Riga, Latvia - March 25, 2018: Latest generation iPhone X with Spotify logo on the screen.
Spotify is a music-streaming app that is very popular amongst users as users enjoy the good quality of the music that is being streamed, as well as the premium features that they can acquire if they choose to subscribe to Spotify and pay a specific amount of money every month.
Recently, Spotify has made the decision to follow the latest trend of streaming services making their services cheaper to entice people to join their subscriptions, and they’re choosing to do so by instituting a service of their own: they’re launching a new subscription tier where you will still have to listen to ads, but you will be able to skip the songs that you don’t want to listen to, as well as let you select specific songs from an album or playlist for playback.
The best part? It’s only going to cost users $0.99 a month.
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Spotify has recently released the tier option for users to potentially indulge in, and the end goal is for the tier to entice non-playing users with a small price of $0.99 and great features with the hope that they’ll decide to go with one of their better, more expensive plans after seeing the things that they can get with such a small price. If enough people sign up for it, then users will get the option to either switch to a different plan, or just opt-out of the feature entirely to save themselves the trouble of having to do it later.
With the current free model that non-paying users are currently using, users get six free track skips per day, with them also having to listen to shuffled playlists, which can really suck if you’re trying to listen to one specific song, but you’re stuck listening to all of these songs that you don’t want to listen to.
However, even though it’s just a tiny bit of money, $0.99 a month is still a bit much to ask for, especially while we’re still in a pandemic where people are losing (or have lost) their jobs, and that $0.99 could make a huge difference. Some people just don’t have the money to be spending on music, even if it is such a small amount.
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Another minor issue that Spotify is somewhat worried about is that the new feature will eat into the company’s current premium user base. Out of the 365 million users that use Spotify every day, about 165 million of them are subscribed to Spotify’s premium services, which means that there are another 200 million users that Spotify is trying to coerce into shelling out the big bucks for, with the tiny $0.99 acting as a sort of transition into that.
Since the tier is still fairly new, there hasn’t been a lot of activity going on around it. Time can only tell if the feature takes off or not, but on the off-chance that it does, Spotify will try to work out any kinks if necessary to give users the ultimate musical experience that is sure to knock everyone’s socks off.
