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.
Already switched to Deezer and liking it way more
https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager/releases for Android
https://github.com/spicetify for PC
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)
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.
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.
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.
Or put some effort into finding new music? The algorithms have never suggested me anything good anyway.
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.
This dude hasn’t heard of pirate streaming services.
Do they have the libraries of Spotify or Apple music?
yeah actually
Yes, in fact there are modded versions of the Spotify app (idk about apple) to access their library for free.
Do they work like ReVanced Youtube and just remove ads/restrictions while keeping account properties? Or do they work like NewPipe and block all the algorithm stuff, use their own accounts/playlists?
I never had trouble finding new music without those recommandation algorithms.
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
InnerTune. Its on F-Droid
Just installed this. I love you!
I’m just here to appreciate the Buccee’s icon, carry on!
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.
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.
Plex is also on the route of enshittitfication. Jellyfin is the better recommendation imo. A variety of apps that can connect to it too, for either streaming or music.
For music libraries:
I run both side-by-side, but for me Plex is still the clear winner right now for features and polish.
There is no point to self hosting music streaming in my opinion.
Just have syncthing sync your music folder on your SD card to your server. Everything local and available when you want it.
Plex is slowly being enshittified too it seems, just slower.
Use Jellyfin as an alternative, it’s awesome!
I do, but the music streaming on jellyfin is nowhere near as nice as plexamp.
Just syncing all of your files locally is far superior to either unless your library is like >250GB.
Streaming is a different use case than playing your own music which is essentially what plexamp and jellyamp are doing with extra steps. There are much better local music players than either option.
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.
USENET. Thank me later
Got one or two you might recommend?
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.
Are you saying Deemix only downloads at 128kbps? If so, I’ve been using it as well and download in FLAC. Also, I pay for the family plan which is $15.99/month.
Edit: Ah, I’m guessing you’re not on a paid Deezer plan.
Yeah I’m on the free plan which used to include FLAC and 320kpbs, but they stopped doing that for free plans about a year ago I think.
But how do you handle music discovery?
Since all music services I’ve tried so far are laughably shit at that anyway, Last.fm is your friend. Besides, Plexamp tries to get you into a Tidal subscription and suggests things from there, so you’ll get stuff here nad there.
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.
Then the rest follow. If Apple music hike their price again, time to dust off my eye patch. Ive already cancelled all my streaming and went with plex, radarr, sonarr.
I do all these plus the streaming services 😂.
Music streaming the only one i cant be bothered with since i have family plan with my gf plus discovering new music and new album from fav artist is too much to pass on.
Life hack: get Plexamp and Lidarr with Lidarr extended scripts. Then sign up for a free month of tidal with a throwaway account. Add said account to Lidarr extended. Add all the artists you want to Lidarr and let Lidarr Extended download all the stuff from Tidal for you. Once it has run out, register with another throwaway adress.
Does this work with any other services like spotify? I know Tidal is lossless but I already have Spotify and Lidarr.
No, it works on Tidal and Deezer. Yet, since the throwaway account is free… :P Lidarr can import spotify playlists and fetch the tracks themselves from somewhere else though
Thanks mate. Will definitely look at lidar. Maybe its time, some music like doom eternal arent available in apple music and this might push me.
Basically doing this already but my only issue is discovery. That’s why I pay for Spotify. I used to have a script set up before the API closed that would run automatically monthly to snag all my liked songs.
There are cool projects for that on lidarr, or you use things like last.fm. Lidarr extended does have a feature to grab similar artists to the ones you have, leads to much bloat in a very short amount of time, of course.
I wish they allowed more audiobook time per month, so one could finish a book past 11hrs. I’d be fine with an extra buck or two for a combined audiobook/music streaming service.
Just your local library for Libby or other electronic access. You probably have access to borrow audiobooks online for free. (assuming the US)
Unfortunately, Spotify has it set where there doesn’t appear to be a limitation on how many people can listen at once, whereas Libby still only has so many copies to share.
How does this compare to other music streaming services these days?
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.
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
There is an official Apple Music desktop app for windows now, no need to use Cider.
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.
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.
How does this work? Spotify has a deal with the music publishers, where they give 70 % of all subscription income to the music companies. The music companies (Sony, Warner, etc) then split the money based on the share of streams.
How can Apple pay out 2.5x70 %, so 175 %? Are thes losing with every subscription?
Think of it not in terms of revenue percentages, but by payouts per song stream:
Service Payout/song Plays to make $1 Tidal Music $0.01284 78 Apple Music $0.008 125 Amazon Music $0.00402 249 Spotify $0.00318 314 YouTube Music $0.002 500 Pandora $0.00133 752 Deezer $0.0011 909 So song for song, Apple is paying 2.5x what Spotify is (.008/.00318), and Tidal is paying out a whopping 4x what Spotify pays.
Sauce: https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-royalties-breakdown/
That whole article is BS, they even say it themselves:
Rates are rarely paid at a flat rate per stream
There is no payout per stream. Instead a fixed percentage of the subscription price is shared among each streamed song. So why does Tidal pay more then? Either their subscriber numbers are still incorrect (they have a history of publishing way higher numbers than in reality), their subscriber listen to less music (which is the main reason Apple Music pays more per stream on paper, since its often bundled) or their audience focuses more on a single artist (or a genre).
Sure. Obviously it’s more complex than that, but it helps illustrate where the math came from in the parent comment. I don’t know why Tidal pays more, but I’m hypothesizing its because most of their “co-owners” of Tidal are themselves, artists/musicians, which IMO is significantly better than the out of touch folks running Spotify.
The $6 student plan also includes Apple TV+
Some lyrics are now disappearing from Spotify :-(
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.
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
Tidal is great but IIRC it either doesn’t support Amazon Echo or the integration is poorly implemented.
Oh no.
£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.
I use YouTube Music and it’s pretty good, but the best feature is no more youtube ads.
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.
It’s funny: I haven’t paid for any streaming/cable/media service in 10+ years; instead choosing to sail the seas, hord media, and host my own streaming service using tools like Emby/Plex/Jellyfin.
Spotify was the one and only service I had been considering, mainly because managing music files is still a PITA; but I keep running into articles like this one and renewing my will to fly the Jolly Rodger.
If switching services, this web service that moves your music between streaming services worked well for me. Paid $5 for one month then canceled https://soundiiz.com/
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.
Same, YTM to AM. Also linked my last.fm if I remember correctly. 1 month for like $5 and canceled after the move.
That’s gotta be a running gag now. Fuck em with a cactus.
Faster than inflation
I pay about that already (~$14 a month), but for Napster, which afaik gives the biggest cut of any streaming service to artists. They also have really good custom playlist management, I never get intrusive popups or emails, and premium means no ads, even with hours of listening. I switched after the Joe Rogan thing happened with Spotify and never looked back honestly.
What joe Rogan Spotify thing?
Spotify spending millions to have the Joe Rogan podcast on their platform.
If you just want music, Spotify is wasting a lot of your subscription fee on unwanted features like podcasts, AI nonsense etc.
Did you use a time machine to get here from 2002?
No actually! Napster bought Rhapsody and now runs a music streaming platform.
I get the reaction though lol. That was my reaction too when a friend of mine recommended it. But I tried it and it is actually really nice, and the price hasn’t gone up in the years I have had it.
Interesting. Do you ever run into music not available on it?
Also the price is currently cheaper than $14. Do you have the family plan?
I do have the family plan actually, I forgot about that!
And I do occasionally. Certain live albums and more niche stuff can be hard to find, and one hit wonders can be tricky depending on the genre and time the song is from. The song I’m Blue by Eiffel 65 is only available in a longer club mix and not the radio edit, for example.
I will say that, in my experience, it has a slightly larger selection than Spotify for classic stuff and different versions of the same song (covers, remakes, remixes, etc). For example, my husband was very excited that they had the whole readout of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Boris Karloff (in two parts, but still) because they used to play it on certain radio stations every year around Christmas. On Spotify I was only ever able to find the same version of the song from several different albums of Christmas mixes.
Thanks for this! I will consider my options. I remember when Spotify was $7 a month. it was easy to justify then, less so each time they hike the price.
How long have you been a Napster subscriber?
Two or three years, I think. So far the price has stayed exactly the same, they still have no ads, and they haven’t made any changes to the app to try to advertise features or anything like that. It was (and still is) a nice change from Spotify, Apple Music, and even YouTube to be honest.
Thanks for all the info!
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.
just PUT some magnets IntO a service
Xmanager if on Android.
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.
Fingers crossed for Tidal, since its made by a bunch of musicians, I think Jay Z is the big one. They actually pay the artists a decent amount, and lowered MOST everyone’s price and upgraded the their quality, so taking a big hit of hopium they’re good enough to not go to shit.
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?
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.
I HATE these ‘made for you’ playlists, just repeats of my liked songs and songs it’s always trying to shove down my throat. Some of them barely fit the genre/vibe of the playlist too.
Part of the original appeal of Spotify for me years ago was the curated playlists.
Are there any other music service that has a decent Wear OS app? Spotify allows me to download and listen to my music offline, and the app is not too bad.
Maybe tidal?
Tidal is basically Spotify, but cheaper, pays more to the artists and is, imo, better.
Googling for “tidal wearos” has some interesting bits, but I don’t have a smart watch so I have no idea what I’m looking atNope, I used to pay for Tidal and I liked that app but it has no Wear OS app. They do have one for Apple Watch but I dont like Apple much.
