- Spotify free tier users can now directly play any song they selected or searched for on the app.
- However, this is a partial improvement over the previous shuffle-only restriction.
- Users will get a daily limit, after which the app will go back to the 6 skips per hour limit.
Spotify seems to be feeling generous lately, as the streaming platform is allowing its free tier users to pick songs again, removing the shuffle-only restriction it added a few years back.
Spotify free tier users can finally play the song they want, as announced in the latest blog post. Users will not have to skip through a random shuffle of tracks to get to a particular song. However, there is a caveat to this, as Spotify free subscribers will only be able to use this returning freedom only a limited time before the app goes back to the previous shuffle-only mode.
Spotify spokesperson Luke Mackay confirmed this in their statement to The Verge, “Each user has a daily allocated amount of on-demand time. Once this limit is reached, users will then be limited to six skips per hour.” This means the free tier members will need to upgrade to Spotify Premium if they need complete control over song selection.
Besides this change, the rest of the Spotify free experience will remain the same, with regular ads in between your listening sessions. With the platform recently bringing its lossless audio streaming to Premium with no added cost, it would have been nice if the free tier users also got something to improve their app experience. But it doesn’t seem like Spotify is in the mood to hand out freebies.
This implementation is still an upgrade, as you can listen to songs shared by your friends, rather than having to shuffle through the playlist, killing the mood. But what do you think about this change? Is this Spotify’s small step towards improving the free experience, or just a way to push more people to get Spotify Premium? Let us know in the comments below.
