Fair point. I was thinking about recorded music but you’re totally right. I think they’re very keen to be less reliant on music and be more in control of their own destiny by having their own content.
As someone who has no interest in their podcasts, it does annoy me that I’m now explicitly paying to subsidise their move into this area.
At the moment it’s only Autoplay (i.e. the songs that play once you’ve finished listening to an album or playlist - you can turn this feature off) and Radio.
We’re not too sure what position other labels in the industry have taken on this, but it’s safe to say that the industry as a whole weren’t very happy with this new feature.
MBW are great for music industry news - you probably saw the linked article, but this one here goes a lot deeper into Discovery Mode: Spotify is letting record labels influence personalized recommendations… so long as they pay for it in royalties - Music Business Worldwide
Looks like Spotify Duo is increasing in price from £12.99 to £13.99 from June (for current subscribers) too.
The price of Premium Family will change from £14.99/month to £16.99/month. Since you’re already a Premium Family subscriber, we’re giving you one additional month at the current price**. This means the new price will become effective on your June billing date.
Not necessarily. It depends on the formula used and where/how the ‘output’ amount is arrived at. My business uses a revshare model and the formula is this, I kid you not:
**(((T - F - P - (T * flat_perc)) - (abs(T - F - P - (T * flat_perc)) * exp)) * perc) - flat**
Spotify could charge $50 a month and still pay artists the same as they do now simply by altering the forumla. For the record, I would love to see artists getting more though. I think the official line is that the increase is so that ‘they can bring you more new content and features’.
I’ve got the same email now. Only just started the family plan and within the 1-month-free period. So now I’ll have one billing cycle of £14.99 followed by £16.99 per month onward.
A 13.35% increase is a bit of a kick in the 
, but to be fair, we are enjoying the family plan and it is still way under the usual monthly cost for buying digital music.
Apple One Premiere looking mighty tempting now considering the Spotify Family plan price increase.
Ofcourse it costs more but has a fair amount extra
Might have to start a recurrent monzo.me the friends who are connected to mine… 
I’m not 100% convinced Apple will increase prices. From what I can see; they are already operating from a loss making model at the moment (just the sheer amount of free trials available) but I do wonder if there is any real incentive to increase streaming costs, given people could just use another service.
What would people think about Apple Music saying “if you’re exclusive to us we’ll pay you more per stream”?
As someone already paying for 1TB of iCloud storage I’m quite inclined to agree.
I’d hate it, I don’t like exclusivity.
It would end up costing the customer more if they then have to sign up to multiple services in order to get all the now exclusive content they want to consume. e.g. Netflix, Prime, and Disney+ etc…
Based on how the model works in music, contracts would need to be renegotiated for artists to lose out from this.
In the grand scheme of things though we’d need to see price increases in all markets for this to make any sort of difference. Spotify operate in some markets where the equivalent price of a premium subscription is significantly lower than US/UK/SE etc. therefore reducing the average revenue per user.
This (kind of) happened in the past. Lots of platforms were out grabbing exclusives of new releases. They weren’t paid more, but they were given a significant amount of programming and editorial placement in return for the exclusive. Spotify turned around and basically said if you give a release an exclusive on another platform, we won’t support your music editorially. That ended up being quite a big hit to take and as a result we hardly see any exclusives these days.
It’s also a really poor user experience.
That probably explains it!
Taylor’s an interesting one. She previously had no music at all on Spotify. This was in protest against Spotify’s free (ad funded) tier. Spotify argue that the free tier is a good way of funneling users to the paying tiers, Apple Music argue that you don’t need a free tier to get users to pay.
I respect what Taylor did, but for the vast majority of artists they’re not in the same position of privilege where they can just pull their music from Spotify and survive both financially and as an artist.
Meanwhile nobody seems to be talking about the streaming service that dwarfs them both and pays a lot less (outside of the subscription service)… YouTube.
I agree with you, but I’m trying to find a commercial reason for Apple to pay more, at least above that of other services.
If they aren’t exclusive then there’s no incentive for them to do so.
I see where you’re coming from.
The commercial incentive needs to be to get the content regardless of exclusivity.
I guess that’s down to perhaps some of the bigger artists to band together and demand more from Apple and set a new standard rate for all.
Ultimately that might also lead to higher prices for the consumer but that will be down to how competitive Apple or any other providers want to be with each other.
A lot easier for Apple to argue this when they’re literally taking a huge chunk of Spotify’s iOS revenue, have default app privileges, preferential access to Siri and the exclusive ability to spam users with ads.
Do you not bore yourself?
Well Apple and Spotify. Unless I’m mistaken (entirely possible) there isn’t a huge difference in streaming payments?
Im my own biggest fan! 