For years, Spotify users running the free experience of the popular music streaming service had to contend with whatever the app threw at them. Playing specific songs was impossible, requiring users to subscribe to Spotify Premium to explore personal tastes. Now, though, Spotify is finally updating its free experience to give users more control over what they listen to.
In a new blog post shared this week, Spotify says it is enhancing how free users experience music streaming by giving them access to pick and play what they want to listen to. They will also now be able to search up and play specific music through the search functionality.
If you haven’t used Spotify’s free experience in the past, then you might not know that it used to be limited to a more Pandora-like experience. That service allowed you to listen to personalized channels, but you couldn’t pick and choose specific songs to play. Instead, you could search up an artist and then the app would make a playlist containing that artist and related music. Spotify used to work very similarly for free users, but now, it’s finally getting a bit more personal.
Many features are still limited to Spotify Premium
Despite Spotify improving the options users have as part of its free experience, many of the best features of the music streaming service are still exclusive to the paid subscription. While some newer features like direct messaging in the Spotify app are available for all users, other features like lossless audio have launched solely for premium subscribers.
That means you’ll miss out on the latest and greatest features that the Spotify team is pushing out. Of course, we may see some of those features eventually make their way to Spotify’s free experience, though there is no guarantee of that happening. Another premium-only feature, Smart Filters, will require you to cough up some cash to Spotify each month to take advantage of it.
If you don’t feel like giving Spotify money every month, then you can still utilize features like the daylist — which is a playlist designed to create music for every part of your day — as well as Spotify’s specially curated playlists. You can also edit your playlists as a free Spotify user, and now free users can even personalize their playlist covers with their own designs.