© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Spotify is undoubtedly one of the best music streaming services in the world, but the platform restricts those on the free tier from playing any song they want.
However, in a new blog post, Spotify announced that it is removing some of the restrictions and giving free users more control over what they are listening to by introducing three new features – Pick and Play, Search and Play and Share and Play.. With the new update, Spotify free users can now search for songs, play them, share specific songs and even make personalised playlists with customisable covers.
As the name suggests, Pick and Play lets you play any song that appears on Spotify’s home page without going through a randomly shuffled playlist, while Search and Play lets you search for music and play it directly. The third new feature – Share and Play allows users to listen to music shared by their friends on social media.
Until now, those on Spotify’s free tier couldn’t directly select a song in a playlist or album, nor could they play any searched song. If you wanted to play a specific track, it required users to shuffle through a bunch of songs. Also, the number of songs free users could skip was capped to six per hour, but Spotify says it has removed it with the new update.
One thing to note here is that free Spotify users can only listen to songs of their choice for a limited time, after which Spotify will switch back to shuffle-only mode. Free Spotify users will also be able to create their very own playlists. For this, all you need to do is create a playlist with a name and add a few tracks. The streaming service will then start suggesting more songs based on the tracks you added.
The Swedish music streaming platform said free users can now create custom playlist covers, a feature that was previously limited to Premium subscribers. However, you can only set one custom cover art per playlist. Last week, Spotify introduced support for lossless music for Premium users, a much-awaited feature that allows users to listen to their favourite tracks in high quality.
