Spotify Pilots A Cheaper Premium Tier Alternative

I know many people who are happily subscribed members of the Spotify Premium service. And quite frankly, I can understand the attraction towards it. If you like music, and particularly diving down rabbit holes that might open up new favourites, having the ability to pick any track you want, play it as often as you like, and, of course, do so without any pesky adverts interrupting your session are clearly quite nice perks to have. However, with a price of £9.99 a month, I don’t personally have it because, frankly, I have enough expenses without adding a fringe one to it.

Following a report via TechRadar, however, reports suggest that Spotify is piloting a new ‘entry-level’ subscription tier in which users can have access to a number of the perks from the premium at a significantly reduced cost. As you might expect, though, it does come with one pretty notable caveat.

Spotify Plus

The new tier, known as “Spotify Plus” gives users access to all the content on the platform, but unlike free users who are often restricted to ‘shuffle’ plays, with this new tier, you can specifically pick tracks and also skip ahead as often as you like (for those of you unaware, on the free version you are limited to 5 skips per hour).

For £0.99 a month, this certainly sounds like a great service. The only downside is that you are still occasionally inflicted with advertisements. But apparently not as often as those on the ‘free’ platform.

What Do We Think?

For a price this low, many people would likely be tempted to try it out. The success will, of course, depend entirely on just how invasive the advertisements are. However, this isn’t the first instance we’ve seen of a major online company offering a less expensive alternative to its premium service. It was revealed that YouTube, for example, was also trying out a somewhat similar concept. I’m still probably not going to pay for it. I am somewhat stubborn in terms of the music I listen to. But for only 99p a month, having a notably better experience than the free version might be enough to tempt a few people into trying it out!

In terms of checking it out, however, it does appear that this new Spotify Plus subscription tier is currently in a pilot stage with it being specifically offered to customers rather than generally rolled out. However, if the initial trial is well received, this could very well form an excellent and significantly less costly alternative to their Premium platform.

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!