Not everyone pays for a music service, and folks who prefer to shuffle their Spotify for free can now pick the odd selection or two.
The mysterious “they” who appear in so many statements say “the best things in life are free”, but they’ve clearly never tried playing an album or track you want when you need to just hear something particular.
Music services that let you pick and choose what you want to listen to are invariably not free, asking for a monthly payment for the privilege of picking and playing a song, album, or playlist in the order of your choosing, though free options do exist.
Take YouTube Music, which can let you hear a selection or two provided you sit through an ad or three. Meanwhile, Apple Music offers a free tier, provided you don’t mind listening to its radio stations.
Spotify’s free service has long provided another approach, giving you the option of listening to ads in exchange for being shuffled around playlists, too. You’ve missed out on the automatic talking DJ service and the audiobook additions to Spotify, but you can listen to playlists on shuffle provided you listen to ads every half hour or so.
But from now on, you might also get to pick a song or two, as Spotify expands what its free service can do.
Hot on the heels of the addition of lossless music to the service, Spotify is now adding the ability to play a song you want, and then shuffling tracks afterwards.
The change doesn’t mean you get the same treatment as Spotify Premium subscribers, and is more that you can pick a song to start a list off. You might even get a few song selections for the day, with the amount resetting at midnight. However, the point is you can pick a song to kickstart a listening session without being on a paid plan.
Playlists on free accounts also get to design their own covers, while lyrics are also being added to the Spotify free tier, as is the ability to share tracks, or just listening to tracks that have been shared to you.
The addition is one that Spotify says has been four years in the making, keeping advertising as part of the “free” package, but giving you a little more to work with, or at the very least, to listen to.
