Spotify Wants More Paid Subscribers, So It Has Launched a New App To Give Away More Music For Free (recode.net)
Spotify on Tuesday announced a new redesigned app for free customers, its first major change to the free tier in four years, as it attempts to lure more customers into buying its subscription service. Free listeners will now get on-demand access to 15 playlists; they can play any song they want in those playlists and are no longer stuck in a world of shuffled playback. From a report: The idea: If people get more stuff without paying, they are more likely to end up paying in the long run. The new mobile app gives free users the ability to play more songs on demand, from 15 pre-populated playlists -- some of which are personalized for individual users, like its popular "Discover Weekly" feature. Spotify has always let users listen to on-demand music for free via an ad-supported option -- it's the main thing that set the company apart from other streaming services in the past. But it has limited full, free access to its library of songs to desktop users, and limited what free users could get to on its mobile app. Today's move doesn't remove those limits entirely, but gives users more opportunity to sample. Paid users get full access to Spotify's entire catalog, on-demand, without ads. The new app also offers users the ability to stream songs with lower data usage. The company says users can save up to 75% of mobile data with data saver mode while streaming on 3G.
What would be your proper price point for a subscription that gives you unlimited access to music?
Would that change if the current Spotify price happened to be $30 instead of $10?
So often, people's desires happen to be "whatever the current thing is, only half". I definitely had this opinion before I took a step back, calculated what I would be have been spending otherwise on music (my substitute would be about an album a month), and decided that the $15 spotify family plan was actually a pretty good deal for me. Maybe you and other people have already done this analysis.