Spotify Premium Review: Lossless Arrived, the Price Rose Twice, and Nineteen Acts Walked

Individual Premium is 12.99 dollars after two increases in nineteen months. Lossless audio shipped at no extra cost in September 2025, and will not travel over Bluetooth.

Spotify Premium costs more than it did two years ago and does more than it did last year, and those two facts are less connected than the price notice implied. Music Business Worldwide recorded the individual plan moving from 10.99 to 11.99 dollars in July 2024, then from 11.99 to 12.99 in February 2026. In between, lossless audio arrived at no extra charge after a decade of delay. The harder question is not whether 12.99 dollars is fair for the listening. It is what the listening funds at the other end.

Twelve ninety-nine, after two rises in nineteen months

The current US line-up is 12.99 dollars for Individual, 18.99 for Duo, 21.99 for Family and 6.99 for Student. Spotify announced those figures on 15 January 2026 and applied them from February, adding a dollar to the individual and student plans and two dollars each to Duo and Family. Music Business Worldwide described it as the second US increase in roughly eighteen months.

The distribution is worth pausing on. A single listener absorbed one dollar; a household on Family absorbed two, for exactly the same catalogue and the same features. Spotify’s public framing was that the change was needed to keep delivering a great experience and to continue offering the best possible experience and benefit artists, which is a sentence that does a lot of work and commits to nothing measurable. No further US increase has been recorded between February 2026 and today.

For anyone choosing between plans, the Duo arithmetic is the part worth checking. Two people sharing Duo pay 9.50 dollars each against 12.99 alone, which makes the individual plan the worst value in the range, and neither of the last two increases changed that ranking.

Lossless shipped on 10 September 2025 and will not travel over Bluetooth

Spotify’s newsroom announced lossless listening on 10 September 2025 at up to 24-bit, 44.1 kHz FLAC, included in Premium at no extra cost. That last detail is the genuinely surprising one. A decade of reporting had assumed lossless would arrive as a separate high-priced tier, and it did not: existing subscribers got it inside the plan they already had. It launched in twelve markets including the US and UK and reached more than fifty by 6 October 2025.

The limitation is stated by Spotify itself and it is a large one. Lossless does not work over Bluetooth, because, in the company’s words, Bluetooth does not provide enough bandwidth to transmit lossless audio. Spotify’s recommendation is Wi-Fi with wired headphones or speakers, or a Spotify Connect device; support at launch covered hardware from Sony, Bose, Samsung and Sennheiser, with Sonos and Amazon added the following month. Most people listen on wireless earbuds, so the headline improvement of the past two years does not reach the majority of the subscribers paying for it.

The rollout itself was quicker than Spotify’s record suggested. Twelve launch markets on 10 September 2025 became more than fifty by 6 October, and Sonos and Amazon hardware picked it up in the same window. After a decade in which a lossless tier was rumoured and never shipped, delivering it inside the existing price was the least predictable thing Spotify has done recently.

Fifteen hours of audiobooks, and what Spotify will not confirm

The audiobook allowance announced in October 2023 gave Premium subscribers fifteen hours of listening a month from a catalogue PhoneArena reported at more than 150,000 titles. Fifteen hours is roughly one and a half average-length books, which makes it a useful supplement rather than a replacement for a dedicated audiobook subscription.

It is also the part of the product where the public record has gone quiet. We could not confirm from a current Spotify page whether the fifteen-hour cap or the catalogue size has changed since launch, and Spotify does not publish an updated figure in an obvious place. Anyone choosing Premium primarily for books should verify the allowance at sign-up rather than trusting a three-year-old announcement, this review included.

Fifteen hours is also a monthly allowance living inside a music app rather than a bookshelf, competing for attention with everything else in the same interface. As a bonus attached to a music subscription it is a genuine one. As the reason to pay 12.99 dollars a month it is thin, and a committed listener will run through it inside a fortnight.

The ghost artists in the playlists

The most serious journalism about Spotify in recent years is Liz Pelly’s investigation in the January 2025 issue of Harper’s Magazine, adapted from her book Mood Machine. It describes an internal programme called Perfect Fit Content, which Harper’s summarises as packing playlists with stock music from ghost artists, licensed cheaply in order to hold royalty costs down.

For a paying subscriber the allegation is not abstract. Premium is a flat fee against a pooled payout, so the question of which tracks a platform has a financial reason to place in front of a passive listener is a question about where that fee ends up. Nothing in the lossless upgrade addresses it. A better-sounding stream of a cheaply licensed instrumental is still a cheaply licensed instrumental.

Nineteen acts pulled their catalogues over the Helsing investment

In 2025 Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek led an investment of about 1.07 billion dollars, through his firm Prima Materia, in Helsing, a German defence-technology company building AI-driven autonomous weapons and military drones. Musicians responded by removing their music. Stereogum’s year-in-review count put the total at nineteen acts across 2025, and the departures ran from late June to late September:

• Kalahari Oyster Cult, 26 June 2025
• Deerhoof, 30 June 2025, who said they did not want their music killing people
• Leah Senior, 1 July 2025, and Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice, 3 July 2025
• Xiu Xiu, 24 July 2025, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, 25 July 2025
• David Bridie, 31 July 2025, and Hotline TNT, 22 August 2025
• Massive Attack, 17 September 2025, and Deradoorian, 24 September 2025

What all of this means for a subscriber deciding today

Nineteen departures out of a catalogue of tens of millions of tracks is statistically trivial and practically annoying, because the gaps are not random. Massive Attack and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are not obscure, and a listener who cares about either has a specific hole in the service they pay for. Anyone whose taste sits in that part of the map should search for their five most-played artists before renewing.

For everyone else the honest verdict is narrow. At 12.99 dollars, with lossless included, Premium is better value than it was at 11.99 without it, and the catalogue and recommendation engine remain the reason most people are there. The reservations are not about sound quality or price. They are about a platform whose own investigative coverage raises questions about what it puts in front of you, and whose chief executive’s other investments have already cost it artists.

Sources: Music Business Worldwide · Spotify Newsroom · PhoneArena · Harper’s Magazine · Stereogum