Why do I only get 6 skips per hour on Spotify?

With the free mobile version, you can only skip six tracks per hour, whereas with Premium, you can skip as many as you'd like. Skip limits can put a damper on things when you repeatedly aren't in the mood for the algorithm's song picks, but it's a forgivable inconvenience.

soundguys.com - Free Spotify vs Spotify Premium - SoundGuys

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Lily Katz / SoundGuys

Spotify is one of the most popular streaming service in the world. It has a massive library of music as well as a sizeable library of podcasts. In this Free Spotify vs Spotify Premium breakdown, we’re going to see if the paid version is worth the monthly fee, or if you’re better off bearing through the ads to save money. You may even discover some features of Spotify along the way. Editor’s note: This Free Spotify vs Spotify Premium article was updated on January 2, 2023 to address Spotify Hi-Fi, as well as to clarify wording in some places.

The listening experience with Free Spotify is unpleasant

Spotify Free and Premium Spotify may look similar at first, but extended functionality varies greatly. There are some key functional differences between Free Spotify and Spotify Premium, particularly with the mobile interface. With the free mobile version, you can only skip six tracks per hour, whereas with Premium, you can skip as many as you’d like. Skip limits can put a damper on things when you repeatedly aren’t in the mood for the algorithm’s song picks, but it’s a forgivable inconvenience.

Spotify Premium let's you skip tracks endlessly, the free version does not

Another drawback to Free Spotify on mobile: you can’t select specific songs for playback. Rather, you can select an album or a playlist and shuffle the songs in it. This can get annoying when you have an earworm and just need to listen to that particular song. With Premium, you can listen to that song over and over to your little heart’s content. This also completely destroys the linear experience of listening to a complete album in order. There is a caveat with Free Spotify, however; you can select songs for playback with unlimited skips, so long as you are listening to them from one of Spotify’s 15 curated playlists under “Made for You” on the “Home” page. These include popular editorial playlists, such as “RapCaviar” and “Alternative R&B,” and playlists algorithmically tailored to your listening preferences such as “Discover Weekly,” “Daily Mix,” and “Release Radar.” The songs on these playlists change frequently. If there’s a blue shuffle icon next to the playlist title, you may only shuffle songs. Get ready for annoying ads with Free Spotify The absolute worst thing about Free Spotify is how frequently ads interrupt playback. The advertisements are incredibly annoying, and are surely designed to be that way. Many of them feature the most irritating noises you could imagine, such as traffic horns overlaid with a voice saying things like, “Is this annoying? If you buy Premium, you won’t have to listen to this anymore.” I’ll give them credit, because this tactic of being obnoxious works pretty well: paying for Spotify Premium is almost worth it for the sole purpose of removing these ads. Of course, for anyone with sensory processing sensitivities, this marketing tactic can be more than just irritating and can cause genuine distress. Listen offline with Spotify Premium Depending on how much you pay for data, it might be a good idea to save your favorite tunes for offline listening. With Spotify Premium, you can download an unlimited number of tracks and podcasts for offline listening. This is great for long flights or if you want to turn off your data while away from home. With Free Spotify, you aren’t able to download any music or podcasts, so you may be spending money in the form of data usage rather than a Premium subscription. On the desktop Spotify app, there are fewer discrepancies between Free Spotify and Spotify Premium. For example, on the desktop app you can select any specific song you want with unlimited skips regardless of if you have Spotify Premium or not. However, you are still subjected to ads on Free Spotify with the desktop app, and you cannot download music for offline listening on your computer unless you have Spotify Premium.

Free Spotify vs Spotify Premium: Discovery features are identical

Spotify Discover and Release Radar update every Monday to introduce new songs to its users. One of the best things about Spotify is the way it promotes the discovery of new music. This is apparent in its algorithmically produced playlists, designed to suggest styles of music that align with your listening history. The “Discover Weekly” and “Daily Mix” playlists are updated frequently with new suggestions. Perhaps you really dislike a recommended song or artist, you can press a button telling it to avoid a certain type of music or to blacklist that artist from your profile. The “Release Radar” playlist churns out new releases from artists you follow and updates weekly.

One of Spotify’s best features is available to Free and Premium users.

Spotify has a large variety of genres, moods, and other categories under the Browse tab, and here you can listen to its editorial playlists to discover new music. It will also recommend editorial playlists based on your listening activity, and it will algorithmically create “Radio” playlists for every song, artist, album, and playlist. When you create a new playlist, the Spotify algorithm suggests songs for you based on the title of your playlist as well as the songs you’ve already put into it. Regardless of if you’ve paid for Spotify Premium, these discovery features are available and very helpful. Does Spotify use voice recognition technology to listen to your conversations and recommend music? In early 2021, Spotify had a patent approved for a technology that would record user speech and algorithmically recommend music based on analyzing these recordings. There has been significant protest against this technology, and as of August 12, 2022, it seems that Spotify has not implemented it. There are different priced memberships for Premium, but Free is free Spotify offers four different types of Premium subscriptions, and some of them are really great deals. First, there is the Spotify Premium Individual subscription, which is $9.99/month. This allows access to all the Premium features such as no ad interruptions, on-demand playback, and downloading tracks for offline listening. If you’re a full-time student at a university or college, you should be eligible for the Premium Student subscription, which is $4.99/month. Not only does this afford you all the same features of Spotify Premium, but, if you are a student in the United States, it also includes a subscription to SHOWTIME and the ad-supported version of Hulu. If you want to share a Premium account with your live-in partner, you can get Premium Duo. It costs $12.99/month and both you and your partner will have your own separate accounts with all the same functionality of an individual account. Spotify offers a family plan, a plan for couples, and a student rate. Spotify Premium Family is very similar to Premium Duo, as all members must live at the same address. Premium Family, though, can support up to six separate accounts, and costs $14.99/month. Parents can choose to block explicit music for specific members, and children can use their Premium Family account on the Spotify Kids app. All of these subscription options are very cool, but ultimately, when it comes down to it, free is free. If the absence of needing to fork over a portion of your paycheck every month is enough motivation to deal with the ads, lack of features, and inconvenience of Free Spotify, then Free Spotify is going to be the option for you.

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Free or paid, enjoy the same social features

Spotify for desktop looks the same no matter what version you subscribe to. Music has always been a social art form, but things have changed quite a bit since the days my dad would buy the latest Neil Young record on vinyl and sit around the turntable with his friends. Of course, people still get together to listen to music nowadays, but we no longer have to be in the same physical space to appreciate some of the social benefits of music. Spotify uses several different tools on its platform to encourage music sharing, and you don’t need to buy Premium to access any of them. Enjoy collaborative playlists on Spotify To create collaborative playlists, press the three-dot symbol at the top-right of your screen (mobile), or next to the playlist title (desktop), and select “Collaborative Playlist.” Then share the playlist link with your friends. This will let them add and remove songs to and from it. Anybody with the link may do so, and it’s private unless someone gets the link. Collaborative playlists are great for when you and your roommates are throwing a party, or you’re planning a road trip with friends. They’re even good for when you just want to share some songs with someone regularly. Spotify has a feature called “Blend” which uses its algorithms to analyze your music taste and the music taste of any friends you add to a Blend playlist. You can even view a “Blend Story” which is a fun slideshow of infographics about where your music tastes overlap and differ when compared to the person or people in your Blend playlist. Each song has the profile picture of either you or your friend next to it, so you can see whose listening activity the song was generated from. Peek at what your friends are rocking out to If you use Facebook, you can link your Spotify account to your Facebook account, making it easy for your Facebook friends to find your profile on Spotify by name or through the Find Friends button on the desktop app. You can search for your friends’ Spotify usernames; browse and add their playlists to your library; view their recent listening history; and, on the desktop Spotify app, view their active listening history. This is a great way to discover new music and gain an idea of what types of music your friends are listening to. If it creeps you out that people can look through your playlists or see what you’re actively listening to, you can make your playlists private and disable the active listening feed. All of these features are available whether or not you pay for Premium. Some music may be unavailable if you don’t pay for Premium Free Spotify pays artists less per steam than Spotify Premium does. In response to this discrepancy, Spotify allows artists to set up a paywall for the first two weeks after a release. If an artist chooses this option, their release will only be available to Premium users until the two weeks have gone by. If it’s important to you to have access to all the latest releases, this may be a feature that sways you to pay for Spotify Premium. Additionally, if you value the amount of money your favorite artists are getting paid, Premium is superior in that department. The following chart depicts the average amount Spotify pays artists per stream.

Digital Service Provider $ Per Stream Peloton

$0.03107

iHeartRadio

$0.01798

Amazon Music Unlimited

$0.01123

YouTube Music/Premium (formerly YouTube Red)

$0.01009

Napster/Rhapsody

$0.00916

Tidal

$0.00876

Apple Music

$0.00675

Deezer

$0.00562

Amazon Prime Music

$0.00426

KKBox

$0.00408

Spotify

$0.00348

Loen

$0.00235

Pandora

$0.00203

YouTube

$0.00154

Yandex LLC

$0.00109

Vevo

$0.00083

UMA

$0.00022

YouTube Content ID

$0.00022

Free Spotify vs Spotify Premium: Sound quality is higher with Premium There is currently no high-resolution option for Spotify users, regardless of subscription type. Spotify only supports AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and HE-AACv2 (depending on what type of device you’re streaming to), which are all lossy file formats. There are still differences in sound quality between Free Spotify and Spotify Premium: with Free Spotify, the maximum bitrate you can stream at is 128kbps on the web player and 160kbps on the mobile and desktop apps, whereas Spotify Premium affords you 256kbps on the web player and 320kbps streaming on desktop and mobile. In essence, this means that Spotify Premium’s music contains more audio data points, and therefore more detail to its sound. Streaming Service Max streaming quality Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) Supported Formats Streaming Service Qobuz

Max streaming quality 24bit / 192kHz

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 1,411

Supported Formats AIFF, ALAC, FLAC, WAV, WMA Lossless

Streaming Service Amazon Music HD

Max streaming quality 24bit / 192kHz

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 3,730

Supported Formats FLAC

Streaming Service Tidal HiFi

Max streaming quality 24bit / 192kHz

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 4,608

Supported Formats AAC, ALAC, FLAC, MQA

Streaming Service Deezer HiFi

Max streaming quality 16bit / 44.1kHz

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 1,411

Supported Formats FLAC

Streaming Service Google Play Music

Max streaming quality 320kbps

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 320

Supported Formats AAC, ALAC, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA

Streaming Service Deezer Premium

Max streaming quality 320kbps

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s)

Supported Formats MP3

Streaming Service Spotify Premium

Max streaming quality 320kbps

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 320

Supported Formats AAC, Ogg Vorbis

Streaming Service Apple Music

Max streaming quality 24bit / 192kHz

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 256

Supported Formats AAC

Streaming Service YouTube Music Premium

Max streaming quality 256kbps

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 256

Supported Formats AAC

Streaming Service SoundCloud Go+

Max streaming quality 256kbps

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 256

Supported Formats AAC

Streaming Service Slacker Radio

Max streaming quality 320kbps

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 320

Supported Formats MP3

Streaming Service Pandora

Max streaming quality 192kbps

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 192

Supported Formats AAC

Streaming Service Spotify Free

Max streaming quality 160kbps

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s) 128

Supported Formats AAC

Streaming Service Deezer Free

Max streaming quality 128kbps

Max Desktop Quality(kb/s)

Supported Formats MP3

Spotify Premium does have higher quality than Free Spotify, but it doesn’t have a high resolution or “HiFi” setting. However, on February 22, 2021, Spotify announced Spotify HiFi, a lossless audio streaming tier that’ll fit in with services like Deezer, Tidal HiFi, and Amazon Music HD. As of December 20, 2022, Spotify HiFi is still unavailable, and once it does launch it probably won’t be worth paying extra for if they charge more than the regular tier.

What are some lesser known Spotify features?

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Spotify constantly and consistently comes out with new features. For example, in 2017, it created a “Time Capsule” playlist for all of its 16-years-old-and-up users, Premium or not. These playlists were personalized based on their extensive listening history. It was created to be the kind of playlist users would have listened to in their teenage years. Pretty cool, huh? Another more recent creation of Spotify’s was the “Pet Playlist,” which users could personalize by inputting the species of their pet as well as ranking their pet’s behaviors across a few different spectra. This data was then mixed with the genres and styles of music the user enjoys to create a playlist for users and their furry best friends. Express yourself on Tinder and Instagram Spotify has partnerships with many other apps, including Instagram and Tinder. You can share the name, artist, and album artwork of a song to your Instagram story with the click of a button on Spotify. If you link your Spotify account to Tinder, you can publish your frequently played songs on your Tinder profile—you know, to make sure you attract people with as impeccable music taste as yourself. And, of course, you can connect your account with Facebook to find friends more easily. Spotify plays nicely with Android Auto and has its own Apple Carplay mode

Lily Katz / SoundGuys Carplay simplifies the interface, so distractions are lessened.

When you connect your smartphone to your car by Bluetooth, Spotify will automatically go into Apple Carplay mode or Android Auto mode, depending on your OS and if your car is compatible with these features. These features reduce the amount of information displayed on the screen, making it safer to navigate the app while in the car. (We don’t recommend using the app while actively driving, though. Have your passenger do it.) They also make for easy integration with the navigation apps Google Maps and Waze. Similarly, many music-listening devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy Buds Plus, offer Spotify integration for easy access. That’s a wrap: End-of-year statistics My personal favorite Spotify feature is “Spotify Wrapped.” In December of every year, Spotify creates an animation of statistics for each user, including but not limited to the song they listened to most over the past year, how many total minutes they spent listening to music over the past year, the podcast the user listened to most often, and the countries all the artists they listened to are based out of. In addition to this, Wrapped shows users the statistics generalized by region and in the world as a whole. In December of 2019, Spotify even had “Wrapped” stats for the whole decade. “Wrapped” is available for both Free and Premium users, but Premium users get additional personalized data including the number of artists they discovered that year as well as their top new artist from that year. Because of this one small detail, Spotify Premium wins this section, but, all Spotify users get a lot of really cool features. Free Spotify vs Spotify Premium: Which one is better? And the winner is Spotify Premium! It’s pretty clear that Premium has more features than Free Spotify, but whether or not you’re willing to pay for a subscription depends on you, of course. If you can get a student, family, or duo membership, Spotify Premium isn’t too pricey, but if you’re still on the fence, Spotify has free month-long trials of Premium. Like most streaming services, the primary purpose of the free tier is to entice you to move over to the fully featured paid tiers; which can range from restricting features like forcing you to shuffle albums and playlists, or hampering sound quality to a clearly audible level. That being said, you’ll still be able to get some casual listening out of Spotify’s free tier, so enjoy the tunes!

Frequently asked questions about Free Spotify vs Spotify Premium

Does Spotify have audiobooks? Yes, Spotify has audiobooks, though, they might be hard to find because Spotify is so centered around music. Start by typing in “audiobooks” into the search bar and that will lead you to playlists, or try searching for specific book. (Your local public library probably also has free audiobooks online too, just saying.) Does Spotify have a senior rate? No, Spotify only offers discounted prices to students, live-in couples or roommates of 2, and families up to 6. Can I access downloaded songs when I stop my Premium subscription? No, you can only access downloaded songs with an active Spotify Premium subscription. We use the free version of Spotify. When we request a song on our Amazon Echo Dot, we get the artist's “station” which then plays songs from the same time period and of similar style. Dot does not, however, simply play the requested song. Is this typical? Yes, this can be attributed to both your free Spotify subscription and Spotify’s relationship to Amazon. Unless you have Spotify Premium, you cannot request specific songs through your Echo Dot. You can, however, ask Alexa to play Today’s Top Hits, your Discover Weekly playlist, or a custom-made playlist of your own and it will shuffle through the songs from these playlists. Can I search for songs by their lyrics? Yes, if you type a song’s lyrics into the Spotify search bar, the song will come up so long as the artist has affiliated their song lyrics to the song. This affiliation can be done through services like Musixmatch. Will it ever be easier to listen to local files on the mobile app? Yes, it was recently leaked that Spotify is planning to implement this capability so you won’t have to upload your local files through the desktop app before being able to listen to them on mobile. Can artists push for their songs to be added to my algorithm? That’s not quite how it works. Spotify recently released a new tool for artists to be able to let Spotify know which of their songs they want to prioritize to be added to users’ algorithms. This doesn’t mean that their songs will necessarily be put into your algorithm, and there’s nothing an artist can do to ensure that it will be. It’s just emphasizing one song over another if Spotify’s algorithm so chooses to select that artist for your recommended songs. This tool is just one additional cog in the machine of Spotify’s algorithms, and is currently only being implemented for Spotify’s Radio and Autoplay.

soundguys.com - Free Spotify vs Spotify Premium - SoundGuys

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