Spotify is telling these subscribers that at the end of their next billing period their account will “automatically switch to our Free, ad-supported service… 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 on to the Free account.” If the subscriber decides that he wants to rejoin the Premium tier, he will then have to decide how to pay for the Premium service using a payment method that Spotify accepts including credit cards and PayPal.
Spotify will no longer allow even grandfathered Premium subscribers to pay for service via the App Store
A Spotify rep said that it informed “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.”
As it turns out, only a small number of Spotify’s Premiumn subscribers pay for their subscriptions through the App Store A regulatory filing from 2019 revealed that Apple took a 15% cut on only 680,000 Spotify Premium subscribers compared to the more than 100 million Premium tier members that the streamer had.