(Credit: Spotify)
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If you use Spotify’s free service, your experience is about to get much better. The music-streaming service has long limited those on its free tier to shuffled playlists, but it will now allow them to search for and play a specific song.
There are limits, of course. You can only listen to one song at a time before Spotify begins shuffling, which means you can't listen to an entire album without upgrading to Premium. You can skip songs, but there’s no guarantee the next track will be something you want to hear. Spotify has yet to confirm whether it's changed its limit of six skips per hour.
Songs shared through Spotify links are now easier to interact with, too. If someone sends you a track, you can listen to it right away without waiting for it to appear in the playlist tool.
Another new feature allows you to make your own playlist covers with images, colors, and text, much like you’ve been able to do on the Premium service.
The free version of Spotify still limits quality to 160kbps. As of last week, Premium users have the option of lossless audio features at 24-bit/44kHz, though that's lower quality than many of Spotify's competitors. The changes will begin to appear for users today.
Spotify may be making this change to recoup some of the losses from its ad business. Premium users can avoid ads, which is good for them but bad for Spotify's bottom line. Can a la carte listening attract more listeners (and ad dollars) on the free tier?