Spotify has announced some quality of life improvements for free users. You can now search for songs and play them.
Believe it or not, this basic feature was a behind a paywall. You may know Spotify lets users access it for free, but they have to listen to ads. Plain and simple. Don't like ads? Pay for Spotify Premium, which does home some cool benefits. You get access to ad-free music, downloads, lyrics, and recently lossless streaming, Mix, etc.
So, anyway, let me provide some context on how Spotify free's search worked prior to this change. When you searched for a specific track or an artist, and clicked on the result, it wouldn't play the actual track. Instead, it would play something else from the artist randomly, it would shuffle the music. This was basically Spotify's way of getting people to subscribe to Premium. It's bizarre, but here is something else that might surprise you. YouTube Music is the only other streaming service that lets you listen to music for free. Apple Music doesn't, and as far as I know, all the others have some sort of restrictions or the other.
Now, when you search for a track on Spotify, you can play it for free. This experience is being called "Search & Play". When you click on play on any Spotify track, it's "Pick & Play". Users can also share tracks with their friends, and this is, you guessed it, "Share & Play". The names are rather silly, but these are welcome improvements.
Messages and personalized playlists daylist (not kidding, that's what it's called) are available for free users. Share & Play might actually be a direct result of Messages being introduced, so users can share playlists, tracks via DMs easily.
But, there are some restrictions. TechCrunch reports that Spotify told the blog that free users on mobile have an allocated "on-demand time", this is a daily limit. When you exhaust it, Spotify will offer a limited number of skips per hour. What are skips? Users can listen to any song they like, and if they don't it, you can skip the song and continue listening. According to The Verge, Spotify offers six-skips per hour for free. Here's the announcement on Spotify's blog.
Spotify Premium costs $11.99 per month, and has no such restrictions. Free users make up for the majority of Spotify's user base. 433 million out of 696 million monthly active users access the music streaming service for free. That's a lot of users, which translates to a lot of ads and revenue.
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