For most of Spotify’s lifespan, the service has kept its pricing plans consistent, only enacting its first price hike just last year. The reasons for these price hikes have been twofold: Firstly, efforts to broaden Spotify’s offerings — as was the case with the introduction of audiobooks — have necessitated new deals with publishing companies to secure the rights for the relevant books and narrators. Spotify has needed the additional revenue to cover the cost of licensing and hosting, on top of the licensing and hosting it already does for the music industry.
On that note, the second major impetus for the price hike is increased pressure from record labels. The entire reason that Spotify management decided to add audiobooks to the service was to diversify content and reduce the service’s reliance on the music industry. This, however, has caused friction with record labels, who were concerned that their royalty payments would be decreased and have pushed for service price hikes to make up the difference. This same pressure has been felt by Spotify’s biggest competitors, Apple and Amazon, who have also enacted price hikes for similar reasons.
It’s not immediately clear how these price hikes and plan changes will affect Spotify’s subscriber base, though it is worth noting that following the last price hike in 2023, the service actually gained over 110 million new users.
