Your Spotify subscription will go up £1 a month/ £12 a year from August 2023
Spotify has announced that subscribers who use its Premium subscription will be subject to a £1 a month (or £12 a year) increase in its subscription costs from next month. The cost of the Spotify Duo and Family subscriptions will also increase by the same amount.
The student subscription has not had a price increase and remains at £5.99 per month.
For the UK, the Premium plan now costs £10.99 per month, up from the previous price of £9.99 monthly. Various plans for multiple users have also gone up by £1 per month, with a Duo subscription now priced at £14.99 and a Family plan – covering six people – now faring at £17.99.
Spotify state that they are increasing the price of their services so that they can continue to invest in and innovate their product offerings and features and bring you the best experience, although it's another tough bit of news for subscribers who have already endured months of cost of living price increases.
The new prices will kick in from late August/early September, depending on when the subscriber's subscription renews, as Spotify have to give a full month's notice of the change, so you'll still have a month at the old price, and the price increase will affect not only existing customers but new ones as well, and will affect users in over 50 countries, not just the UK.
Spotify isn't the only music service to up prices this year; Apple and Amazon have increased prices, and YouTube also increased prices last week on its monthly and annual premium plans in the USA, for the first time since the subscription service was launched in 2018.
Earlier this week, Spotify reported a 27% improvement in monthly active users to 551 million in the April to June period – beating forecasts of 530 million users. Spotify premium subscribers have jumped another 17% year over year to hit 220 million, also exceeding expectations, so the increase is not due to decreased revenue but did cut hundreds of jobs recently in an effort to make increased margins.
If you decide you don't want to pay the increased rate, you can downgrade your account to a free account, but this does offer less functionality, such as only being able to listen to your playlists on shuffle mode, and you will have to listen to adverts. To downgrade your account, use the following steps:
Log in to your Spotify account.
Under 'Your plan', click 'Change plan'.
Scroll to 'Spotify Free' and click 'Cancel Premium'.
If you're on the Family subscription for six people, yet only two of you use the service, you can save £3 a month (both now and once the price hikes have taken force) by switching to Duo. Equally, if your Duo account is only used by one person, you can switch to an Individual account to save £4 a month (both now and after the hikes).
Other Music Service Options:
Amazon Music Unlimited is Amazon's own music streaming service, which costs £10.99 a month, but if you are an Amazon Prime subscriber, you can get Music Unlimited as an add-on for an extra £8.99 a month, which will work out £2 cheaper than Spotify Premium. You can also get a 30-day free trial to test it out.
If you are on the Spotify family plan, then consider switching to either Apple Music (3-month free trial available), or Amazon Music Unlimited, which will work out cheaper. Apple and Amazon currently charge £16.99 a month for their respective music streaming family plans – which will be a saving of £1 a month compared to Spotify, so £12 a year, and they both also support six listeners like the Spotify family service.
Personally, I'm going to stick with Spotify, even though I'm not thrilled at another price increase; I have so many playlists set up on Spotify, and I can't be bothered to set them up again on a different service, and I don't want to have to listen to adverts or not be able to play my music in the order I want to, which removes the free version as an option, so I'll have to deal with that £12 extra a year, which I'm pretty sure Spotify hope the majority of its subscribers feel the same way!