Last week there were two options with Spotify; you could either go for Spotify Free (although you needed an invite in the UK, since it became so popular again when they released their mobile clients), or you paid £10 per month for Spotify Premium.  Spotify have now made things a little easier, and are offering 4 options, depending on exactly what you are after.

Firstly, there is a new Spotify Open option.  This does not need an invite (and in fact the Spotify Free option remains invite only, but is still available); and has one other key difference with Spotify Free – there is no Spotify Radio Mode, which was very useful if you didn’t know what exactly you wanted to listen to, but need know what sort of music you wanted.  Also, you are limited to 20 hours per month.

Also, there is a new option, Spotify Unlimited, which sites between Spotify Free and Spotify Premium, yet only costs £5 per month (a price that many said they would be willing to pay when the Spotify Premium originally came out).  It does support the Spotify Radio Mode, and like Spotify Premium is ad-free, and does not have a 14 day limit of accessing Spotify from abroad that the Spotify Free and Spotify Open options have.

However, if you want to have access to Spotify music when offline, or play Spotify music on your mobile (whether online or offline), listen to Spotify’s exclusive content, or benefit from enhanced music quality, then you’ll still need to take out the Spotify Premium subscription.

Having a greater range of options is a good thing, and many people may decide the £5 per month is a price worth paying for online access to a very large (though not yet complete) catalogue of music.

Some useful pieces of information;

• If you have Spotify Free, and you buy a subscription to Spotify Unlimited or Spotify Premium, then if you let your subscription lapse, you will return to Spotify Free, not the newer Spotify Open.
• You can no longer buy a day-pass, but for just a little more you can now get a whole month worth of Spotify Unlimited.  Technically you’ll sign up to recurring payments, but if you cancel before the end of that month, you’ll only pay for the single month, as there is no long term tie-in contract.  You will obviously continue to get the higher level of service until the end of the month; so you could pay and cancel the next day, but still benefit from a months’ worth of service.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 9:50 am and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.