As the biggest platform of online streaming music service in the world, Spotify encourages people to pay for music, with subscriptions as its main revenue source. But it also provides customers with an option of free service. So there are three ways to enjoy music provided by Spotify: Free, Premium and Family. Each has its relative strengths and limits. Here the article will make a detailed introduction and comparison of these three ways to help people choose the best fit from Spotify Free, Premium, and Family.
- Difference Of Spotify Free And Premium Accounts
- Difference Between Spotify Free And Premium Sound Quality
- Difference In Spotify Free And Premium
Spotify Free model is the most restrictive one among three ways. It is well-known that Spotify makes its revenues by selling premium streaming subscriptions to users and advertising placements to third parties. So in the Free model, users don’t need to pay any money for streaming Spotify music. But they must tolerate the disturbance of advertisements while listening to Spotify songs.
- 6 Differences You Need to Know about Spotify Free and Spotify Premium On January 4, 2018, Spotify announced on Twitter that it has 70 million subscribers. Spotify also claimed the total number of active users was up to 140 million in June 2017.
- Spotify Premium Free Unlimited Comparison Options Whats the difference between Premium and Free × Close We use cookies to give you the best online experience. By using our website you agree to our use of cookies in accordance with our cookie policy.
- Spotify is one of the best music streaming services. It offers a free, ad-supported tier and Premium subscription. With Spotify Free, you can access a giant library of Spotify, discover new music, share tunes with friends, and listen to tunes picked by Spotify's Radio feature.
There are many types of Spotify advertisements: Audio Ads, Display Ads, Billboard Ads, Lightboxes, and so on. Audio Ads run for a maximum of 30 seconds as a commercial in between streamed tracks. Display Ads, Billboard Ads, and Lightboxes appear during active and inactive use. In addition, the Free users only can choose shuffle play to stream music, and are not allowed to unlimited skip during the listening, can’t listen offline and play any track as they want, and so on. If you want to save your money and don’t mind advertisements and these limits, you can try the Free model.
2. Spotify Premium
Spotify Premium is a quite convenient model. Spotify Premium subscribers may not have as many limits to enjoy tracks as Free users, because the subscription removes advertisements and some limits. Premium users allow unlimited mobile usage, unlimited mobile usage, as well as offline and online access to playlists. Spotify offers users free trials of Premium features for 30 days. And it increases the bitrate for some songs. So just pay $9.99 per month, the Premium users will enjoy high-quality audio without advertisement.
3. Spotify Family
In order to attract customers and make sure its users not going to move their entire family over to Apple Music for pricing reasons, Spotify launches family plans. Like Apple Music and Google Play Music, families can now subscribe to Spotify Premium for $14.99 per month and get six different Spotify accounts and profiles. If you share your Spotify account with the entire family but want to keep playlists separate from your kids’ playlists as well as save money, consider Spotify family. Spotify Family is essentially a reduced Premium plan for a family, it provides access to listening offline, ad-free music on any device including mobile, tablet, and desktop. And everyone can play at the same time.
Extra tips: How to Enjoy Spotify Music without Restriction
Spotify is proprietary and encodes its music with protecion. Even the Premium and Family users can’t stream Spotify music on all of their devices as they want, such as MP3 player, car player. Then, is there any way to record Spotify music? Luckily, there is a great Spotify Music Converter that will help users perfectly record Spotify music. That is NoteBurner Spotify Music Converter, a smart Spotify music downloading and converting tool. This program can convert all your Spotify music and playlists to plain MP3, AAC, FLAC or WAV with keeping 100% original quality of Spotify music. Thus, you can enjoy Spotify music freely.
Click to begin a 30-day free trial of Spotify Premium and create an account, either through the website or on the Spotify app. Choose the plan you like and start your free trial for 30 days.
6 Differences You Need to Know about Spotify Free and Spotify Premium
On January 4, 2018, Spotify announced on Twitter that it has 70 million subscribers. Spotify also claimed the total number of active users was up to 140 million in June 2017. That is to say, about half of Spotify users pay for the premium subscription and still half of Spotify users stick to free plan. If you are going to have a try on Spotify and has been a Spotify free user, you may wonder whether you should pay for the premium subscription or simply stick to free plan. Before you make up your mind, learn about the 6 differences between Spotify Free and Spotify Premium.
1. Playback Mode: Shuffle Play VS Different Modes
With Spotify Free, shuffle play is the only mode you can use to enjoy streaming music. With Spotify Premium, you can enjoy different playback modes including shuffle play, play in order, repeat a song and repeat a playlist/album.
Many Spotify new members asked how to make a playlist play in order, the answer is to pay for the premium subscription.
2. Ad Free: No VS Yes
With Spotify Free, you can listen to any music in Spotify, but you'll hear ads between tracks both on computer and mobile. Sometimes, the ads may ruin your mood totally when you are enjoying music leisurely. With Spotify Premium, you won't get any ads no matter what device you are using.
3. Limited Skips VS Unlimited Skips
Everyone has his own music taste. Sometimes, you may hear some songs you don't like and you simply want to skip them. With Spotify Free, you can only skip 6 songs per hour, but with Spotify Premium, you can skip any songs you don't like without limitation.
4. Internet Connection Required VS Offline Listening
With Spotify Free, you must have a stable internet connection to stream the songs. Without a Wifi connection, it's almost impossible to listen to music unless you use data connection. But why would you use data connection as it definitely costs more than Spotify Premium subscription fee. With Spotify Premium, you can download songs to your PC, Mac, iOS, Android or other supported devices and listen to them offline whenever you don't have internet connection. Spotify Premium users can save mobile data by downloading up to 10,000 songs per device, on a maximum of 5 different devices.
5. Play Most Tracks VS Play All Tracks
With Spotify Free, you can listen to most tracks in Spotify library. But some new tracks or albums are only available for Premium users. The songs or albums will be grey out for Spotify Free users. And Premium users sometimes can enjoy some albums several weeks before actual release. Though it happens very infrequently.
6. Audio Quality: 160Kbps VS 320Kbps
On desktop, default streaming audio quality for Spotify Free users is Ogg Vorbis 160kbit/s while Premium subscribers can choose to switch on High quality streaming, which uses 320kbit/s. On iPhone, iPad or Android, Spotify Free users can choose either 96kbit/s or 160kbit/s while Premium subscribers have one more option which is 320kbit/s. As to streaming audio quality on Chromecast, it's AAC 128kbit/s for Spotify Free, and 256kbit/s for Spotify Premium.
Enjoy Spotify Songs on Any Devices without Limitation using Spotify Music Converter
Even if you have subscribed Spotify Premium, there are still some limitations such as only 3 devices can be used, only 10,000 songs can be downloaded and you can't enjoy Spotify offline songs on MP3 players like iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, Sony Walkman, iRiver, Sandisk Sansa, etc. or burn Spotify offline songs to CD for your car audio system.
Difference Of Spotify Free And Premium Accounts
The best solution of enjoying Spotify music without limitation is to use TuneMobie Spotify Music Converter. TuneMobie Spotify Music Converter can download Spotify songs, albums and playlists to computer and convert to MP3, M4A, WAV or FLAC with ID3 tags and metadata kept, no matter you are using Spotify Free or Spotify Premium.
Difference Between Spotify Free And Premium Sound Quality
With Spotify Free and Spotify Music Converter, you can create a playlist in any media player and add songs to the playlist and play in different playback modes on demand, enjoy full pleasure without ads interruption, skip any songs as you like and enjoy them offline no matter there is internet connection or not. The actual audio quality of output songs is same as source which is 160kbit/s, and you need to wait for some time when the Premium-songs are also available for free users. With Spotify Premium and Spotify Music Converter, you can enjoy high audio quality at 320kbps and enjoy the Premium-only songs on any devices whenever they are available.
Difference In Spotify Free And Premium
After reading the 6 differences between Spotify Free and Spotify Premium, will you decide to pay for Premium subscription or stick to free tier? No matter which choice you make, Spotify Music Converter is definitely a must-have program for any Spotify users.