Spotify’s Free Plan Will Let Users Listen to the Songs They Want
Did you know you can set up Google to filter out junk? Follow these steps to improve your search results, including adding my work on Lifehacker as a preferred source .
Spotify is finally giving its free subscribers a feature they’ve been asking for since the music streaming platform launched nearly 20 years ago: the ability to listen to any song they want. That’s right: Gone are the days of searching for a song and then hitting “skip” until it shows up on a Spotify playlist.
Free users can select songs in three ways: via the search function, by clicking on any song in the Spotify interface, or by clicking on a link shared by other users. Free users can also listen to podcasts through Spotify, as well as create and listen to playlists. Spotify’s previous “six skips per hour” rule also appears to have been scrapped.
Of course, free Spotify accounts still have limitations. The most obvious is that they have to listen to ads. Free users will also face a limit on the number of minutes of music they can listen to on demand, won’t be able to queue tracks, and won’t be able to access Spotify’s “AI DJ” feature . (Not a big loss, believe me.)
They also won’t have access to another new Spotify feature that’s only available to paid accounts: lossless audio .
Spotify Premium Customers Get Lossless Audio
Spotify Premium accounts are getting better, too . The first and most important update is part of the long-awaited launch of lossless audio on the service. Lossless audio streaming (streaming files that are an exact copy of the original material) will be available in more than 50 Spotify countries from today until October.
Premium users will also be able to send private messages to make sharing music easier, as well as add and customize transitions between songs in a playlist.
Changes Make Spotify More Competitive
Spotify’s service updates for both tiers aren’t aimed at improving the lives of users, but at staying relevant and profitable in a crowded and ever-changing market. Spotify hopes to increase advertising revenue by increasing the number of listeners who upgrade to paid services, entice more free users to upgrade, and reduce churn among customers who go elsewhere.
Before this change, Spotify’s free plan was akin to radio: you could listen to the music you wanted, albeit with constant ads. That model may have made sense when streaming was new, but more and more young users are migrating to YouTube, where you can listen to any song (and watch the music video) on demand, for free. Young people are finding music on TikTok, not Spotify.
The changes to Spotify’s premium service are aimed at a more “mature” audience. Lossless audio doesn’t mean much without good headphones or speakers. However, the phrase “our music is lossless” has long been an advertising argument for Apple Music and Tidal, but now it is no longer true.