Spotify enhancing free tier with 15 on-demand playlists, mode with 75% less data consumption

Zac Hall | Apr 24 2018 - 7:07 am PT

Spotify held its major media event in New York City today where it announced a new version of its app that lets users play more popular music for free. Spotify says it is also reducing data consumption so users can stream more music without worrying about overages.

Spotify’s free tier currently offers access to shuffled playlists, but on-demand playback is kept behind the Premium paid tier. With the new version of Spotify’s app, over a dozen popular playlists including Discover Weekly will be available for on-demand playback without shuffling.

Some of these playlists will include personalized recommendations based on user taste. Just like Apple Music, Spotify’s free tier will now ask users to select which artists they like which will fuel the daily updated personalized playlist recommendation.

Here it is: Spotify’s new free app on mobile. You can listen on-demand to about 15 of Spotify’s most popular playlists (including Discover Weekly). Rest is still on shuffle. Spotify says it negotiated new deals with the labels to make this happen. $SPOT pic.twitter.com/Famy3UXXKw

— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) April 24, 2018

Spotify also says its new “low data” mode reduces data consumption while streaming by 75% for users with data caps. Spotify also shared its latest subscriber numbers: 71 million paid customers and 90 million free users. That compares to Apple Music’s 40 million paid subscribers (Apple offers a three month trial but no free tier).

over 80% of users in Vietnam and over 70% of users in Mexico and Brazil use Spotify on WiFi, not mobile data. crucial inspiration behind new Data Saver feature on mobile. pic.twitter.com/ByOeC59mR5

— cherie hu (@cheriehu42) April 24, 2018

In total, the new free tier will include on-demand access to 15 playlists in total (with more playlists available with limitations like shuffle). Spotify is also overhauling both its iOS and Android apps with new organization, local song cacheing, and new recommendation features when building playlists.