In that case, seems like their only other option is to raise rates slower but they are still required to raise the rates because they are not making money and not growing. Raising rates and not adding new features will likely reverse their growth. How would you feel if there were price hikes yet nothing has changed or improved? Again there is no real value add in your scenario so the customers can jump to a competing service and suffer no real loss. The podcasts are clearly helping to solve growing problem and thats at least a little bit better than not making money AND not growing.

The value they have is music recommendation and spotify wrapped. Apple recently added their karaoke mode.Tidal has great quality. There are plenty of new music related features that they can add. I, as a consumer, sign up for music streaming to stream music. I don't value a podcast moat, so I use a competing service that is more inline with my needs.

Plenty of services are rising their prices and lowering their offerings (HBO, I am looking at you). Which is also trash, and I am allowed to make value judgements on those as well.

If you love podcasts, and need your Joe Rogan, then spotify is for you.

Sadly, Spotify is both hurting the podcast ecosystem AND a crappy podcast player -- much worse than PocketCasts, OverCast, or even Apple Podcasts if I'm being honest.

It's like the executives decided to force podcasts into a music player. All the podcast value adds like gap trimming, adjustable playback speed, slight rewind on restarts that last longer than a few seconds... they've omitted.