Among all the hoo-hah over free mobile-streaming and Led Zeppelin exclusives, Spotify actually let slip on another piece of news today.
In some parts of Europe, Spotify has thus far restricted free users to 10 hours a month once a 6-month unlimited grace period had ended. Now, however, these caps have been removed completely across all platforms – which basically means you can have completely free, unrestricted access to Spotify on desktop and mobile. It will be ad-supported, of course.
If you’re based in the US, this likely won’t mean much to you, given that caps aren’t in place there anyway. But for those in the UK – a big market for Spotify – and other countries in Europe, this will go some way towards tempting people on-board for the long-haul. Only time will tell whether it will encourage people to become a paid-subscriber and remove the ads, or soldier on with the commercially-supported incarnation.
We spoke with Miles Lennon, ‘Product Owner’ at Spotify, about the reasons behind this move. Surely if they’re trying to encourage people to become a paid subscriber, removing these limits on the free service would discourage people from doing so?
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“More access means more engagement,” he says. In other words, the longer someone has access to the full (ad-supported) service, the more likely they will be to pay to remove the ads and get offline access through the premium service.
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