Spotify has dubbed this feature “Pick and Play”.
Advertisement
Spotify announced big changes to its free offering today, likely in an attempt to get you to convert over to a paying customer.
With such a dramatically improved free tier, one might wonder what the appeal is in a paid service.
Playlists are available on the new Home screen and users can like or hide songs as they listen to tell Spotify what songs and artists they like.
That “play what you like” feature also applies to your own personalised playlists like your Daily Mix and the “Discover Weekly” list, giving you a little more to listen to, and making the experience a little more like what it is for premium users.
The platform’s free tier will also feature algorithmically suggested songs for user-created playlists. So when you search for a specific song you want to add to a playlist, Spotify’s recommendation system will work behind the scenes to automatically recommend some more songs to add to that burgeoning collection of songs.
Spotify now operates a two-tier system – premium and free.
Desktop users have on-demand access to every song in the Spotify catalog with no skip-limits but have to deal with ads. Sixty percent – or more than 40 million – of Spotify’s current premium subscribers started out as users on the free tier, he said.
This is great news for mobile Spotify users, but investors aren’t pleased. A data saver option has also been added to Spotify’s free subscription level.
“The free experience on Spotify is becoming a lot more like Spotify Premium”, said Babar Zafar, vice president of product development, during Tuesday’s Spotify presentation in NY. To hold Apple off, Spotify has chose to leverage something Apple can’t – the free tier of its music service. The solution is a watered down version of Spotify Premium’s solution, which allows for offline listening when songs or playlists are pre-downloaded.
Users will notice that the new free app has different buttons along the bottom as well.
Advertisement
That’s changing in the new Spotify mobile free app, though it’s not a complete free-for-all. Created to be faster and more efficient, the app now includes a data saver mode that optimizes playback for using up to 75 percent less data when turned on.
