At this point Spotify offers less than competitors with Spotify hi-fi being a bunch of imaginary bullshit. I only subscribe to spotify when they offer me 3 months for the price of one.
What competitors do you recommend?
I use soundcloud and have used Bandcamp but Bandcamp got sold to Epic.
I have also heard of Faircamp which looks promising.
I switched to a TIDAL subscription a couple of months ago. The whole experience, apart from sound quality, is a downgrade from Spotify Premium. I still recommend it to people because supposedly they pay a better cut per stream to artists. The sound quality upgrade is quite noticable if you have good sound gear.
I like Apple Music and would use them if it wasn't so god damned difficult to upload my own music. I have an eclectic collection of music and though, to be fair, I haven't listened to a lot of it in a while, I would still like the option. Being on Linux there is no iTunes option and getting it to run under Wine hasn't worked for me. So right now I use YouTube Music because it's so easy. I may switch to Plex now that I have a decent internet connection.
They can't exactly afford to go higher than the round 10 we have a month. It will cost them a lot of customers just from the sheer inconvenience caused by the change in gift cards.
This effect would happen even at just 1 cent above the convenient pricing. That means if they increase the price, they have to make up for the immediate loss of "convenience users" which means higher price again which leads to an exponential spiral.
We are more likely to see ads being forced into Spotify premium.
A higher price I can stand but ads in a paid service? If they do that, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't just use ublock origin with Spotify on the web or a modded APK instead.