Spotify is increasing prices in several regions outside of the US, just days after posting disappointing earnings. Spotify announced on Monday that Premium subscribers across Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific will be notified about pricing changes “over the next month,” providing an example email showing a €1 monthly increase from €10.99 to €11.99 in an unspecified country.
Unfortunately, Spotify’s announcement doesn’t name the impacted countries. A spot check across multiple European countries using Internet Archive snapshots from July shows that €1/mth increases have already been applied for new customers in Spain, Italy, and Portugal. European countries that previously raised subscription pricing in recent months — including France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands — do not appear to have been hit with additional increases.
Despite posting positive results for paid subscriber growth in its quarterly earnings report on July 29th, Spotify’s profit forecast fell below analysts’ estimates. Spotify’s stock price fell by 11.5 percent the same day, wiping $16 billion off the company’s market cap.
When asked during the earnings call why Spotify isn’t raising prices more frequently, CEO Daniel Ek said that the streaming company was prioritizing retaining subscribers for the long term over making short-term revenue gains. These new price increases may not be directly responding to that criticism, however, as The Financial Times reported in April that Spotify was already planning to hike prices in Europe and Latin America this summer.
US pricing is so far unaffected. Spotify held fast to US pricing for 12 years prior to the first increases that began in 2023 and continued into 2024.
