Spotify just made its free version worthwhile, but I’m not sure its enough

Spotify has officially lifted a set of restrictions that have long characterized the free tier of its flagship music streaming service. In what the company dubs its new ‘Free Experience,’ users without a Premium paid subscription are now able to listen to specific tracks without jumping through quite as many hoops as before.

Specifically, Spotify’s upgraded Free Experience allows anyone with a non-paid account to search for, to stream, and to share any musical track, without the previous limitation of having to first seek through randomized songs in shuffled order. This update is rolling out now in a global capacity, and it comes hot off the heals of Spotify’s all-new lossless audio integration within its Premium tier.

“Whether you’ve previously tried Spotify or you’re a long-time streamer with our free experience, there’s a lot to love about these enhancements. You now have more control over how you listen: Search and play any track or jump right into something your friend just shared,” the company writes in a blog post.

For once, generosity takes precedent (somewhat)

Spotify’s new Free Experience is a marked improvement, but it’s still not ideal

Spotify’s previous system for non-paying users was shuffle-based, which meant that you were never able to directly pick a song of choice on-demand. For example, if you were to have searched for Livin’ on a Prayer within Spotify’s user interface, you’d be greeted with an algorithmically determined playlist with the Bon Jovi classic mixed somewhere within the rest of the tunes. To add to the cumbersome nature of this system, it also restricted users to a limit of six music skips per hour.

Perhaps most frustratingly of all, this previous Spotify free tier behavior made sharing tracks with non-Premium users an absolute hassle. Tapping on a music link wouldn’t sidestep the shuffle requirement, and so non-paying users weren’t able to directly click on a shared music link and immediately listen to the song being shared with them.

With Spotify’s new Free Experience, these drawbacks are (mostly) eliminated. As mentioned, non-paying users can now directly play tracks of interest, which is a major step forward, but it’s also far from a total win. Advertisements are still present, of course, and on-demand music listening is still throttled after reaching a yet-to-be confirmed amount of daily usage.

“Only Spotify Premium users have complete control to play and skip music without restrictions. Mobile listeners of the updated free experience will be able to tap on any song or search for what they’d like to play, or if they don’t like a track or simply want to hear what’s next, skip the occasional song and carry on listening. Each user has a daily allocated amount of on-demand time. Once this limit is reached, users will then be limited to six skips per hour, a Spotify spokesperson confirmed to The Verge in a statement.

In other words, Spotify is throwing users of its free tier a bone, but it certainly isn’t offering a full-course meal. The cynical side of me views this new Free Experience as nothing more than a ploy to bolster music link sharing, with the change perhaps being made in part due to industry pressures from rivals like YouTube Music. I can’t help but feel that this change won’t tip the needle in Spotify’s favor when it comes to market share, but perhaps shuffling is a bigger barrier to entry than I’m giving it credit for.

Nevertheless, a win is a win. Spotify’s small sprinkling of generosity here is welcome if it means I can finally send songs to my Apple Music-loving friends without inundating them with 2010-era iPod Shuffle vibes.