Club Benefits
Spotify may have a pair of new CEOs after former head honcho Daniel Ek stepped down, but the streaming music provider is keeping with its now annual tradition of raising prices.
The music streamer announced that subscribers in the US, Estonia and Latvia will be seeing a higher price for Spotify Premium later this month. It's the third price hike since 2023 and the fourth since 2021.
Not a cheap date
It was rumored that Spotify was planning to raise prices last November, but we didn't know by how much. Since the last hike in August 2025, Spotify has added a number of AI features and the long delayed lossless audio program.
This price increase makes Spotify the most expensive streaming service. That's more than some of the other best streaming services including Apple Music ($10.99), Tidal ($10.99), and the niche hi-res streamer Qobuz ($12.99).
Benefiting artists?
Spotify said that the price hike is meant to keep providing a great experience and benefit artists. However, it's not clear how much, if any money from the hike will actually go to artists.
Spotify is often criticized as very anti-artist due to its streaming revenue payouts. The most recent estimate I could find from Route Note suggested that Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream on the platform.
To be fair to Spotify, other music services also have low payouts for artists. Apple Music and Tidal only pay out $0.01 and $0.013 per stream, respectively. Qobuz allegedly pays $0.04 per stream.
Big artists from Massive Attack to Sylvan Esso have boycotted Spotify over everything from meagre payouts to former CEO Daniel Ek's investment in military hardware companies to ICE recruitment ads being run on the platform.
Despite such issues and ever increasing prices, Spotify remains the most popular streaming service. According to Exploding Topics, Spotify has more than 281 million paid subscribers, more than double the 125 million Apple Music subs.
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