While Apple is reported to be negotiating with record companies to drop the subscription price of a revamped Beats Music service down to $5 per month, Spotify has effectively dropped the price of its streaming music service by giving family members of subscribers a 50% price cut.
So if you have a $10 Spotify Premium subscription, your husband can get one for $5 a month.
Spotify says the new pricing will rollout globally over the next few weeks. The company says it currently has more than 10 million paid subscribers, and 40 million listeners overall.
Spotify’s move indicates that it agrees with Apple’s belief that if paid music subscription numbers are going to grow much more, prices will have to go lower.
Apple has been pushing the labels to drop their prices for streaming music, as it wants to relaunch its recently acquired Beats Music service with a $5 per month subscription plan.
While $10 is the music industry standard for a monthly music streaming subscription, that’s twice the $5 per month that Apple says even its best iTunes buyers spend buying music. If a music streaming service were available at that price level, theoretically any music buyers that switched to the streaming model would generate just as much income as before. And the subscriber numbers should grow much larger.
Apple is bound to face resistance from the record labels, who are just now getting used to the fact that streaming services can generate income on a large scale. They’re likely not to want to drop subscription prices down to $5 immediately. Re/code suggests a more Netflix-like $8 per month might be more comfortable initially.
