Spotify has announced two new ways to access the streaming service – Spotify Open and Spotify Unlimited. Spotify Unlimited offers a cheaper package for ad-free listening while Spotify Open will give you access to ad-supported tunes without an invite. That’s great news but could it mean the Spotify Free service is on the way out?
The confusingly named Spotify Unlimited package gives you access to the whole Spotify catalogue for £4.99 per month but only via your computer. To use mobile streaming – including the recently tarted up Spotify iPhone app – you’ll still need to stump up £9.99 a month for Spotify Premium.
If you’ve so far failed to snag a Spotify invite, Spotify Open will give you 20 hours a month of ad-supported listening. Spotify says the current Spotify Free package will stay: “New users [will] still be able to sign up to the current Free service by obtaining one of the many millions of invites currently available.”
Spotify Open is a welcome addition but we expect those Spotify invite eBay auctions will keep doing brisk business. You’ll soon chew through a monthly limit of 20 hours.
While Spotify has been quick to assure us that Spotify Free is here to stay, the arrival of Spotify Open has to put a question mark over its future. Spotify’s big challenge is persuading people to subscribe and reducing the amount of free streaming could be one way to do that.
Let us know what you think of Spotify’s latest plans and what you’ve made of the social features that it added with the last Spotify update.
Out now | from £free | Spotify
