Spotify testing new low cost paid tier – Spotify Plus

Spotify is experimenting with a new paid tier called Spotify Plus, which will lie between free and Premium. The good news is that it is inexpensive; the bad news is that you will still hear ads. The Verge was the first to report about the new Spotify Plus plan, which is presently being tested with a small group of users.

Spotify Plus is a new low-cost subscription option that combines features of existing free and premium tiers. The plan includes commercials, just like Spotify's free tier, but there are no restrictions on how many tracks you may skip every hour. Users can also choose the songs they want to listen to instead of being restricted to shuffling through albums and playlists.

Spotify Plus costs $0.99 per month in one test, which is significantly less than the $9.99 per month Premium tier. Unlike the free tier, Plus allows users to pick and choose whatever songs they want to play and skip. Spotify Plus, like the free version, includes advertisements. The $0.99/month price, according to the publisher, may not be set in stone; instead, it might be one of the price points at which Spotify is testing the new tier to determine user demand.

Spotify confirmed the news to The Verge, but declined to provide any other information. "We're actively testing an ad-supported membership option with a small group of our users," a Spotify representative told the source, underlining that Spotify Plus may never be released.

Since 2018, Spotify's free tier has been in its current form. Users can only skip six tracks per hour and can only select and listen to individual music from 15 playlists, which range from editorially selected playlists to algorithmically created collections like "Discover Weekly" and "Daily Mix." Free users can only listen to shuffled music outside of these playlists. The new Spotify Plus tier is a low-cost option to get around some of those limitations.

While Apple Music has incorporated lossless and spatial audio to its service, Spotify has yet to do so. Spotify HiFi was launched in February and will contain songs with lossless audio compression. However, neither the price nor the specific date of availability were ever disclosed by the company. Apple Music, its main competitor, began lossless audio streaming in June.