The company CEO Daniel Ek stated that this price hike was inspired by Apple and YouTube Music. Both services raised their prices recently. In all honesty, a price hike is a pretty odd source of inspiration. YouTube Music recently raised the price for its family plan by $5/month. People now have to pay $22.99/month rather than $17.99/month. As for Apple, the company raised the price for an individual plan to $10.99/month and the family plan to $16.99/month. Also, the Apple One bundle is now up to $16.95/month.
Spotify CEO says the price hike will be “good” for the company
In a statement, Ek said that a price increase in the US is “one of the things we would like to do and it’s something we will consider with our label partners.” He then continued to say “I feel good about this upcoming year, and what it means about pricing for our service.” Obviously, he’s a lot more enthusiastic about the price increase than Spotify’s customers. People are not going to be happy about paying more money a month for the same service. However, we can’t take statements like these from company executives at face value. We can tell that this price increase is an effect of the struggling economy. This is despite the company’s growth over the last year. Spotify beat its third-quarter expectations by maintaining 456 million monthly active users with 195 paid subscribers. It racked up €3 billion in revenue, and that’s up 21% year-over-year. While this is true, Spotify’s stocks did fall 5% after market close. At this point, we don’t know how much the price will increase or when this will happen. We know that Spotify did raise its prices in other regions around the world, so a US price increase was imminent.
