It is very clear that the companies that offer streaming services are at a crucial moment. For this reason, and to face what the year 2023 can bring, there are many that are increasing prices compared to last year. One of those that has just taken the step is Amazon in its Music Unlimited service. We tell you exactly what is happening. The company created by Jeff Bezos itself has been in charge of communicating this to those who have an account of this type in the US and the United Kingdom, which at the moment are the two affected countries (it remains to be seen if the rest of the regions where it is provided the indicated service end up suffering the same fate). The fact is that this movement follows the steps that Apple took not long ago, which meant the moment in which other companies with cloud services began to increase the prices of what they offer (music, movies, series…) . Therefore, that was the turning point… except for Spotify, which remains unwavering for the moment in its pricing policy. An increase that is not crazy, but that is important. In the two places where the quota is raised in February 2023, the increase is one dollar and one pound. It is not something that makes you delete it from the platform immediately, but we are talking about more or less 10% compared to the price they had before… which is not bad at all. Thus, in the US and the UK, you go from paying 9.99 in their respective currencies, to having to deduct 10.99 from your account. Student rates suffer the same fate, by the way. Everything indicates that the market is undergoing a full-fledged readjustment for different reasons, but the fact is that it affects almost all companies that offer online access services. In the case of Amazon Music Unlimited, which allows access to the company’s complete catalog made up of more than 100 million songs with lossless CD quality, we are talking about the third player by market share in the US, where it has 13.3%. Therefore, we are facing one of the most important companies today after Spotify and Apple, respectively. Will there be a chain reaction? In the short term it does not seem likely that this will happen, but in the medium term it cannot be ruled out at all, since the moment in which we are experiencing is that of global market regulation and, when this occurs, everyone tries to protect themselves with the objective of to not have a bad time and end up being absorbed by a third party (looking back, the example of pizza chains is more than valid). One of the consequences of price changes on different platforms, such as video or Amazon’s own with music, has a very obvious danger: in the end, users seeing the costs of having several contract platforms will have to to choose. And, at that point, it’s virtually certain that more than one of the existing ones will now disappear because it will be completely unfeasible. It simply remains to be seen which ones survive. >
