Spotify announced big changes to its free offering today, likely in an attempt to get you to convert over to a paying customer. What they’ve done is make the experience more personalized, added like and hide buttons, gave you the ability to create your own playlists, that sort of thing.
Specifically, Free on Spotify is getting 15 new on-demand playlists that let users pick and play any track without skipping or waiting on shuffle. They’ll be unique to users, which will only get more personal as you continue using the Like❤️ or HIDE???? buttons regularly and tell Spotify what you love the most during sign-up. But in even bigger news, Free on Spotify will now let you create your own playlists. As you create those, Spotify will do its best to recommend additional songs based on your preferences. And finally, Spotify has created a new Data Saver feature to let you listen to music without emptying your data bucket.
The changes will roll out over the “coming weeks” to both iOS and Android.
// Spotify
Slacker Radio has had this type of personalization for a long time. And I believe that their music library is larger, though I am not 100% on that.
Now that their IPO (even if it wasn’t a traditional IPO) is behind them they need to start figuring out how to convert free accounts into paid. They need to start turning a profit at some point.
Interesting fact: It took Amazon 6 years after going public to turn a profit.
Anyhoo, if I used Spotify, these new perks would probably encourage me to keep using the free service (at least for a bit longer) rather than jumping to a paid subscription.
Well artists( and their fans ) seem to think Spotify doesn’t pay them enough. Well if they get more money Spotify needs to charge more. They need to charge more now anyway( to make a profit ). The problem is people won’t pay more. You know the same fans that think Spotify should pay more. I’m not sure how people think $10 a month covers royalty payments when some people are listening to hundreds of hours month.
All that being said I won’t pay $10 because it’s not worth it to me. Of course I don’t spends hours everyday listening to music.
I have always been able to create playlists on Spotify Free…
Yep same here. This more of a publicity thing before it they go public.
It would be great if they added some sort of import or migration tool that makes it easier to switch. I’d give Spotify a try but I don’t want to rebuild my library and playlists from GPM.
The other thing keeping me on GPM is the app Music Mate which lets me play the music in any app I want, not just the service’s app.