If you’re a longtime Spotify Premium subscriber, your account could be set for a shake-up. Spotify is ending all support for payments made via Apple’s App Store billing system, and consequently, some subscribers are slated to get the boot.
If you signed up for Premium through the App Store, and make your monthly payments via Apple’s billing service, then Spotify will soon downgrade you to a free, ad-based account. To access Premium again, you’ll need to re-subscribe using a different payment method, according to an email sent to a subset of Spotify users and as first reported by Variety.
“We’re contacting you because when you joined Spotify Premium you used Apple’s billing service to subscribe. Unfortunately, we no longer accept that billing method as a form of payment,” Spotify wrote in its notice email, which has been going out to relevant subscribers in recent days. At the end of these customers’ last billing period, Spotify has said it will automatically switch them to free accounts. “If you wish to keep your Premium subscription, you will need to re-subscribe after your last billing period has ended and your account has been moved,” the company added.
In a statement to Variety and TechCrunch, Spotify further confirmed this news. “We recently began notifying a small number of users that a legacy payment method, that their Premium account is attached to, is being deprecated. Users notified by email will automatically move to a Free account from their next billing cycle. Users will then have the option to upgrade to a Premium account by logging into their account at Spotify.com. These actions will help ensure that we can continue to provide a consistent best-in-class subscription experience for all our users,” a company spokesperson wrote.
It is unclear if, in this process, Premium subscribers will lose downloaded content or if there’s any way for these users to get ahead of the change before Spotify downgrades their accounts. Gizmodo reached out to Spotify with questions but did not hear back by publication time.
Spotify users were only able to sign up for Premium accounts through the App Store billing system for about two years between 2014 and 2016, per TechCrunch. So this change will just impact the relatively small number of legacy account holders who registered during that window through the App Store. According to a previous regulatory filing from 2021, these account holders made up just 680,000 of Spotify’s 100 million+ Premium subscribers — about 1% of its subscriber base at the time. More recently, Spotify’s Premium userbase has grown to over 200 million subscribers, according to the company’s most recent earnings report.
The music streaming giant has long opposed and publicly fought against the fees levied by Apple through the App Store. Apple charges a commission on all transactions completed through its billing system. Seven years ago, in an attempt to get out of those fees, Spotify nixed the ability for users to sign up for Premium accounts via Apple’s billing system. This new change is simply a continuation of Spotify’s ongoing protest against the App Store payment policies.
In 2019, Spotify filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission over the so-called “Apple tax,” claiming that Apple had taken up to 30% of user payments through its fees and forced Spotify to raise consumer prices. In response, the EU charged Apple with antitrust violations in 2021.