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Spotify giving away more music, hoping you’ll pay for Premium
- Spotify is giving free tier members access to more songs in its massive catalog.
- The hope is that this new Spotify free update will bring more users to the service, and turn those users into paying customers.
- Spotify is now a public company, so it has to increase its revenue to appease shareholders.
Now that Spotify is officially a public company, it has to continually make more money year-over-year to appease shareholders. As of now, the best way for the company to make more money is to get more people to subscribe to its paid service, Spotify Premium.
The company’s strategy, according to Recode, is to give away more of its music catalog for free, starting today. Spotify hopes that by making the free tier of service the best choice for music listeners, it will be easier to turn those listeners into paying customers.
As of now, anyone can create an account with Spotify and listen to free music as much as they like. The caveats are that mobile users’ listening experiences will be interrupted periodically with advertisements; be limited to specific songs via pre-programmed playlists; and be limited to only six track-skips per hour.
Desktop users have on-demand access to every song in the Spotify catalog with no skip-limits but have to deal with ads. The ability to listen to the entire Spotify catalog on-demand with no ads and no skip limits on both desktop and mobile is reserved for Premier members.
But starting today, Spotify members utilizing its free service on mobile devices will get the ability to select more songs on-demand from 15 playlists. There will still be ads, and there will still be a skip-limit, but your library access will have a broader reach. Desktop free tier users will see no change in service.
Premier membership currently costs $9.99 per month for a single user or $14.99 for a family of up to five people who all live at the same address.
Eventually, Spotify might be able to increase its revenue by introducing its own hardware. We got a glimpse of what the company might have in store when an ad for an in-car device appeared in some Spotify apps, and then promptly disappeared. The rumor is that Spotify could announce that device today.