Video-on-demand service Discovery+ now costs more in the United States.
The platform, which offers a catalog of over 70,000 ‘real life’ TV shows, will from today (January 7) charge subscribers USD $9.99 per month for an ad-free experience. (Those happy to sit through advertising can pay $5.99 per month for the ad-supported tier.)
Discovery+, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, was launched in 2021 at a $6.99 monthly ad-free price point. That price was previously raised in 2023, to $8.99 per month.
None of this has a lot to do with the music industry, of course. Except… it also kinda does.
Let’s just focus on Spotify for one second. The Daniel Ek-run service has been available in the US for nearly 14 years since launching in July 2011.
Yet during this near-decade-and-a-half, SPOT has only raised its Premium Individual price two times:
- In 2023, the same year Discovery+ upped its price by $2 per month, Spotify raised its price by $1 per month – from $9.99pm to $10.99pm;
- Then, in 2024, Spotify raised this price by a further $1 to $11.99pm. (This ‘Premium Individual’ tier now includes audiobooks plus music, a ‘bundle’ offering that Spotify has used to reduce the proportion of its revenues that it pays US songwriters in mechanical royalties.)
In TV and film land, an array of subscription streaming services have increased their prices multiple times in recent years, pushing subscribers’ monthly charges upwards.
For example: Netflix has raised the Stateside subscription price of its ‘Standard’ streaming tier SIX times since it launched in 2011 (the same year Spotify came to the US). It now costs $15.49 per month.
In other words, a Netflix ‘Standard’ subscriber in the US will fork out $42 more per year today than they would for a Spotify ‘Individual Premium’ subscription (at $11.99 per month).
Meanwhile, an ad-free individual Premium monthly subscription to Disney+ will set you back USD $15.99 in the States today.
That’s more than double the price that Disney’s service charged when it launched in 2019… at $6.99 per month.
Below, MBW has compiled a chart showing the timeline of price rises at various SVOD (subscription video on demand) services over the past decade.
You can see how it might leave some figures in the music industry clamoring for Spotify et al to follow suit…
In the audio-visual world, they have a name for the phenomenon depicted above – where rival platforms repeatedly increase their prices, inspiring their competitors to do the same.
They call it streamflation.
This is obviously a reference to the elephant in the room: the negative impact of monetary inflation on the ‘real value’ of each dollar spent by the US consumer.
Case in point: the $9.99 it would have cost you to subscribe to Spotify when it launched in the US in summer 2011 is today worth… $13.96 (source: the US Consumer Price Index.)
Therefore, Spotify’s current ‘Premium Individual’ price ($11.99pm) simply hasn’t kept up with the price of inflation since the service launched in the States.
Will the SVOD ‘streamflation’ price rise trend at services like Discovery+ now inspire Spotify, and its music-oriented rivals, to once again hike their prices in 2025?
Eyes peeled…Music Business Worldwide
