I was literally having this conversation the night before the email arrived. My other half and I were doing that thing couples periodically do, sitting down and questioning whether we actually need everything we’re paying for each month. We pay for both YouTube Premium and Spotify, which, when you think about it for more than thirty seconds, is a bit ridiculous. YouTube Premium includes YouTube Music. So on paper, we’re doubling up.
Then the Spotify email lands. Our Duo plan, Spotify Premium for two people, is going from €16.99 to €18.99. It was €14.99 two years ago. That’s a 26% increase in two years, with no meaningful change to what you’re actually getting for that money beyond audiobooks I don’t listen to and podcasts I could get elsewhere.
For individual plan customers, you can expect €11.99 to become €12.99.
For some, it’s not a crisis. For other’s, it’s the breaking point. The breaking point I recently reached with Virgin Media, cancelling after over ten years with them because of another price increase. Death by a thousand cuts; I’ve said it so often.
The value question nobody wants to answer
Here’s the thing with Spotify. The product is genuinely good. The recommendations are excellent, the interface is smooth, and if you’ve been a user for years, your Wrapped data and curated playlists have become oddly personal. That’s not an accident. The longer you stay, the more friction there is to leave. Your listening history, your playlists, your routines, all of it is quietly working against the part of your brain that’s weighing up whether €18.99 is worth it.
This isn’t Spotify going from cheap to slightly less cheap. It’s a service that’s had multiple price increases in just a few years, and users aren’t seeing new features that justify the trajectory. The same core product, progressively more expensive, with Spotify’s own justification that it benefits artists doing very little to convince anyone who’s read anything about per-stream payouts.
Where YouTube Premium actually makes sense
Back to our situation. YouTube Premium costs €25.99 a month for a family plan, which sounds steep until you do the maths. Divided between two people, that’s around €13 each. It covers YouTube Music for both of us, removes ads across all of YouTube and YouTube Kids, and lets you play video in the background on mobile (achievable in other ways, but the most straight forward way).
Don’t underestimate the quality of life change that removing ads brings. If you use YouTube at all regularly, removing ads is transformative. I’m always briefly shocked when I use a browser without it and get ambushed by a fifteen-second ad before a two-minute video. The ad experience on YouTube without Premium has become aggressively bad, and that alone carries serious weight in the value calculation.
YouTube Music, to be fair, is not Spotify. The recommendations aren’t as refined. The social features and podcast integration don’t compare. But it works, it’s included in something we’re already paying for, and if you’re even a casual listener rather than a dedicated audiophile, it covers most use cases. Recently, I even had the experience of finding something on YouTube Music that was removed, for some reason, from Spotify.
The subscription creep problem
This isn’t really just about Spotify. It’s about the broader pattern that Spotify represents. We’ve gradually moved from owning media to renting access to it, and each individual subscription looks manageable until you add them all up. Music, video, cloud storage, gaming, productivity tools, the lot.
Speaking of gaming, I’ve written about this exact dynamic with Xbox Game Pass pricing in Ireland, which went up dramatically, triggered a wave of cancellations, and has since come partially back down. That cycle of hike, backlash and partial retreat tells you something important. These companies are testing how much friction they can introduce before people actually leave, and the answer is usually “quite a lot.”
But again, it’s death by a thousand cuts. In the past 12 months I’ve seen nearly every subscription I have increase with no respect to the price I signed up at or with loyalty being rewarded.
So are we actually going to cancel?
In this household, it’s very likely that this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back and leaves us giving YouTube Music a real shot. But I appreciate that most see the price of YouTube Premium and can’t justify it alone for “just removing ads”, not realising that Music is included too.
You’ll see plenty mentioning that they are returning to sailing the seven seas. This is in reference to piracy. Some will argue that Spotify’s model of you paying, but never owning anything means you can never steal it – if buying its owning, piracy isn’t stealing. As much as I love the sentiment of taking down “big streaming”, I can’t condone illegally downloading and stealing revenue from artists. It’s also simply just not that straight forward to start downloading music en masse to make your own Spotify, even if you are savvy with terms like “Lidarr” and “Plexamp”.
The hilarity of the scenario is that Spotify’s own foundations were based in piracy, and the company’s success moved many away from piracy by making music affordable and accessible. But you live long enough as a hero, you always become the villan.
The result is many with shift the questioning of their monthly Spotify sub from passive to active.
For us, the YouTube Premium family plan stays. The ad-free YouTube experience alone justifies it, and the music streaming is a bonus rather than the main draw. Tonight, a quick spot check of artists and content to ensure everything is on YouTube Music before we say goodbye to our Wrapped algorithm. Spotify is the one now sitting on the chopping block. Instead of the company making €2 extra per month from us, they’re losing €16.99 per month. Those maths matter, but only if others follow.
