{"id":973988,"date":"2019-12-11T09:00:48","date_gmt":"2019-12-11T16:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=924809"},"modified":"2019-12-11T09:00:48","modified_gmt":"2019-12-11T16:00:48","slug":"why-do-we-still-pay-only-10-a-month-for-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/music-news\/why-do-we-still-pay-only-10-a-month-for-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do We Still Pay Only $10 a Month for Music?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Of the litany of things you can buy for $10 \u2014 a sandwich, a box of pens, and a print magazine among them \u2014 unlimited access to a catalog of 50 million songs is one of the most bang-for-your-buck options out there. But that\u2019s how much music-streaming subscriptions have cost their entire existence.<\/p>\n

The coming year may be when that finally changes, for a number of reasons. First, Spotify, the leader of the music-streaming market, recently entered its second decade of existence towing 250 million users, 110 million of whom are paying subscribers; when tech companies hit such major growth milestones, they tend to hike up prices to begin recouping previous years\u2019 lost revenue, which is why Uber rides, Seamless deliveries, ClassPass sessions, and the products of other startups-turned-behemoths are more expensive now than they were at the start.<\/p>\n

The music industry<\/a> would welcome higher prices with open arms, as it\u2019s griped about streaming\u2019s meager payouts to rights-holders for a decade now. That\u2019s on top of the fact that nearly every other type of subscription, from Netflix to Amazon Prime, has boosted fees over that same decade \u2014 sometimes more than once. Per the U.S. rate of inflation, even a $10 bag of apples in 2008 should cost somewhere around $12 today.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So why hasn\u2019t anyone been charging more than $10 a month for music? \u201cIt\u2019s a billion-dollar question,\u201d says Russ Crupnick, managing director of music research firm MusicWatch. \u201cIt\u2019s been at least 15 years, if you include Rhapsody, that music subscriptions have been sold for the same price. Yet if you think about it, they work on more devices than ever, and have bigger catalogs and more features and functionality than ever. It\u2019s a measure of the competitiveness of the environment that the prices haven\u2019t changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

With a dozen streaming services all offering the same songs and albums, it\u2019s risky for any one company to take the first step into users\u2019 wallets. \u201cThe one big difference between music and video is that Netflix has House of Cards<\/em> and Orange is the New Black<\/em> and all that,\u201d Crupnick says. \u201cIf you are really a fan of someone\u2019s original content, they can get away with sneaking in increases because they know you\u2019re waiting for the next season to binge. In music, if your favorite streaming service said they were going to raise prices, you could easily switch to a different one. There\u2019s no House of Cards<\/em> exclusive for them to offer.\u201d (Music streaming<\/a> did once make a foray into album exclusives<\/a>, but it was ill-received and short-lived.) And while Spotify may suffer financially from its low pricing right now, juggernauts like Amazon and Apple don\u2019t mind operating their music arms at a loss because the rest of their businesses<\/a> are profitable enough to compensate.<\/p>\n

One route that music services could take is toward tiering \u2014 offering high-resolution streaming at a higher price, as TIDAL and Amazon do<\/a>. Another is raising fees in regions that will tolerate it, as Spotify has been doing with experiments<\/a> in its home region of Scandinavia. Going more niche could be another tactic: In a study<\/a> by YouGov and Dutch-American classical streaming service Primephonic this month, 52% of American music fans said they would be willing to pay more than $10 a month for \u201ca streaming service that truly meets their needs,\u201d with some willing to go as high as $20 a month. \u201cIt has become very clear that the \u2018one platform fits all genres approach\u2019 of major streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music is increasingly causing frustrations with music lovers,\u201d Primephonic\u2019s CEO Thomas Steffens said in a note accompanying the study.<\/p>\n

But offsetting the potential avenues toward charging more money is a sentiment that the standard $10-a-month price point for music may be too psychologically entrenched in the culture to ever budge. \u201cThe problem is that there are so many places you can listen for free,\u201d Nick Gatfield, a longtime music executive and the former CEO of Sony Music UK, tells Rolling Stone. <\/em>Gatfield sees more potential profit in the \u201ctwo-sided marketplace\u201d that Spotify and other streaming services are exploring, in which the companies would charge artists and labels fees for using their data analysis tools, because the consumer music-streaming market is already too saturated to introduce much change. \u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly tough game,\u201d Gatfield says. \u201cUnfortunately, music is like a utility now; you switch it on and it\u2019s there.\u201d<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Of the litany of things you can buy for $10 \u2014 a sandwich, a box of pens, and a print magazine among them \u2014 unlimited access to a catalog of 50 million songs is one of the most bang-for-your-buck options out there. But that\u2019s how much music-streaming subscriptions have cost their entire existence. The coming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-973988","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-14 16:09:24","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KFMU Solar Powered Radio","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=973988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=973988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=973988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=973988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}