So, just got an email from my friends at Spotify to let me know they're increasing my subscription price, from $9.99 to $10.99. One dollar, not enough to make me too upset, no. And certainly not enough to make me take my subscription and leave, no.
And if they had said this increase was due to rising cost of providing service, I would have quirked an eyebrow, remained skeptical and likely groused about it with folks at the office.
But that's not their reason for this price increase, no. They're reasoning is as follows, copied directly from the email they sent, which likely a great many of you received as well (or you will soon).
The price of Premium Individual is changing from $9.99/month to $10.99/month.
We’re increasing the price of Premium Individual so that we can continue to invest in and innovate on our product offerings and features, and bring you the best experience.
Since you’re already a Premium subscriber, you will pay $9.99/month until your billing date in September when your subscription will go up to the new price.*
Thanks for being a fan of Premium.
The Spotify Team. |
My problem here is this. They have not once in the last six years implemented a change that did not require a fix resulting in the application having the same features it had before, that was useful or an improvement. In other words, every change or update that's been an actual improvement, has been one that in some way or another returned the application to the same level of utility it had before they made seriously boneheaded changes.
Now, I am unfortunately still not irate enough to leave Spotify over this. But they better get their act together, or a lot of people will be doing exactly that. We don't mind paying premium for the service provided, as long as you don't muck about making changes that aren't helpful or necessary. Your application already does literally EVERYTHING I need it to do. Why should I need to pay you more so that you can tinker with what's not broken and falsely call your tinkering improvements? You want to tinker around and build a new wheel? Have at it, make a add on app for Spotify that does all sorts of new stupid nonsense and if it turns out there's an audience and a market for that, then you'll certainly develop a paying user base just as you have with Spotify itself. You folks presumably when to college somewhere to learn how to do what you do for the company. You should have been taught all of this already, the last thing you SHOULD need is someone explaining it in a forum post. However, I do care a great deal about the well being of Spotify. It is bar none my preferred source for listening to music and finding new music to enjoy. And I can't help but believe that Spotify's prolific availability has done wonders to curtail the more rampant forms of digital piracy among people who enjoy music. I would hate to see all that be destroyed by some greedy ideas about changing and expanding on something that already works, and expecting the customers to pay for it to happen.
