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Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Chief amongst those priorities is to keep the free service, which is what makes Spotify unique, and what you're seeing here is a balance of these priorities. We've shown that the model is doing extremely well, but as things stand we need to tweak the service to ensure everyone has access to legal music in the long term. Before you start throwing rotten fruit at Spotify as a protest -- not a good thing for your computer monitor in any case -- you have to read between the lines of this statement.
Spotify has always stressed that it thinks its free service is a crucial ingredient in persuading people to eventually pay to upgrade to Spotify Premium or Unlimited. That is to say, people use Spotify for free for six months, or even a year or more, and at some point realise they think it's worth paying for. More than 1 million people have made that decision so far. Some of the company's record label partners and shareholders , however, think Spotify could be nudging users along a little more when it comes to upgrading.
Rather, you can select an album or a playlist and shuffle the songs in it. This can get annoying when you have an earworm and just need to listen to that particular song. The absolute worst thing about Free Spotify is how frequently ads interrupt playback.
The advertisements are incredibly annoying, are surely designed to be that way. Depending on how much you pay for data, it might be a good idea to save your favorite tunes for offline listening. With Spotify Premium, you can download an unlimited number of tracks for offline listening.
This is great for long flights or if you want to turn off your data while away from home. For example, on the desktop app you can select any specific song you want with unlimited skips regardless of if you have Spotify Premium or not. However, you are still subjected to ads on Free Spotify with the desktop app, and you cannot download music for offline listening on your computer unless you have Spotify Premium.
In August , there was a glitch with Free Spotify that allowed for unlimited skips, specific song selection, and ad-free listening on both the mobile and desktop versions of the streaming service.
This glitch made it almost identical to Spotify Premium, minus the ability to download music for offline listening. Spotify Discover and Release Radar update every Monday to introduce new songs to its users. One of the best things about Spotify is the way it promotes discovery of new music. This is apparent in its algorithmically produced playlists, designed to suggest styles of music that align with your listening history. Perhaps you really dislike a recommended song or artist, you can press a button telling it to avoid a certain type of music or to blacklist that artist from your profile.
Spotify has a large variety of genres, moods, and other categories under the Browse tab, and here you can listen to its editorial playlists to discover new music. Spotify for desktop looks the same no matter what version you subscribe to.
Music has always been a social art form, but things have changed quite a bit since the days my dad would buy the latest Neil Young record on vinyl and sit around the turntable with his friends. Of course, people still get together to listen to music nowadays—though, perhaps not so much in This will let them add and remove songs to and from it. If you use Facebook, you can link your Spotify account to your Facebook account, making it easy for your Facebook friends to find your profile on Spotify by name or through the Find Friends button on the desktop app.
This is a great way to discover new music and gain an idea of what types of music your friends are listening to. All of these features are available whether or not you pay for Premium. Free Spotify pays artists less per steam than Spotify Premium does.
In response to this discrepancy, Spotify allows artists to set up a paywall for the first two weeks after a release.
If an artist chooses this option, their release will only be available to Premium users until the two weeks have gone by. This includes artists similar to those you've already been listening to, as well as your " Discover Weekly ", " Release Radar ", "Top Songs of [year]" and "Family Mix" playlists, among others.
It's worth noting here that if you follow your favourite musicians you'll get notifications and updates when they release new content too. To discover new music, you can either tap on the "Home" tab where you'll find plenty of options, or you can go to the "Search" tab to search for new content by category and genre. These are great ways to discover new music that's similar to your current taste but ones that you might not have otherwise listened to.
One of the obvious benefits of Spotify is if you're using it on your phone then you can connect to a wealth of different Bluetooth devices and stream your content that way. Whether that means a home audio receiver, head unit in your car, Bluetooth headphones or Bluetooth-connected speaker - there are plenty of possibilities.
With Spotify Premium you can also take advantage of Spotify Connect. Spotify Connect allows you to play your music through a variety of different Wi-Fi connected devices including everything from Wi-Fi speakers to your television, Amazon Echo , Google Home, Chromecast , PC and much more.
This is great because it means you can listen to your music in more places and with more devices. It also offers you a choice in how you control the music playing on your Spotify account.
For example, if you're streaming to speakers in your lounge using your phone then you can use it as a remote control to adjust the volume, change tracks or create a party playlist while listening.
If you're the proud owner of a smart home speaker like Google Home or Amazon Echo then listening to your favourite tunes on Spotify is also a breeze. All you need to do is set up Spotify as your primary music service inside the relevant app, then use your voice to command the speakers to play whatever you want. If you have multiple devices you can also take advantage of multi-room audio functionality to broadcast Spotify tunes throughout your home. Connecting and creating groups for these devices, then broadcasting music or a playlist to those groups with your voice is a straight-forward affair and one of the highlights of owning an AI-powered smart speaker.
Spotify has apparently carried out some research and found that a large percentage of pet owners specifically play tunes for their pets. To help create the perfect listening experience for pet owners, the company has created a tool to help you create a pets playlist. Getting started with it is easy too:. These pet-centric playlists are based on your musical preference, only catering to your pet's mood and disposition. Spotify Kids is an app specifically designed for young children who are part of a household that already has a Spotify Premium plan.
This app caters to children listening from age three and up and is designed to be "safe" and private too. As you'd expect, the music here is more interactive with singalong songs, film soundtracks and even stories.
Listening content on this app also includes tunes hand-picked by a dedicated team of editors to ensure great listening for your little ones. Spotify Stations is another separate app that's available to download alongside the main Spotify app.
Stations is intended to give listeners easy access to curated playlists and a more radio-like experience. It also is designed to create a listening experience that makes stations based on your listening habits too. Spotify comes in two main forms - free and Premium. If multiple people in your house use Spotify, you might consider Premium for Family which gives up to six people access to their own unique Spotify account under one bill.
All users have to live at the same address so it's not a package to include your friends on, but it's a good way to split the cost.
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