Spotify halves its free lunch

There’s no such as a free lunch. Not on the internet either. There is always someone who picks up the bill for all the free services. Sometimes it’s advertisers, sometimes it’s premium clients, sometimes it’s you yourself, paying with your personal data. Finding a good mix between free and paid-for services is something that all online services think about on a regular basis. From time to time, the balance shifts. As it now does with streaming music service Spotify.

Spotify has decided to shrink its generous free lunch buffet. Subscribers to the free version of Spotify soon will get only ten hours access to Spotify’s extensive music library. Now, they get twenty hours. Furthermore, individual songs can only be listened to 5 times in the new Spotify Open plan. On average, that would limit listening to 30% of the songs that someone listens to in the course of one year. People new to Spotify will have half a year’s access to 20 hours of free music a month.

On the other side, Spotify is expanding it’s services. The music library has expanded from 10 million to 30 million tracks over the course of the last few months. Additionally, Spotify has announced to reveal some new functions over the next few months.

Source: Spotify blog