

Current regulations allow digital music providers to pay a lower music royalty rate if their paid music subscription offering is bundled with other legitimate product offerings. Seeing an opportunity, Spotify has exploited this regulation by converting all Premium Plan music subscribers into a new, bundled subscription offering without consumers’ consent or any notice. Spotify’s intent seems clear—to slash the statutory royalties it pays to songwriters and music publishers.
Spotify has priced its Audiobook Access plan with 15 hours of listening time per month from a limited catalog of 200,000 audiobooks at $9.99/month. In contrast, Spotify’s music-only Basic Plan—which includes unlimited hours of listening from a catalog of over 100 million songs—is priced only a dollar more. Under the regulations, the higher the Audiobooks Access plan is priced, the lower the music royalty Spotify must pay.
You shouldn’t be “paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago” regardless of anything an executive has done. Be less lazy and cancel subscriptions to shitty services.
Also, if a CEO doing a bad thing is a dealbreaker for them, why the fuck are they on twitter?.