It’s about time – Spotify is finally upgrading its free tier with these Premium-style features

• Spotify is upgrading is free tier for the first time in seven years
• Now users can tap and play any song they want to in a playlist, or by using the search bar
• These enhancements are designed to give users more playback control, but they're still missing out on some fun Premium features

Spotify’s Free tier offers users a small dose of the advanced features the platform has to offer, and despite its limited features and the presence of ads, Spotify Free is where most people start before committing to a Premium subscription. Now, the music streaming service is upgrading its Free experience – and it’s long overdue.

Hot on the heels of launching Spotify Lossless, Spotify is upgrading its Free experience with new features that give you more control over the music and podcasts you listen to. The current Free tier launched in 2018, so this rollout marks the first major upgrade for Free users in seven years, with the focus on improving in-app control functions.

The upgrade is rolling out to users globally from today, and you'll be able to choose what you want to listen to by simply tapping a song in a playlist or via the search bar, giving you more flexibility and control over your listening experience.

Prior to the new update, users had little to no choice over what to play and when, as it was primarily a shuffle-only experience, and similar restrictions also applied to shared songs on social media.

Listening to songs that others have shared to other social platforms came with its own limitations, and Free users couldn’t play them straight away. Instead, they were put into a playlist and preview loop, resulting in a lot of frustration with the social sharing experience. With the new upgrade, users can now tap on a song a friend has shared to their social media page and jump straight in.

According to Spotify, these upgrades to the Free tier are about more than just giving users more control over what they listen to. It makes simple tasks such as curating playlists and navigating features like Discover Weekly easier, which in turn makes the overall streaming experience a more personal one.

This also applies to Spotify Wrapped, which the company touched upon during the livestreamed announcement, saying: “Spotify Wrapped obviously shows you your most listened-to songs, so when you have more control over what you’re playing and when, we believe Spotify Wrapped will become even more valuable.”

What’s still missing from Spotify’s Free tier?

Spotify’s Free service is about to become even more manageable and enjoyable for users – even if these new features should always have been available in its Free version. That being said, a plethora of features are still missing – including Spotify’s popular AI DJ.

Now that the company has started paying slightly more attention to its Free version, I wonder if this new upgrade will open the floodgates for other handy features to come to the Free tier.

During Spotify’s livestream, I asked about this, and Spotify told me: “This change is really about improving the baseline free experience and giving our listeners more control so that we can better meet their use cases around the overall listening experience. That being said, at Spotify we’re always looking to improve and see what features make sense. But in this update, we’re just focussing on these specific improvements.”

Though it would be great for Free users to get a small taste of the advanced features loved by millions of Premium members, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Spotify is preserving most of these for paying subscribers only – that way, more Free users will be likely to give into temptation and sign up for Premium.

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