Imagine Kendrick and Drake decided to collaborate and drop an album together featuring J. Cole and Kanye West, and after 10 seconds of the first song, a Clorox ad pops up with a Ford ad following it, ruining the entire flow of the song. This is what happens when you don’t buy the premium version of Spotify.
With multiple different plans, Spotify’s premium version is worth it for its price. The app offers four different plans for whatever best suits your needs: the student plan for $5.99 a month, the individual plan for $11.99 a month, the duo plan for $16.99 a month and the family plan for $19.99 a month. Regardless of your plan choice, Spotify Premium opens opportunities to listen to your favorite songs, podcasts and shows with your friends and family, alongside a host of other features that make listening to music all that much more enjoyable.
The premium version eliminates every single problem in the free version. For starters, the premium version is ad-free, so you don’t need to worry about an unskippable 30-second ad popping up every minute. The premium version also has unlimited skips, whereas the free version only allows users six skips per hour. Premium also allows the user to download unlimited songs to listen to offline, a huge bonus for long road trips or plane rides. But, by far the best improvement is getting the basic ability to listen to the specific song you search for. For non-Spotify users, in the Spotify free version, when you search for a song, you can’t play the specific song as you have to shuffle a playlist with “similar songs.”
The simple fact is that the free version of Spotify is genuinely unbearable.
Admittedly, most of the value of these basic features is a result of how Spotify purposely impairs its free version to make the premium all that much better. But Spotify Premium backs up its worth with a host of other innovative quality-of-life features that make it worth your money. Features like the ability to host “Jams” to listen to music with friends in real-time, and their latest AI DJ feature, “DJ X,” a personalized AI DJ which plays songs based on your past interest and listening history while also be able to switch up the vibe if the user chooses to, are incredibly useful. If anything, Spotify Premium gives so many new features that most users aren’t even aware of them all to the point where large forums like Spotify Community consistently help users uncover features they didn’t realize were there.
Above all, Spotify stands out with its ever-growing library of over 100 million songs, 6.5 million podcasts and 350,000 audiobooks, massive catalogs of playlists and a huge variety of features for user personalization. Less popular music platforms like Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal and more tend to lack in these aspects, especially when it comes to song recommendations and other personalized features.
And though Spotify’s free version is a pain to use, Apple Music, a close competitor, doesn’t offer a free version at all, forcing users to pay for the platform if they want to use it. Both platforms offer one-month free trials, but if the user decides that they still prefer to listen for free, Spotify still offers a free option, unlike Apple Music. Additionally, Apple Music is primarily a mobile-based app while Spotify is compatible for both mobile and PC, allowing users to quickly listen to their favorite songs whenever, wherever they want.
All in all, Spotify Premium proves itself to be worth the cost. Certain plans like the Student, Duo and Family Plans can also give you more value for your money while also inviting your friends and family to listen along.
