One little R5 increase we can handle. But a second, much larger hike only a couple of months later? Yeah, we’re good, thanks, Spotify. The music streaming giant recently reworked its subscription model, adding a new ‘Premium Platinum’ tier into the mix, which adds Spotify’s “lossless” audio and audiobooks for South Africa.
That we can handle, even at the proposed R180/m price. It seems like a fairly good deal, offering three accounts (R60/m for each), lossless audio, offline listening, twelve hours of audiobook listening, AI DJ, and AI playlist creation. It comes at a hefty cost for Spotify’s other tiers, which include Premium Student, Premium Lite, and Premium Standard. Oh, and it’s axed the ‘Duo’ tier, which offered a discounted rate for two Premium accounts.
It was fun while it lasted, Spotify
South Africa has awaited these features for quite some time, though many had hoped they would be limited to a more expensive tier, rather than hiking prices and removing features from cheaper tiers. The new pricing has already gone into effect locally, joining the likes of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, India, and Indonesia.
The new tiers work as follows:
- Premium Student (R48/m) – Includes access to one ‘Premium Standard’ account for a discounted rate, offering ‘very high audio quality’ (up to ∼320kbps) and the ability to listen offline.
- Premium Lite (R70/m) – Includes access to one ‘Lite’ account, offering ‘high audio quality’ (up to ∼160kbps)
- Premium Standard (R95/m) – Includes access to one ‘Standard account’, offering ‘very high audio quality’ (up to ∼320kbps) and the ability to listen offline.
- Premium Platinum (R180/m) – Includes access to three ‘Platinum accounts’ at the same address, offering ‘lossless audio quality ‘ (up to 24-bit/44.1kHz), the ability to download and listen offline, 12 hours of audiobook listening (for the account owner), AI playlist creation, AI DJ, Spotify Jams, and the power to mix your playlists.
Both Spotify’s lossless audio and audiobook access are among the most highly requested features. You can see what we think of Spotify’s definition of “lossless” here, but we’re keen to see how the audiobooks fare. Access is reserved for the ‘Premium Platinum’ account holder — which makes splitting the bill three ways a little trickier. You’re also only getting 12 hours of access per month, with 10-hour top-ups available.
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In a bid to get more folks involved, Spotify is offering its Premium Student and Standard plans for free to newcomers for the first month, allowing them to trial the app before inevitably making the jump elsewhere. Somewhere with blackjack and hookers proper lossless, and a cheaper entry point.
“The Premium Platinum plan is designed to deliver the ultimate Spotify experience and will see us launch several new product features in South Africa,” the platform said in a release to Hypertext.
“This is an evolution of our Premium subscriptions portfolio and reflects the engagement insights we’re seeing across our platform. While Spotify has become even more central to people’s lives, those behaviors aren’t universal – so we’re introducing options that consistently meet more of users’ needs, with local strategies aligned to each market,” it continued.
