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Digital Top Stories
Spotify launch new subscriptions, freemium is open but limited
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 18 May 2010
Spotify have launched two new subscription models this morning, a cut-price version of its premium service and a streamlined version of its free service.
Spotify Unlimited will retail at five pounds per month, rather than the current ten pounds per month for premium, and will provide ad-free access to unlimited streaming music, but not the mobile functionality of the full premium package.
Spotify Open is a limited version of the current ad-funded free service, and offers free access to up to 20 hours of listening a month, with ads. Spotify Open is aimed at new subscribers who can’t currently access so called Spotify Free – with its unlimited free listening – without an invite.
The service’s existing seven million free unlimited subscribers across Europe will continue to have access to unlimited free music, and any unused invites to Spotify Free can still be distributed and taken up, meaning several million more people will be able to access the unlimited gratis service.
But once all invites have been taken up it’s thought that no new Spotify Free subscriptions will be offered, meaning the streaming music platform will then offer three main levels of service to new customers: limited ad-funded streams for free, unlimited ad-free streams for five pounds month, and unlimited and mobile streams for ten pounds a month.
Whether Spotify Free will ultimately be phased out altogether at some point in the future – for existing users also – remains to be seen, though that’s certainly not on the table at the moment. But presumably the new limited-play free version will help Spotify further expand its market share. The Swedish service, like all its competitors, have to control their growth carefully, given limited ad income means too many free users will result in losses (or even bigger losses) being made.
It will be interesting to see whether the limited-listen free model wins any label support in the US, where record company resistance to freemium has delayed the launch of Spotify there. As previously reported, the boss of rival streaming music service MOG, a US-based company, has said he doesn’t believe Spotify will be able to launch their free service at all in the US, and that ultimately the major labels will lobby for the phasing out of free in Europe too.
