
Building a streaming platform that expects to have multiple billions of dollars in revenue across hundreds of millions of users is going to have enormous fixed costs that cannot be trivially scaled down if user counts are lower. If they plan around a much lower user count they can scale it down at that planning phase, but not after the fact (at least not easily).
Here’s a good estimate on their hosting, streaming and licensing costs
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/oct/08/spotify-internet
They tack it down to about 6 million a month that is of course excluding lawyers and other salaries.
Interesting. That’s dated October of 2009 and says Spotify had 5m users. Looks like they have ~200m users today. At a linear scaling it’d be twenty times larger, or £120m=$154m per month. That’s $1.85b/year.
In reality it wouldn’t scale linearly, but it also accounts for zero salaries, which was the major component of my comment.
Look I appreciate the downvotes and all, but didn’t you just say that fixed costs don’t go up and down with users?
If you’re so enthusiastic about paying a corporation making 25 billion a year even more owing to inflation why aren’t you asking about the corresponding minimum wage hike for the people they get that 25 billion from?
Because that’s not what the article is about? Why is this hard for people to grasp? Not every comment is about everything in the world.
How many more years could they have held back on the price hike if they hadn’t blown hundreds of millions on a failed attempt to lock up the podcast industry inside their walled garden.
That really seems like a stretch. More likely is they don’t, and instead we’re talking about them being bankrupt and people will say they should’ve seen the signs and sprung on exclusivity before Apple (or any other corp of your choice) bought out everyone and killed them.
Bad take.
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.
Oh sweet dick, does an iPhone have enough juice to make lossless stuff from Apple Music sound beautiful on my HD560s?
Tidal has been doing that for a while. The hi-fi option is/was double the price of the standard.
the only difference of that tidal hifi is already 1400kbps and HiFi plus is upto 9000
It’s only been 3 years since they announced it, give them a little time jeez.
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http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ must be propaganda by Big Audio to sell more hifi equipment because I can’t tell a damn difference between lossy and lossless. I’m ashamed.
I’d be curious to hear other people’s experience with this test. Personally, the two quality levels are completely indistinguishable for me. And that was sitting in a quiet room, using decent quality wired headphones, and really concentrating.
At least I know there will be no need for me to upgrade my subscription if Spotify ever does start offering uncompressed.
I can, but I do get it. Not everyone has the ears. But when you can hear it, it’s a curse lol
Some of it has to do with the audio equipment too.
Like I can hear the difference on my high quality headphones when connected to a decent USB audio interface device or my Denon home theater system with Technic speakers. Barely, while a difference is there. But can’t tell on my gaming headset or PC speakers.
And my ears are messed up. Had two sets of ear tubes when I was a kid and have some scar tissue on my eardrums which resonates with odd frequencies sometimes.
So artists get more money right?
…right?
Artists now get even less money, ironically. They’re strongly pushing towards this system where the algos will push your songs to users, resulting in some amount of more listens, except the downside is that you cut your own pay. If you’re signed on a label, you get even less than nothing now
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.
Did the exact same thing and switched to Apple Music. Unfortunately for some unknown reason, AM isn’t nearly as good in my experience. I have songs that were working and then come up as unavailable later. The recommendations are terrible like Apple is trying to push what they want me to hear not what I am interested in. Using it on multiple devices is painful as I sometimes try to play it on my win10 machine, my Mac, and my iPhone and it can’t figure out that while I am I lay playing it in one location at a time it thinks I am trying to play more than one simultaneously. Maybe I’ll try Amazon music next. I do wonder if Tidal is any good.
I would fully switch to Apple Music but this lofi selection is baddddddd
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.
Holy shit, deezer still exists?
Yeah it’s where most pirated FLAC content comes from these days
Yeah, I just unsubscribed 2 months ago because they removed their regional pricing which caused rates to increase 4-6x in some countries.
You can get ARL’s for free pretty easily, no need to pay either company: https://rentry.org/firehawk52
I am still using private bitorrent sites for my music. Use Navidrome which seems to be the best alternative to the abandoned subsonic app and been collecting since 2005. I am somewhere near 300k in songs at this point. I tried Spotify once when I got 6 months free and found I was just to used to my way of discovering new music that I kind of hated how Spotify tried to do it.
I keep having hope that someone continues to improve the few apps we have left dedicated to personal music libraries otherwise one day I may have to switch.
Have you given funkwhale a try? I used to host subsonic years ago but i dropped it at some point, started my collection back up after i found out about funkwhale, It also has support for subsonic clients although i havent personally tried that myself yet.
Not personally, but I have seen it. I just have so much stuff I never found the need to have other people to connect with for stuff I am missing so it didn’t seem worth it. The only stuff I find I want is stuff that’s new release and get it within a few weeks when I have time.
I use navidrome and it uses the subsonic API so I’m guessing funkwhale should still work with it but I never looked into it. I host for myself really, my wife, father, and a few friends will use it from sparingly.
And I’m sure that’s to better compensate the artists, right?… right?
I had to scroll way too far to see someone mention this.
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
Hollywood accounting. None of them make a “profit” because they’re taxed on profits. Now it’s possible that they really are losing 180 million (a lot of startups like uber coast on investors with the assumption they’ll turn a profit at some point) but I wouldn’t take their word at face value.
Spotify is a publicly traded company. Their financial reports are required to be audited every single year. They really are losing money. There’s no way around that.
The studios, most of which are also publicly traded, report billions of dollars in profit every year. Hollywood accounting is about using shell companies to move money around (back to the main studio) while ensuring that nobody ever gets paid out on the profits of the movie by the LLC they set up to produce the movie.
I finally got out of accounting. It’s really hard to commit fraud at any scale when you’re a publicly traded and audited company. People are gonna call bullshit on that but I’m serious. I would be in favor of requiring every “small business” to be audited on a regular basis because I don’t know the exact percentage but I would testify in front of Congress right now that easily over 50% of all the small business clients I ever had were committing fraud somewhere.
One case that comes to mind is a guy with a small construction company who had funneled over a half a million dollars to his personal house, calling it business expenses. I took this to my boss - who signed a code of professional ethics and has a professional license on the line - and their reply was “he’s defrauding the government out of about a quarter million dollars but we’re not the accounting police and that’s why we don’t sign his tax returns.”
Spotify and Amazon Prime are my only two services. Piracy covers movies and TV.
Spent over 20-years managing my digital music library, always painful. It’s a relief to drop all that and just search what I want, receive tunes.
Damned convenient to queue up a playlist when I’m at camp screwing around, singing kaya yoke with my gf, working around the house, all that. Plus, I can download all my songs to a local device about as fast as I can click. I’m often in the boondocks with no internet, but I always have music.
Maybe they shouldn’t have paid Joe Rogaine $200 million.
Yeah, mr.“selfmade” there. /s
The link you provided says that Spotify actually lost ~$170 million. $3 billion is the revenue.
Honestly, it’s totally fair imo.
People who hadn’t experience before-Spotify times can’t really appreciate the value. I’d love all information to be free and all but just the indexing and data hosting service would be worth 11$/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.yeah the price increase isn’t too awful for me. I use Spotify all the time so premium is totally worth it for me. and I know rates aren’t that high but I’m happy to know I’m actually paying the people I listen to somewhat!
Eh I find music streaming services to be massively overpriced. Second hand CDs are dirt cheap and offer better quality than Spotify does.
Sounds like you don’t need it!
anyone ever heard of x-manager?
I use it.
Ah yes, poor people and people living on minimum wage don’t need music. And if they really needed it, they would just skip a meal.
Indexing and data hosting is worth $11 per month? Music uses very little space and bandwidth. Listening to 3 hours every day for a month ends up being around 10gb of bandwidth. If they were using expensive on-demand AWS bandwidth, that would cost them 50 cents. They aren’t, they have edge caches all over and almost certainly pay less than 10 cents.
Don’t… need… music…? There are plenty of free streaming options, or even the damn radio. Premium Spotify is far from the only option.
Being able to listen to anything you want whenever you please is 100% a luxury – and one that wasn’t available until pretty recently.
I really wonder about the age of the posters. I remember when the norm for music was $1 a song, which very quickly became $1.29. Spotify is so incredibly dirt cheap compared to that. But if people didn’t experience that heyday of $1 per song, they’re looking at this from a completely different perspective.
As if piracy, free youtube etc. doesn’t exist. If you can’t afford 11$/mo and can’t afford to invest time to get around it then you really have bigger problems to complain about like lack of social security and wealth distribution. Complaining about this just appears like a comical waste of energy tbh.
Not everyone wants to listen to music illegally? And not everyone has unlimited data or can afford it for youtube/etc. Wealth distribution and a lack of social security are huge problems but like, bro it’s not a good look to criticize working class folks for (rightfully) complaining about yet another round of inflation.
There’s this thing called a radio…
Arr me hearties, thar be more ways than one to score yonder plunder.
The entitlement is strong
Meanwhile, ad-free Spotify through X-Manager remains free.
Spicetify on desktop can also block ads.
Here’s another alternative: YouTube Music with adblock
through X-Manager?
I dont get it, how does it work? Am I supposed to install spotify AND this other app?No, you don’t install the official app. You install x-manager, then install a patched version of Spotify through the x-manager app.
Ok, i’ll try it thanks!
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.
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And when someone is short on money or just too tired of keeping track of which services having what media and switching chairs all the time ? remember there is always the way of Jack Sparrow, and go sailing to the 7 seas. ARRRGH!
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I agree with you, but this site is full of people who hate the idea of companies having to make money and just steal shit all the time. It’s a lame attitude to have I think, they believe they are entitled to others work because they don’t like the distribution model.
It’s the quality of service that they offer, I don’t mind paying £60-70 a month for all my tv/movies but when the services don’t even work well, have terrible experiences and constant caveats to using them it’s just not worth it. Go spend the money on a self-hosted solution for a better experience and be done with it. It’s not exactly cheaper either it’s just less of a headache.
If i was in a righteous mood, i would say :
1 - Paying for consuming media older than 30 years is a perversion of the intellectual property idea, of supporting artists for a short window of time by artificial restriction of the right to culture and knowledge, and then to release the works to the public domain for the enjoyment of society. That the capitalists extended said window to be the death of the autour + 70 years, and then invented the idea of owning the art-invention-etc made by worker-artists is the real robbery of the situation. The current phase of studios trying to leverage AI tools (and AI tools that are essentially industrial scale pirates AND plagiarists) to make even more exploitation of artists is not surprising to me.
I forgot to add: the original north american idea was 14 years + 14 years, if the artist made a request for extension to get the 2nd period. Imagine if we had 14 years copyright now, everything made 14 years ago would be released and available to watch or even to make derivative works…2 - I am not north american, i am third worlder (Brazil). So, since i have the money and time to spend, i prefer to spend money on domestic artists and domestic works to benefit my nation, which is a lot poorer than western artists and populations, and with much less famous cultural works. Instead of giving (more) money to Disney, i can go on music shows or theater here, or sign up one of the local streamers, and pirate the foreigner’s content i want. Brazilian artists, that really need the money and attention, i try to pay whenever possible (if it is even available). For films made by disney (and equivalents) … they will make enough money from cinema release here and from their foreign rich country, no need to give then a monthly transfer on top. The book Open Veins of Latin America is something of a reference in this type of reasoning.
Some of us have very good reasons for pirating, I was paying for every service under the sun in the UK last year and I dropped them all simply because the moment I went on holiday practically none of them worked. At that point, I realised that they just weren’t worth it and I could build something out and self-host a far better service.
So I spent something like 2 grand doing that knowing at least I’ll never have that issue again, Piracy is always a service issue first and foremost and most of these services are crap. Netflix still at least has a reasonable interface and a good experience across every device but Prime video is atrocious, P+ is likewise terrible and don’t ever get me started on NowTV.
Easier to just use torrents.
It’s what the software industry calls dumping. Microsoft got in trouble for doing it with IE. They give something away for free or cheaper than the competition, basically subsidizing the cost with another lucrative division of the business. We make a bunch of money selling Windows, so we can afford to give away IE for free. And eventually we’ll put the competition out of business, then we can increase the price once we no longer have any competition.
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…
I’m still salty from when this happened to Google photos
I wouldn’t group doordash in with the others.
They barely provide a service; leach off of restaurants, forcing them to raise their prices to maintain razor thin margins; and lobby for shitty legislation to not pay or give people benefits.
I agree with the general point, though.
That txt from ATT about the paperless discount was so poorly worded. Took me forever to realize I can still get the $10 discount if I switch the autopay to a debit card. It’s only the credit card autopay/paperless that is getting reduced to $5.
Interesting, t mobile is removing their 5 dollar autopay discount unless you use a debit card too. I wonder what the deal with that is.
The email I just got from them said to expect a rate increase for my august billing cycle of 2.50 a line. So, even switching to a bank account from a credit card won’t help. They were just trying to make me more comfortable while bending me over.
Weird. My txt said the following:
“Hi, it’s AT&T. As early as Oct. 2nd, the AutoPay and Paperless discount for customers paying by credit card will decrease from $10 to $5 per line. If you prefer to use your credit card, no action is required to receive a $5 discount.”
Sounds like your offer is different. One quick tip if you are looking for other ways to save on AT&T. If you sign up for AARP you can get an additional $10 off of the top plan in addition to the paperless discount on AT&T.
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.
Imagine paying to hear Joe Rogan
You don’t have to pay to listen to him, that’s free. The paying comes to skip the adverts.
Imagine paying to listen music
What do they mean first? Family plans went up from $15 to $16 in May 2021.
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