Spotify’s Premium Plan Finally Gets a Price Increase

Over the past year, streaming music services have been raising their prices across the board, yet Spotify has somehow managed to maintain its $9.99 monthly Premium subscription in the midst of this. Until now, that is.

Apple kicked things off last October when it bumped the price of an individual Apple Music subscription to $10.99/month, a $1 increase from the $9.99 that’s been the norm for it — and most other streaming services — since Apple Music launched in 2015.

At the same time, Apple also raised the prices for an Apple TV+ subscription by $2/month, but that was arguably for an entirely different reason. With Apple Music, the company said it “due to an increase in licensing costs,” adding that “artists and songwriters will earn more for the streaming of their music” due to the new pricing.

For Apple TV+, a price bump was seemingly in the cards all along; Apple said it was introduced “at a very low price because we started with just a few shows and movies,” so it was inevitable the company would charge more as it added more shows and movies to its catalog — especially considering the outstanding critical acclaim and awards many of these have received, not to mention cleaning up at the Oscars as the first streaming service ever to win an award for Best Picture.

Nevertheless, some were skeptical when Apple pointed to higher music licensing costs as the motivation for raising the price of Apple Music. After all, higher music licensing costs would be expected to push other music services to follow suit, yet Apple Music seemingly remained alone.

However, by early this year, it became clear that Apple was merely ahead of the curve as others followed suit. Amazon bumped its pricing for Amazon Music earlier this year, and then last week, YouTube Music joined the club, leaving Spotify as the only holdout still charging $9.99.

In every case, pricing has gone up from $9.99 to $10.99 per month, setting that as the new bar for streaming music services, and now it seems that Spotify may have just been waiting for everybody else to make the move before announcing its own price increase.

In a newsroom post today, Spotify announced that it will be raising its Premium Individual plan in the US to the same $10.99 as its competitors “so that we can keep innovating. Unlike Apple, Spotify isn’t saying anything about music licensing costs, although it does add that the new pricing will provide updates that will help it “continue to deliver value to fans and artists on our platform.”

The individual plan increase is accompanied by corresponding increases to Spotify’s other plan tiered, with the Family plan and Student plans increasing by $1 each, to $16.99 and $5.99, respectively, while the Duo plan gets a $2 increase to $14.99. Apple similarly increased its Apple Music Family plan by $2/month last fall.

Unlike YouTube Music, which is so far only increasing its US pricing, Spotify is also rolling out similar pricing changes in quite a few other countries, including Andorra, Albania, Argentina, Austria, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Spain, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Croatia, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Peru, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, Singapore, Slovenia, Slovakia, San Marino, Thailand, Türkiye, and Kosovo.

The company adds that existing Premium subscribers will get a notice via e-mail of the new price increase and will have a two-month grace period before the new price comes into effect.