Wednesday, July 30, 2014

My opinion of Spotify's "free" option for mobile

The other day (almost a week ago, actually) I decided to install Spotify on my Android device, even though I am currently a free user. I already knew that Spotify had a limited free option, but over the past few days I've figured out that Spotify's shuffle mode really sucks.


Spotify's free shuffle mode feature does what it is supposed to do - it shuffles songs in your playlists, etc. If you don't have enough songs in a playlist, it'll find some extra ones to throw into the mix (which isn't desirable either but whatever).

I've really started to seriously hate shuffle mode when I actually wanted to listen to a specific song. I actually had to listen through ~45 minutes of music just to hear one song. If you were wondering what song that was, it's embedded below.


At this point, I had a magnificent idea: Why not have a truly free option for mobile? I mean, if Spotify did this they would easily gain more mobile market share, even if ads are still involved. I'm really eager to see why they haven't done such a thing yet, but I've narrowed down possible reasons:
  1. Ridiculous music contracts prevent this
  2. They don't want to do this right now in an effort to gain more premium subscription users
  3. They don't care
Hope you guys enjoyed this small opinion post. I typed this at like 4 AM and decided to finish it up now, so if it seems like I'm tired, I was.