Hot on the heels of the revelation that new Spotify users must now have a Facebook account too, the music streaming service has now announced that it is killing off ‘Spotify Open’, and everybody who signs up to the free service will simply have an ad-supported Spotify account for the first 6 months, with no listening restrictions in place.
After 6 months, users will be limited to 10 hours of streaming per month and a 5-play limit for individual tracks.
So, how does this affect existing Spotify Open users? A good question, and one it answers in a blog post earlier. Spotify’s Andres Sehr says:
“If you’ve had your Spotify Open account for less than six months, you’ll discover that your time cap has gone. And it’ll stay gone until your account reaches its six-month birthday…if you’ve had your Spotify Open account for more than six months, you’ll still be limited by time. As you’ve been with us for a while, the chances are you also enjoyed a six-month period without time limits when you first joined.”
And what if you’re already on a paid Spotify service? Well, there’ll be no changes there.
Spotify launched in the US back in July, and it’s currently trying to drive its paid subscriptions by offering incentives for people to sign-up. During Facebook’s f8 conference last week, the social network made a number of announcements, one of which was a deep integration with Spotify and other music services.
It goes without saying that this latest announcement is geared towards getting people hooked and then shoehorning users into a paid subscription by diminishing the free service. And you know what? It might just work.
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