FWIW, today, at $12 per month, the service is trivially cheap and unsustainable. A coffee costs 5 bucks.
Complaining about price increases when a product is dirt cheap makes no sense. The price most people are willing to pay is much higher IMHO.
Spotify is actually a great value, but they keep making it worse and worse. If they had announced a price increase along side of an announcement of "we're doing this to compensate for the expected loss of income that will occur when we remove podcasts from the UI as we refocus on our core competency of delivering you amazing music and helping you discover amazing new music" we'd be cheering the price increase.
But no, the price will go up, and they'll F-up the UI even further to make it even harder to actually find music in it, and they still won't offer high quality streams.
"Get what you pay for" is fine, but what they're giving me is getting closer and closer to what I'd expect to get for free.
They have to do both: raise the price and deteriorate the service on their march to a sustainable value/price ratio.
I have both an Apple Music family plan as well as Spotify individual for several years, but will probably migrate off Spotify (if only to send a pricing signal to them). My kids have an iPad set up with my apple account, so I'll have to migrate them off to their own account first.
Spotify won't lose their core listeners, but folks like me who were probably already spending too much will realize they've wasted years of sparse usage.
If I find Apple Music isn't working I can always migrate back.
The number of people spending five or more dollars on a single cup of coffee can't possibly be so high that it brings the overall average to five dollars, could it?? That would make me sick.
FWIW is not even a particularly expensive place in the US.