The Price of Being a Country Music Fan Just Went Up

Country fans who want their music to be commercial free will need to pay a bit more for it.

Spotify announced a monthly price hike for Spotify Premium. It's the first price hike since the service was launched in 2011.

The monthly price for Spotify Premium was $9.99. It will now cost $10.99.
Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited and YouTube Music Premium also cost $10.99 a month.
Spotify Premium Duo and Spotify Premium Family cost $14.99 and $16.99 a month respectively.
Pandora Premium remains at $9.99 monthly.

A short note at Spotify announced the changes. "These updates will help us continue to deliver value to fans and artists on our platform," it reads, in part.

The move is not surprising as Spotify CEO Daniel Ek hinted at it several months ago. Variety notes that Spotify is the world's largest paid music-streaming service, with over 210 million subscribers. In addition to these price changes in the U.S., similar changes will be seen by users in nearly 50 other markets worldwide.

It's not clear how much — if any — of the additional revenue will be passed along to musicians. A graph at Producer Hive shows Spotify as having the fourth most songwriter-friendly royalty agreement, paying $.00318 per stream. This means it would take 314 streams for a songwriter to make a dollar (125 at Apple Music).

A price change of just $1 over 12 years is reasonable compared to hikes for other subscription services. For example, Netflix has hiked prices on the standard plan five times in the last eight years (per the Verge) and over the last nine years, the cost of Amazon Prime has gone from $79 to $139 yearly.

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Categories: Country Music News