A new report about Spotify’s plans for a more expensive premium tier claims that Apple is considering doing the same, but Apple Music has no reason to ever copy its streaming rival.
The days of Spotify being the most popular streaming music service in the world and yet constantly losing money, may be over. The days of Spotify trying to get the EU to force Apple into giving it an unreasonably better deal, may never change.
But a new report says that amongst Spotify’s plans for the near future, there is the likelihood that it will introduce a new and more expensive subscription tier. Bloomberg says the new tier would, for a start, offer better quality audio — which Apple Music already does as standard.
There is also the idea that through subscribing to this more expensive Spotify tier, users could get concert tickets. They could also get tools to edit songs, which for enraging artists and record labels has got to be right up there with how Spotify still pays musicians far less than Apple Music ever has.
Spotify will do what it needs to and maybe concert tickets will be a good thing. Certainly better quality audio would be overdue.
But the same report then goes on to claim that both Amazon and Apple are looking to do the same thing. It’s not as specific about what they’d offer, and it says the plans are at such an early stage they may never happen.
Yet reportedly, Apple is considering introducing a new and more expensive Apple Music subscription tier. Especially given that all Apple Music tiers get the same better audio than Spotify, it’s hard to see what else could be offered.
There’s Apple Music, Apple Music for students, Apple Music for families. There doesn’t seem to be much left, short of Apple Music for pets.
Although, if the report were that instead it was the Apple One bundle — which includes Apple Music — then there might be something here. A higher Apple One tier could include more iCloud storage than at present, and maybe that would be offered at a better rate than at present.
But for a straight Apple Music subscription, there’s no headroom for anything else — even if Apple wanted to emulate Spotify.
Apple does not want to emulate Spotify. This Apple Music rival is vastly more popular than Apple’s offering and doubtlessly Tim Cook would be happy to overtake it.
But since this is Tim Cook’s Apple, you know that financially Apple Music is and always has been on rock or at least pop solid footing. Even paying out more to artists, Apple Music is not going to be losing Apple cash.
Apple Music is doing fine, artists aren’t really doing fine out of it but they’re doing better than with rivals. So Apple Music can just keep on doing exactly what it does right now.
The service doesn’t tend to sit still, though. It has introduced a whole Apple Music Classical app, for instance.
And then Apple has reportedly offered artists financial incentives to remix their albums using Spatial Audio.
Unless there’s something else coming to Apple audio, it seems unlikely that there’s going to be a new Apple Music tier. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any price rise, though, as it’s now over two years since Apple hiked up the cost of Apple Music, Apple One, and most of its services.
