Spotify improving free service with upgrades like on-demand playlists

Spotify is rolling out some big improvements to its free tier of service.

Spotify today announced that its free tier users can listen to music on-demand, so long as that music is on one of 15 personalized playlists. Those playlists include Daily Mix, Discover Weeklyl, Release Radar, and Today's Top Hits. This is an upgrade from the previous way the free tier worked, though, which only let users listen to music on shuffle.

Free tier users will also get song recommendations via a process Spotify calls "assisted playlisting". These recommendations will be based on playlists that you make. 

Rounding out today's announcements is a new data saver mode. With it, Spotify says that data usage will be reduced by up to 75 percent.

One thing that's not changing about Spotify's free tier of service? Advertisements. If you want to get rid of them, you'll have to sign up for Spotify Premium, which costs $9.99 per month.

This updated Spotify free tier is rolling out.

You might think that Spotify would focus on making improvements to its Premium tier where the paid users are, but the free service has 90 million people using it, and Spotify hopes that making that free service better will eventually convince those free users to convert to the paid tier.

The improvements rolling out to Spotify's free tier of service sound pretty good, giving users a taste of on-demand listening rather than limiting them to shuffle. Letting these free users see what on-demand listening is like could get some of them to jump to the paid tier, especially since they can get rid of advertising by doing so as well. 

Spotify improving free service with upgrades like on-demand playlists originally posted at http://phonedog.com