Spotify and YouTube are testing low

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Music streaming services on an iPhone: More and more providers are vying for subscribers

Photo: Jenny Kane / AP

Youtube, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, TV Now, Apple Music, Joyn or Disney Plus - the list of streaming providers vying for customers goes on and on. Since many cannot afford an unlimited number of services, some providers are now experimenting with new pricing models. Shortly after YouTube, Spotify has now apparently started such a test: Individual users are offered new monthly subscriptions at a greatly reduced price. In Germany, both offers are not yet available to general customers.

According to the US magazine "The Verge", the music streaming service Spotify is offering its new "Spotify Plus" offer at different prices at the same time: A user reports an offer price of 99 US cents per month - one tenth of the standard tariff.

But other users had to pay more.

Cheaper subscriptions with less convenience

There is only a limited service for the low price: Subscribers continue to receive advertisements between individual pieces of music, but they can select individual pieces of music and skip pieces as often as they want.

This is not possible with the purely advertising-financed free offer from Spotify.

Shortly before, a similar experiment from YouTube had become known.

The video portal is currently offering certain users in several European countries a new subscription level called "Premium Lite".

Subscribers can stream ad-free videos for seven euros per month.

The restriction: users have to forego music videos and certain functions such as playing in the background.

YouTube and Spotify have apparently only been testing the offer on a limited group of users so far.

However, there is no guarantee that the reduced-price offers will actually one day be included in the standard offerings of the platforms.

It is also not certain whether these contracts will be offered at the same price in all countries.

But they fit into the current concept of both providers.

Spotify is currently expanding its own advertising business in order to supplement its income with subscriptions.

In the second quarter of 2021, the platform was able to more than double its advertising revenue to 275 million euros year-on-year.

In the same period, income from subscriptions rose by 17 percent to just over 2 billion euros.

YouTube, on the other hand, is trying to add paid services to its previously largely advertising-financed offer.

Just two weeks ago, the platform added the Super Thanks option, which fans can use to send YouTubers between $ 2 and $ 50.

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