Spotify implements new free tier limitations for India; Check what functions have been taken away

New Delhi: Spotify, the widely used music streaming service, is updating its service in India.

Spotify is looking to restrict the free ad-supported plan’s functionality. This week, Spotify customers in India received a pop-up notification verifying the platform’s recent updates, which include the ability to skip tracks, play the previous track, and more.

This implies that free Spotify users in India will no longer have access to features like rewinding, repeating tracks, or playing music in a certain sequence. Now only Premium members will have access to these extras.

Spotify guarantees that free users may keep listening to their favourite artists, albums, and playlists and can make use of the platform’s recommendation engine. Possibly in places like India, Spotify is reducing the features offered to free users over time.

Spotify to restrict features in free-tier to boost subscriptions in India. The audio streaming platform is reportedly mulling to limit features such as track list reordering, track rewind, and track repeat features to users behind the paywall.

Details: https://t.co/YrvquQXKlM

— BSTech (@BSTechOfficial) October 10, 2023

Since its 2019 debut, Spotify has been offering these capabilities without a paid subscription, but the firm has recently announced modifications to the free tier due to the maturation of the market, as reported by TechCrunch. Those who use Spotify’s free tier will soon face limits like those in place for the Brazilian version of the service.

A report by Redseer from April 2023 claims that Spotify has over 26% of the Indian streaming music industry.

The corporation is exhausting every available means to increase the number of paying customers for its premium service. Reports have surfaced lately about Spotify’s alleged eagerness to charge users for playing the same song repeatedly.

The creators have done all they can to guarantee that even the most basic features of a music streaming service need a paid membership.

Premium users in India may listen to music offline without ads and can download up to 30 tracks at a time for only 7 per day. The Spotify Premium plan costs $119 a month and allows you to download up to 10,000 songs across 5 devices.

Spotify has, without a doubt, tried many different tactics to get consumers to pay for premium services, but thus far, at least in India, none of them have been successful. It has been said that the firm has plans to provide a more expensive service with features like Hi-Fi audio.