Love it or hate it, Spotify continues to assert its dominance over the music industry. In a recent bid to lure Americans who don’t live on the coasts, the streaming service partnered with Sprint for an offer that gave six months of free Spotify membership to anyone using the phone carrier. That equates to about $60, which is a cute little offer. Now, Spotify has gone one step closer to becoming like a phone or cable service by announcing family plans. Not framily plans, family plans.
Usually, when sharing a Spotify username, if your friend or younger brother starts playing a song on another computer, it’ll stop your song. Harsh. With the new family plan, access for two users will cost $14.99, three users will cost $19.99, four users $24.99, and five users $29.99. So why couldn’t they just be like Netflix and let a few people share the same account, without paying much extra? Right now, four screens streaming Netflix at the same time costs $11.99. If Netflix pulled these Spotify prices, there would be literal rioting in the streets. People would start looting DVDs, that’s how desperate it would get. Apparently, it costs Spotify a lot more money to license prerecorded music from Universal and Warner than it does for Netflix to produce beloved TV shows from scratch. Funny how that works.
At any rate, Spotify Family will be available worldwide over the next few weeks. Don’t just blame CEO Daniel Ek for this pricing, blame the major labels for extorting whatever they can out of the service.
• Spotify: https://www.spotify.com