Spotify announced that users on the free music plan can now listen to any song they want on Sept. 15. Free users now can choose what songs they want to listen to in playlists and albums, features that were only previously available for Spotify Premium users.
The free plan still has certain restrictions including the amount of skips per song. Spotify said free users have a “daily allocated amount of on-demand time.” Once that time is used, they will “then be limited to six-skips per hour.”
The change comes after Spotify rolled out a lossless audio feature for premium users. Lossless audio is a digital audio format that perfectly preserves all original audio data resulting in high quality sound, song authenticity and no data loss.
Lossless audio has been “one of most anticipated features on Spotify” and is only available for premium users in “select markets” according to Spotify.
Free users will still have advertisements when using the app, something free users dread.
“The ads were annoying, but I didn’t really think about them that much,” Mary Struik, a Spotify Premium user and sophomore at the University of Miami, said. “The ones I remember the most were the ones from Spotify themselves about getting premium.”
Although the free plans still contain advertisements, the freedom to listen to any song instantly is a major change for the free plan.
“That was the thing I hated the most about not having Spotify Premium. I wasn’t allowed to play the songs I wanted,” Struik said.
These new features can bring more listeners to Spotify as the audio platform faces competitive pressure from other audio streaming services, like Apple Music and Amazon Music.
As one of Spotify’s top competitors, Apple music already offered lossless audio starting in June of 2021, although they do not offer a free plan.
UM students on all plans can now walk to the Wednesday market or jog to the gym with a break from the ads. The new lossless audio might make it harder to hit pause too.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source themiamihurricane.com ’
