You don’t need to be anywhere near your pennies to realize that. Whether it’s to listen to your favorite music or watch your favorite series, the prices of your subscriptions to streaming platforms have not escaped general inflation.
An even more significant increase for those who pay for multiple subscriptions to be able to juggle platform-specific exclusivities. But how much have those prices risen exactly? Tech&Co did the math (taking January 2019, the launch year of Disney+, as a starting point).
• Music (Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music)
If you listen to your music on Spotify, you may have thought that you could escape these price hikes. But the ax fell this summer: the leading platform in the streaming music market raised the price of its monthly offer in July 2023. The basic subscription went from 9.99 euros per month to 10.99 euros per month in France, an increase of 10%.
A leap that does nothing more than align the prices of the Swedish company with those of its main competitors: among them, the French Deezer was the first to increase the cost of its monthly offer, once again going from 9.99 euros per month to 10 99 euros in January 2022. For its part, Apple Music had already followed in October 2022, and Amazon Music Unlimited closed the march in August 2023, both with the same prices.
• Series and movies (Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+)
It is on the side of the series and movie platforms where we find the greatest increases. But depending on the number of screens, the quality of the image, the presence or absence of ads… sometimes it is difficult to navigate between the different offers.
Let’s start with the market leader, Netflix, which is also a champion in number of uploads: the platform has increased its prices twice since January 2019. If you pay the Standard offer monthly, your direct debits have increased from €10.99 to € 11.99 in June 2019, then €13.49 in August 2021, for a total increase of 23%. For the Premium offer, it is even 29% (from €13.99 to €15.99, then €17.99).
The price of the Essential offer, now hidden on the Netflix website, increased only once in August 2021 from €7.99 to €8.99 per month, an increase of 12.5%. The most recent offering, Ad-supported Essentials, was not affected by these price increases.
Subscribers to the Amazon Prime monthly offer, which includes access to the Prime Video streaming service, experienced a 17% increase, going from 5.99 euros to 6.99 euros in September 2022, which also includes the access to other Amazon group services.
Finally, if you pay for a Disney+ subscription, you have not experienced a price increase… For now. Because the company will soon increase your monthly payment by 33% if you’re not careful: the current offer of €8.99 will drop to €11.99 in November 2023. If you want to maintain the current price, you will have to settle for 2 screens in instead of 4, and abandon 4K for 1080p.
These variations obviously depend on the type of offer you subscribe to, and there are many tricks to pay less for access to these platforms: annual subscription, family or student offer. But whatever your subscription, you’re probably paying more for it than you were 4 years ago.
Source: BFM TV
