Spotify's new 'Basic' plan in the US is here, and it's really just the old Premium plan

At the beginning of this month, Spotify increased the price of its Premium plan by $1.00, going from $10.99 monthly to $11.99 monthly. The main reason for this price jump was the recent introduction of audiobook support on the platform. With the “new” Premium plan, you get 15 hours of audiobook listening time per month.

The problem is that users who don’t care about audiobooks suddenly are paying more for a service they don’t use. Well, Spotify is now offering a solution in the United States with its new Spotify Basic plan. The Basic plan costs $10.99 each month and only includes music and podcasts.

Wait a minute — that’s just the old Premium plan with the same old price!

We’re not really sure why Spotify chose to do things this way. Why didn’t it launch a new plan that included audiobooks with a slight upcharge and then give people the option of switching? Instead, it forced everyone on Premium to pay more, and now they need to manually switch down to Basic if they don’t want audiobooks. Oh, wait — I just answered my own question.

Regardless of Spotify’s sneaky moves here, it is nice to see that people who were upset about the price increase have an option to get things back to normal with this new Basic plan.

This probably isn’t the only new Spotify plan we’ll see this year. A years-in-the-making tier is probably coming in 2024 that will provide users access to lossless audio, which will be of higher quality than the compressed tracks Spotify Basic and Premium subscribers get. However, Spotify might be too late to the game by the time this so-called “Hi-Fi” tier launches, considering Apple Music’s entire catalog is lossless and doesn’t require more money to access it.