Spotify, I am sure this is one app that all you have must have all heard about but mostly during last year because I cannot recall anyone saying to play music from Spotify before last year. But this app is originally a Swedish audio streaming and media services provider which was founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek, wow now that is definitely news to me as I have never used Spotify before the year 2020. So for those of you who still don’t know what Spotify is, let me just give you all a brief overview of the app. Basically, this app offers digital copyright-restricted recorded music and podcasts, not only that but this app now consists of more than 70 million songs, from record labels and media companies. But in this app only the basic features are free and you will be having limited control over the company in addition to that you will get songs that will come along with a lot of advertisements which can really get annoying at times. But once you pay for the Spotify premium version you will have a lot of perks such as offline listening and commercial-free listening. This app will also allow its users to search for music based on artist, album, or genre, and can create, edit, and share playlists via the app.
So you all must be wondering if this app was here since the year 2006 then why is it that most of us have had access to it since last year or this year well the reason behind that is that Spotify has made itself available in most of Europe and the Americas, Oceania and more than 40 countries in Africa, including South Africa and Mauritius, and Asia as of July 2021 before which it was not available almost anywhere. Not only that but the company decided to expand its availability even more that the service is available on most modern devices including Windows, macOS, and Linux computers, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, and AI-enabled smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and Google Home.
But that is not where the company stopped… They went on with their expansion plans and hot news brings in the latest news that Spotify is planning on bringing a new subscription tier for $0.99 called the Spotify Plus which according to the reports is going to be a mixture of the existing free and premium tiers. In simpler words, the new plan will still be featuring ads like Spotify’s free tier, but it doesn’t impose any limits on the number of tracks you can skip per hour as it does in the free tier. Plus users are also free to pick which specific songs they want to listen to, rather than mostly being limited to shuffling within albums and playlists. In Spotify’s free tier we all have seen how it doesn’t let us, as the users, skip more than six tracks per hour, not only that but only lets us pick and listen to specific tracks from 15 select playlists, ranging from editorial-selected playlists to algorithmically generated collections like “Discover Weekly” and “Daily Mix.” Outside of these playlists, free users can only listen to shuffled tracks but with this new Spotify, Plus tier is a relatively cheap way to reduce some of those restrictions. But as we know that Spotify will have a thorough test run before launching anything new so right at the moment the testing of this latest subscription tier is going on with a limited number of users which they have chosen so it is not confirmed as of yet whether this new free tier will be launched in that form that we have heard as the test run can definitely open up a new hypothesis about their experiments and after all, they would want to provide what is the best for their users.
So let us hope for the best and hope that this new subscription tier is soon released because it would really be helpful for us as we just have to pay $0.99 for a lower restriction of music play and I hope that there will not be so many advertisements which will pop after each and every song as it is very annoying. Now, let us wait to see what the outcome of this test run is!
