What improvement in service does the hike reflect?

So artists get more money right?

...right?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, ad-free Spotify through X-Manager remains free.

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.

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

And yet they still don’t offer high quality audio.

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.

Imagine paying to hear Joe Rogan

What do they mean first? Family plans went up from $15 to $16 in May 2021.

Tidal increased their prices recently too, by the same amount. And for that I'm getting the high-quality audio Spotify keeps on promising for over a year TWO YEARS now.

Don't get me wrong, Tidal still has its own problems but I don't get why people still choose to have Spotify over one of its competitors.

I stream all my own music for free with my Plex server.