Spotify bets free users would love to pay $0.99 to skip tracks at will

Spotify Plus costs $0.99 and combines some of the perks of the company’s existing Free and Premium tiers, such as on-demand streaming and the ability to skip tracks at will.


STORY HIGHLIGHTS

  • Spotify is testing a new $0.99/month Plus tier with some users
  • The new Spotify Plus tier is being offered at several price points
  • Depending on feedback, it could become available more widely 

An illustration showing a white Spotify logo, with lettering, set against a green background

Spotify’s Plus tier brings track skipping and on-demand streaming

Price-wise, this cheaper monthly tier is comfortably positioned between the ad-supported Free tier and Spotify’s Premium tier that provides all the bells and whistles. With Spotify Plus, you get two basic features in exchange for a much lower monthly fee of just 99 cents.

First, you can listen to your favorite tunes on-demand which lets you cherry-pick songs on albums and playlists for playback. And second, you can skip tracks at will. To make up for the low price and these features, you must put up with some advertising on Spotify Plus.

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By comparison, Spotify’s ad-supported free tier limits the number of tracks you can skip per hour to just six. But Spotify may need to rethink the value proposition here because free tiers on other services include unlimited skipping.

It’s just a test

Twitter has not officially announced the new Plus tier because the company is currently running this as an experiment to gauge potential interest from its users. According to The Verge, Spotify Plus is being offered at a variety of price points as part of the test.

“We’re always working to enhance the Spotify experience and we routinely conduct tests to inform our decisions,” a spokesperson said. “We’re currently conducting a test of an ad-supported subscription plan with a limited number of our users.”

At the last count, Spotify had 365 million users.

Of that number, 165 million were Premium accounts while the remaining 200 million accounts were using the Free tier. Spotify Plus could convert at least some percentage of free accounts into paying customers, even if they’re paying just 99 cents per month.

This comes hot on the heels of the news of Google’s new YouTube Premium Lite offering.