Photo Credit: Thibault Penin
Weeks after revealing price increases for a number of markets, Spotify is hinting at additional bumps – and indicating that they’ll be accompanied by new features.
This insight comes from Spotify co-president and chief business officer Alex Norström, who elaborated on his company’s pricing strategy when speaking with the Financial Times. A few things stand out from the article, but its timing and sources should be noted off the bat.
Norström’s remarks account for a small portion of the text, which makes good use of information disclosed during Spotify’s late-July earnings call. In other words, it might not be a coincidence that the exec just now opted to divulge details about pricing and fresh features to a business newspaper.
Time will, of course, tell whether a near-term release is in the cards for said features. While Spotify’s superfan-tier ambitions certainly aren’t new, also worth highlighting are the platform’s recent direct publishing deals. Following an avalanche of pushback against the service’s bundling craze, Kobalt signed the latest of those direct pacts earlier in August.
And as previously emphasized by the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), compositional rightsholder approval is a mandatory stop on the road to remix and mashup features. Both offerings will reportedly factor into the superfan package.
(Perhaps testing the waters here, Spotify upped its playlist-mixing game last week.)
Next, that Norström didn’t mention the U.S. (or even North America) is telling as well.
The omission appears to affirm the theory – illustrated in detail by DMN Pro – that flat subscriber numbers are prompting the company to hold steady on domestic pricing. To be sure, the aforesaid Spotify price boosts spared the U.S. and Canada, though there’s nothing stopping the DSP from working to bolster monetization across its present subscriber bases.
Speaking of enhancing revenue from current paid users without once again raising core prices, the focus on supplemental features probably isn’t a bad idea from a global perspective, either.
When it comes to Individual, Apple Music charges £1 less per month than Spotify does in the U.K., A$3 less in Australia, and €1.15 less in France, to name a few examples. In short, modest churn or not, it’s probably best for Spotify to avoid widening these gaps.
With that, it’ll be worth keeping an eye out for either additional price increases hitting existing plans in tandem with new features or, likelier yet, features made available at a higher cost via standalone tiers or add-ons.
