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Business News Digital
Amazon increases the price on its discounted music plans
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 7 April 2022
Amazon is increasing the price of some of its music streaming plans, but only plans that offer a discount on the industry standard rate of ten dollars a month.
Given that streaming is a revenue share business for the music industry – in that streaming platforms commit to share the monies they generate from subscription sales with the labels, distributors, publishers and collecting societies they negotiate deals with – the price point charged for those subscriptions is very relevant for the music community.
In most markets the baseline subscription price – so ten dollars, pounds or euros – has remained unchanged since subscription streaming first took off in the late 2000s. Given inflation, that means the value of those subscriptions has declined. Plus lots of services have used discounting and bundling to grow their user bases.
With all that in mind, an increasing number of people in the music community have been calling for subscription prices to increase, at least in line with inflation. Spotify has instigated some price increases in some markets, especially around its discounted and bundled packages.
And now Amazon is following that lead. The increases in some markets relate to customers who get a discount on their monthly music subscription because they are also part of Amazon’s Prime scheme or because they only access music on one Alexa powered device.
US Prime members previously paid $7.99 for their music subscriptions, and that is rising to $8.99. Meanwhile the single device plan is increasing from $3.99 to $4.99. Similar price increases are happening in some other markets.
