What does bricking the units do for them? That's super shitty.

Yeah, that thing costed $200 and came out just a couple of years ago. Seems like a shitty thing to do because they don't want to keep their servers up. At least giving folks who bought it a year of Spotify Premium as compensation seems reasonable.

I love Spotify as well but this is indeed shitty. I'm glad that I hadn't even heard of this device, there's a chance that I might have gotten one and then have this happen.

Offering refunds now

https://www.engadget.com/spotify-now...193001487.html

Is this why i got an email, about prices going up.

Sounds like it was just for Data Collection on American Users. They got what they wanted and are done with the project.

Yep, "we lost our budget for data mining so we're pulling the plug."

Damn, Spotify Premium is jumping from $16.99 to $19.99 / mo starting next month. That's a pretty huge increase. I don't love that. I prefer Tidal for Streaming music anyway since their audio quality is way better in the Tesla.

That’s the family plan, yeah?
My individual plan is going up to $11.99.
I’m still getting Hulu for free with my sub, but it’s getting to the point where I’m considering dropping it entirely.

It is a big jump, but I still get a ton of value out of Spotify, especially now that they carry so many audiobooks and podcasts.

I was telling my son about how when I was his age and younger, I would buy an entire album/cassette/CD completely blind for $10 to $15 because I liked just one or two songs I heard on the radio. Then I tried to describe to him the sheet anger and anguish when the rest of the album sucked. He has zero clue how lucky he is that he can not only immediately stream almost every album in existence but also immediately stream every future release on release day.

For $20 bucks a month (between my wife, my son and me, it is $6.67 a person), it really is the value of the century. I always shake my head when I read people who bitch about it. Most have no clue what they are getting for that piddly amount in comparison to just 20+ years ago.

And just think...in 1990 a $10 cassette would be $24 today. A $15 dollar CD would be $35.99! Yikes!

Except CDs are still $13-15 today. They literally stayed the same for 30 years.

Agreed. Back in the 80s I would have jumped at the chance for paying around twenty bucks a month for being able to listen to almost anything I wanted, rather than spending $15-20 CDN for metal albums that I bought soley based on magazine reviews (the stuff I was listening to was never played on the radio, and this includes bands like Metallica back then, so I hadn't even heard a single song before buying those albums). Lots of money wasted on duds, I would happily have paid even $50 a month for something like Spotify, instead of blind buying an album or two a week, and that's in 1980s dollars.

Vinyl used to be $10, and now run $30 to $40. I like that Blu-ray audio is starting to take off, hopefully it'll do better than DVD Audio and Super Audio did. The new Nightwish album is being released in blu-ray audio as an option, first time I've seen that on a new release. Bugged me that metal bands were focused on getting cassettes as a day and date release options along with CD and Vinyl, but not looking at high resolution formats.

Umm...yeah. But that is not my point.

My point is that we were paying the equivalent of 36 bucks on a single blind buy CD 30 years ago. Now people bitch about having to pay 20 bucks a month and have every shred of music at their fingertips.

I just wish the movie/TV streaming platform was like music platforms. One streaming service and you have access to everything. You just pick your service. Streaming music nowadays is the biggest bang for everyone's buck.