We May Be Reaching Peak Streaming Subscription
By Bobby Owsinski from Music 3.0
Scroll around the internet and you’ll find a lot of grumbling about subscription prices. Nowadays, everything is a subscription – audio streaming, video streaming, gaming, software, plugins, workstations, AI models, and no doubt several other categories I can’t think of right now.
Every time a subscription monthly price is raised, a lot of people start wondering where it will end.
Recently YouTube raised its subscription prices as well, and many are watching to see if that might finally be the one that causes internet users to say, “No more!” We may be hitting the point of “peak streaming subscription.”
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The Prices Go Up
YouTube isn’t just raising its price on one plan, it’s raising prices across all of its subscriptions. For instnace, the YouTube Premium Individual plan is increasing from $13.99 to $15.99 per month, while the Family plan, which covers up to six accounts, is climbing from $22.99 to $26.99 per month.
The YouTube Music Individual plan is rising from $10.99 to $11.99 per month, with the YouTube Music Family plan going from $16.99 to $18.99 per month.
YouTube Premium Lite, a lower-cost tier that provides ad-free viewing on most content but excludes music videos, is also increasing by $1, from $7.99 to $8.99 per month.
It’s Only a Buck
Now you might think, “It’s only a buck,” and that’s no doubt what YouTube is thinking, but here’s the thing – in March, Netflix raised the monthly prices for all its plans by $1-$2 per month, while Amazon Prime Video raised the cost to remove ads by $2 per month. Before that, Spotify raised the cost of its core plan to $12.99 in January.
When you add all of those up, that’s less than 10 bucks a month, but it’s the timing and psychological factors in play here that could cause users to begin to examine all their subscriptions. When that happens, they select only the ones that they truly find useful, where before they might have happily continue to pay for services they don’t use that much.
Clipping off a streamer or two might end up meaning that extra tank of gas each month that you need if you’re on a fixed income, so I wouldn’t be surprised if users began looking more closely at what they’re subscribing to. Of course, nothing gets you to look at your finances more closely than tax time, which we’re in right now.
When Subscriptions Make Sense
There are times when subscription makes total sense however.
For a software developer, the steady monthly income allows them to continue to do updates and improvements, which also makes sense for the user, since they receive ongoing value.
For a streamer, it’s just like a utility like the electric or gas company as it helps pay for the massive infrastructure involved. But unlike a utility where you pay only for what you use, audio and video streamers charge a flat fee per month. How that money gets distributed is worth an entire discussion (which you’ll find in many places online already) which will just take us off point here.
The fact of the matter is that almost everyone is surprised when they take a personal inventory of exactly how much they pay each month in subscriptions (hint: it’s never lower than you expect).
The $1-$2 extra for YouTube every month might just make subscribers wonder whether they could get by with free version instead. And they might even delete some other streaming services while they’re at it.
The day of the subscription is not over, but the day of peak streaming subscription might just be at hand.
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