Streaming music and podcast platform LiveOne says it is moving forward with a price increase that will help it support new and innovative features on the service.
Moving forward, the annual cost of LiveOne Plus will be $40 per year, up $4 from its prior price. LiveOne Plus offers aggregated music feeds without advertising, similar to SiriusXM’s Pandora Plus, along with podcasts from its former brand PodcastOne and third parties.
Additionally, the cost of LiveOne Premium — which offers the ability to stream tracks and albums on-demand — will rise to $11 per month, a $1 increase that matches the price of rival services Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music.
“Our latest price adjustment reflects the growing value of our music streaming and enables us to continue driving product innovation and deliver enhanced content experiences,” Robert Ellin, the CEO and Chairman of LiveOne, said in a statement. “We remain committed to offering some of the most competitive pricing in the music industry while providing an exceptional experience for our (business-to-consumer) and (business-to-business) customers.”
LiveOne didn’t offer additional insight into the product innovation that is coming down the line, but in an unpublished interview with The Desk earlier this year, Ellin said he was particularly excited to see the different ways the company could leverage artificial intelligence to bring more features to the platform in a way that engages its music and spoken word listeners.
“I’m a huge believer in the direction of where it’s going,” Ellin said. “I’m a huge believer in the combination of AI with human behavior and human decision.”
Ellin said the company was already experimenting with ways to translate English-language podcast content into Spanish, a complicated task that involves changing the dialect and tone to make it closely resemble the native spoken word. He also affirmed that a combination of AI and human strategy will lead to improvements in the user interface and experience of its apps, some of which are integrated into car infotainment systems.
“That’s not easy; we’re doing a lot of work in that area,” Ellin said, projecting that innovative uses of AI would help the company reach “over 10 million subscribers in the next five years” and help it earn “$1 billion in revenue” over the same amount of time.
