Söderström says in fact that 'the more you play, the more you pay,' and converting users to premium 'is not one of the things we worry about.' Sixty percent of the people who upgraded to Spotify premium in 2017 started out as free users. The updates to the free tier raises a key question: What is the incentive to opt for the $9.99 monthly premium plan? The quick answer: No ads, offline listening and the ability to choose whatever songs you want to hear whenever you want to hear them. The sonic quality of the tracks may also be degraded some it remains to be seen how many listeners will notice. It does this by caching some tracks it thinks you'll want to hear on your mobile device. Spotify has a streaming catalog of some 35 million tracks and more than 2 billion playlists in all.įor users without unlimited wireless data plans, Spotify is offering a data saver feature that it says saves up to 75% of mobile data while streaming. Spotify's playlists will be personalized based on your own musical tastes but will also include such popular Spotify-curated playlists as RapCaviar and and VivaLatino. Though he didn't come right out and say it, the suggestion is in cars, smart speakers and elsewhere.

Spotify's chief research and development officer, Gustav Söderström, says bring it on. 'We feel we can compete on our product, but it has to be a level playing field, (meaning) everyone has the same access to consumers through these platforms,' Söderström said.

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