Today, April 24, 2018, Spotify announced their brand new free version of the Spotify Mobile App (iOS | Android) at Gramercy Theater in NYC.
Spotify is one of today’s leading music providers (Currently 90 million users) and with their new free tier, users can now listen to music on the fly that much easier. The previous free tier for Spotify had limited amount of shuffles a user could use. With the new version, users can listen “on-demand” to any song they want, as many times as they want, as long as the song appears on one of the 15 personalized “Discovery Playlists” such as Daily Mix, Discover Weekly, Release Radar, or Today’s Top Hits.
That comes out to be around 750 tracks and over 40 hours of music that one can listen to on-demand, without using a Shuffle feature. You want to listen to a particular song for free, you got it!
This is particularly nice because it means that each time you search a specific song, and add it to a playlist, Spotify with automatically make recommendations that are similar for you.
The feature that I am most excited about is Low-data mode. (Called Data Saver), which will cut data consumption by up to 75% !
In the past, Spotify didn’t allow offline listening to music for free, which meant users had to either use wifi, or pay for Spotify Premium in order to utilize “Offline” mode. (Ability to play music from your playlists when offline).
With this new data system, it caches the music ahead of the stream via 3G. This allows user to listen to more music while using just wireless data. On top of this, Spotify also is optomizing the streaming of the tunes itself as well as the application as a while with other UI changes to save both data and power.
Unfortunately, as expected, advertisements will still occur with this updated free tier version of Spotify. Don’t want the ads? Upgrade your account to Spotify Premium today!
As of today, Spotify is built upon three tiers: ubiquity, personalization, and freemium.
