Is Spotify Premium Worth It?.
Spotify is one of the best places to stream music and listen to podcasts. It has fantastic apps on most platforms and offers innovative features and great music suggestions. You can get most of what Spotify has to offer for free, but making the decision to pay for a premium service offers many significant benefits.
The question is, is Spotify Premium worth it? Let’s take a look at the paid features, which are the most compelling reasons why you really need to give money away.
No Advertising!
Unless you yearn for radio days, you probably won’t enjoy it when your playlist is interrupted by ads. Unfortunately, the only way for Spotify to offer you music streaming without asking for money is by selling ads. After all, launching a streaming platform actually costs a lot of money!
For us, this is by far the main reason Spotify Premium is worth it. Pure, continuous music, no one is trying to sell you anything.
Control Over Your Music
Free Spotify users have no complete control over what they listen to. Shuffle play is the only mode you can access and you only get a limited number of track skips. This means that you will most often hear songs or artists that you don’t like.
Premium users can play any songs in any order. You can skip tracks as much as you like. This is another feature that changes the power of Spotify from streaming radio to a personal music player.
Since music is such a personal thing, we cannot imagine that most people will enjoy being forced to listen to songs that they are not interested in. This is a big argument for premium.
The Latest Music
If you want to listen to the latest music as soon as it comes out, Spotify Premium is well worth it. While this is not the case for all songs, there are some high-profile new releases that don’t become available to free users for two weeks.
If you mostly spend your time listening to your favorite old-time music, it doesn’t really matter. However, this is worth considering when making a purchasing decision.
High Quality Offline Playback & Streaming
Most of us these days use smartphones or other mobile devices to listen to music, but they are not always within the reach of an internet connection. Perhaps you want to listen to music on public transport or on vacation, away from the Internet.
If you are using the free version of Spotify, you will need an internet connection for music to continue playing. With Premium, you can download your favorite songs, albums or playlist to your device and listen to them wherever you go.
You can also download high quality versions of your music, so in general the downloaded music will have amazing quality and clarity. The premium processing even gives you streaming audio.
Free Spotify users are limited to 96Kbps streams. This is far below the quality of a CD. If you pay for a premium subscription, you can increase it up to 360 Kbps. Even if you don’t have particularly good headphones, the difference will still be day and night. It is absolutely worth getting access to this high quality sound. Even non-audiophiles can easily hear the difference.
Is Spotify Premium Worth $9.99?
Most people probably don’t think of $ 9.99 as a lot of money, but just because something is cheap doesn’t mean you should be wasting your money. We think the price is absolutely justified, especially considering the time when you could hardly buy a single album every month for $ 10.
Even in the iTunes era, when you buy songs right away digitally, you only get a few individual songs for the money. So from a purely value standpoint, Spotify Premium is an incredible deal. You can not only listen to your favorite music at any time, but also discover and listen to new music without paying for it.
Basically, there are two drawbacks that apply to all streaming services. First, if Spotify goes bankrupt, you will lose access to your music collection. Second, you have no control over what music gets into the service. This means your favorite music may or may not have been released on Spotify at all. Considering the price, we do not see this as a problem, but for individual users, such opportunities can be an obstacle.
For everyone else, we think Spotify Premium is absolutely worth it as any of the key features improve over the free experience to the point where the price is justified.
The Family Plan Changes The Game
While the value of the Single-User Premium plan may be controversial, it’s important to remember that Spotify offers much cheaper per-user rates for family groups. The family plan is $ 14.99 at the time of writing and covers six family members. That’s roughly $ 2.50 per user if you use all six slots.
The family plan also has other cool features like shared family playlists. Even in a household of only two, the decline in value is significant. More than enough to tilt the scales in favor of the Premium option. There is also Spotify for kids.
Alternative Options
Spotify does not exist in a vacuum, it has many competitors such as YouTube Music and Apple Music. Some of these services also have free tiers, so if you’re trying to save some money but can’t handle some of Spotify Free’s limitations, it’s worth taking them into account.
A key alternative is the free version of YouTube Music. While it still relies on ads, it offers unlimited song skip and you can choose any songs you want to play. So if your main problem with Spotify Free is lack of control and not ads, YouTube Music Free might be the right choice.
On the other hand, the free YouTube Music tier does not support background playback. So the question is what compromises are you willing to make as a free user.
Is Spotify Premium Worth It? Try a Trial
While we can discuss the pros and cons of Spotify Free and Premium all day long, in the end, nothing can replace actually living with the service for a while. Spotify knows this as well as others, which is why they offer a free trial for new users.
Usually these trials last at least 30 days, but sometimes there are proposals for 60 or even 90 days. There is no risk of signing up for a trial, so why not use the Premium tier for a while and see if you think paying $ 9.99 a month is worth the restrictions and hassle of Spotify Free.
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Is Spotify Premium Worth It?
Is Spotify Premium Worth It?