Popular music streaming service, Spotify, has just announced a brand new, free version of their mobile app, that aims to address some of the complaints with the original free tier, and bring in new customers.
Originally, if one had a free Spotify account, they would only be allowed to listen to artists on shuffle, and would be unable to select specific songs to play. According to Tech Crunch, the new version does away with that, allowing users to listen to whatever song they want as many times as they want, but there's some heavy restrictions. Spotify is really placing a large amount of faith into its recommendation algorithms, as the only songs the new free user will be allowed to listen to on-demand will be those present on the 15 personalized discovery playlists including "Daily Mix", "Discovery Weekly", "Release Radar", and "Today's Top Hits". While that's not quite the same amount of freedom afforded by the paid version, it still amounts to over 40 hours of music at a time.
It's worth noting that Spotify will continue to run ads in the new free version, as a way to encourage users to switch over to premium.
It's not all bad news, however. There are a number of cool upgrades too, for instance, a feature that offers live recommendations to users as they make their own customized playlists. Additionally, Spotify will now have a data-saver mode, which reportedly cuts data usage by 75 per cent, which is great for those who don't wish to be tied to a wifi network whenever they want to stream.
Is this new free version enough to make you switch over from Apple Music?