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Spotify today announced that they’re making their streaming music service free for mobile users… except there’s a quick catch (isn’t there always?). You’ll have to listen to tunes in shuffle mode, meaning you’ll select an artist or a playlist, and hear music from that pool of tracks in a jumbled, random order. It’s not ideal, but considering you aren’t paying a dime for the functionality we can’t imagine too many people will scoff at that.
Bringing a free way to enjoy the Spotify experience will be crucial in the company’s growth. They’ll invite you inside for dinner, and they’re hoping that you thought the turkey was good enough that you’ll want to stay and pay for the dessert. I can’t say that’s a bad strategy at all. The app itself can be had as a free download in the Google Play Store.
[via Spotify]
Too bad with T-Mobile, I will probably still need to keep that premium account for those drive through rural area.
Good thing for T-Mobile I don’t have to watch my data limit
Unlimited only get you as far as there is good data speed, in rural area, it’s useless if you only got EDGE.
Their EDGE is surprisingly fast out in the sticks like 150-200kbit
It’s unusable for me at all, found this out the hard way when i was driving up to Chicago this Thanksgiving when I was passing through Indiana. I forgot to set my offline playlist on spotify, and go without music for almost two hours.
So this is a Pandora / Slacker clone? Thanks for bringing nothing new to the table.
You can’t do any of the things listed in Pandora. You can’t shuffle through a playlist, artist, or album in Pandora. That is significantly different.
Do I create the playlist? Otherwise if it’s predetermined it is like Pandora’ algorithm.
Yes, you create the playlist, and the app plays random songs only from your chosen playlist. Spotify has always had free Pandora-type streaming.
Soooo… Chromecast support?
wonder if there’s a limit to how short a playlist can be?
The premium account is well worth the money. I have discovered FAR more music with Spotify than I ever did with Pandora or Rdio1 or Slacker. It is a great app and they continually add new music!
It’s about time. Rdio followed the same route. I’ll keep em all, along with the original, Pandora, to see which works best.
doesn’t work in Canada :(
You should know by now that nothing works in Canada except chainsaws.
LOL … now that was fack’n funny!
WOW! What a sweet move! The deal breaker for me though is that the PC experience is sooo much better with Google Music.
Hmm, I’ll check it out…And Usher!… Yeaaaa Man.
Is it free or ad-supported? Big difference :P
This is amazing for free. I really like google play music but it’s very expensive when you need 5 accounts.
I’m still having issues with spotify. It’s not just my device either. After listening to around 3 songs, it just hangs itself. I guess that’s what you get for free. I wish I never gave up the Google all access at $8/mo
I was really excited about this news and went to listen to some of my playlists. It’s great but now there is a global 6 skips per hour. You used to be able to load different radio stations and get 6 skips per station. This is not the case anymore.
You can get around this by closing and reopening the application.