Spotify is raising prices again. For the third time in two and a half years.
Emails sent to subscribers on January 15 say US Premium plans will go up by up to $2 a month starting with February billing cycles. After more than a decade of frozen prices, annual or semi-regular hikes are beginning to look like part of Spotify’s business model.
What’s changing in February
Spotify is already showing the new prices to new sign-ups in the US. Existing subscribers will see the increase on their February bill:
- Premium Individual: from $12 to $13 per month
- Student: from $6 to $7 per month
- Duo (two accounts, one household): from $17 to $19 per month
- Family (up to six accounts): from $20 to $22 per month
- Basic: stays at $11 per month (and remains an option only as a downgrade path for some Premium users)
Spotify didn’t call out all of these tiers in its customer emails, but confirmed the new pricing on its site.
From a decade of flat prices to three hikes in 30 months
For roughly 12 years, Spotify’s core subscription price barely moved. That changed in mid‑2023. Since July 2023, the company has now pushed through three separate increases, including this one.
The last hike landed in July 2024, when:
- Premium went from $11 to $12
- Duo rose from $15 to $17
- Family jumped from $17 to $20
At the time, Spotify said the higher bills were needed so it could “invest in and innovate on our product features.”
The new line from Spotify is slightly different. In its latest explanation, the company says:
“Occasional updates to pricing across our markets reflect the value that Spotify delivers, enabling us to continue offering the best possible experience and benefit artists.”
The language is vague, but the pattern is clear: after years of price stability, Spotify is behaving much more like other large subscription platforms that treat gradual, recurring hikes as standard practice.
New features Spotify can point to
Spotify has rolled out a noticeable cluster of features and projects over the past few months that it can connect to those higher monthly fees:
- Lossless audio arrived in November, answering a long‑standing request from audiophiles who watched Apple and others move earlier.
- Music videos landed in December, pushing Spotify deeper into territory long dominated by YouTube.
- New Messages features launched earlier this month, including:
- the ability to share your listening activity with friends, and
- tools to request joint listening sessions, branded as Jams.
- The company also opened an 11,000‑square‑foot podcast studio in Hollywood this month, another sign it’s still betting heavily on spoken‑word content.
This month, Spotify also added more ways for video podcasters to make money, continuing its shift from pure music streaming into a wider creator platform.
“Benefiting artists” vs. shrinking royalty pools
Spotify is framing this latest price increase partly as a way to “benefit artists.” The company’s own numbers do show a growing payout pool: a report released in March said Spotify paid $10 billion in music royalties in 2024, the highest total in its history.
But that doesn’t end the argument. Critics inside the music industry have spent the past year pushing back on how that money is split. In 2024, Billboard estimated that changes to Spotify’s royalty model would result in musicians receiving millions of dollars less overall, despite the larger top‑line figure.
At the same time, Spotify is dealing with criticism over the amount of low‑quality AI‑generated content—what detractors call “AI slop”—on the platform, raising fresh questions about which kinds of tracks actually capture those royalties.
Political blowback didn’t stop the growth
The decision to raise prices again comes after a rocky 2025 for Spotify’s public image.
- Some users and musicians boycotted the service after learning that then‑CEO Daniel Ek had heavily invested in Helsing, a German military defense AI company.
- In October, US nonprofit Indivisible called on subscribers to cancel memberships after it emerged that Spotify was running recruitment ads for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
- A Rolling Stone investigation in November, citing an anonymous industry source, reported that the Department of Homeland Security paid Spotify $74,000 for that ad campaign.
Spotify has since confirmed that the ICE recruitment ads ended in late 2025.
Despite the controversy, the business didn’t stall. In a quarterly earnings report released in November, Spotify reported strong year‑over‑year growth:
- Premium subscribers were up 12%
- Monthly active users on Basic plans were up 11%
- Total monthly active users also climbed 11%
- Gross profit rose 9% YoY to $1.56 billion (about €1.35 billion)
Those numbers tell Spotify that it can absorb some churn and public criticism while still adding paying users—and that gives it room to keep nudging prices up.
The new streaming math
With three hikes in 2.5 years, Spotify is signaling that the $9.99‑forever era of music streaming is over. Instead, it appears to be converging on the same playbook that video platforms like Netflix popularized: steady product expansion, public justifications about content and creators, and regular $1–$2 increases.
For listeners, the impact in 2026 is straightforward: Premium Individual moves to $13 in the US, and family‑style plans get meaningfully more expensive. For Spotify, the bet is that lossless audio, music videos, social listening, and a deeper creator ecosystem will be enough to keep most people from hitting cancel—no matter how often the bill ticks up.
