Understanding Spotify’s Subscription Plans

To use the Spotify music service, you have to sign up as a subscriber, and then download the Spotify software. Spotify offers three levels of subscription access, ranging in price from free to $9.99 per month. The more you pay, the more music you get to listen to.

The three plans are as follows:

• Free. This is no doubt the most popular plan because you don’t have to pay anything to use it. This plan displays occasional ads in the application, as shown in Figure 2.1, and comes with some limitations—there’s no mobile version, you can’t use it in offline mode, and you’re limited to 20 hours of listening each month.

Figure 2.1. Spotify Free, complete with in-app advertising.

• Unlimited. This plan costs $4.99 per month and eliminates both the ads from the interface and the listening time limit. (Figure 2.2 shows Spotify without the ads.) With this plan you can listen to your music as long and as often as you like. However, there is still no mobile component to this plan.