For people that are wondering about the new plan and the cryptic "basic individual" that's not marked as premium — you still keep all the basic features of your basic music plan. The literal difference is that there's no access to audiobooks. Once I secured the basic, it showed all the features: save music, listen in any order, etc.

I was looking into the plan options available, having had Premium for years. And I saw that there is Basic, for £1/month less. It's available as an option on my account, it said when I searched for it that if it doesn't show up then you're ineligible for it but it DOES show up so I could switch to it and save a little money.

The question is, what's the difference?

I know that people with Free get ads, can't disable Shuffle and only get a few skips per day.

With Premium, you can play a playlist in order, skip as much as you want, and don't get ads.

With Basic it's stated that you don't get ads. But what about forced shuffle and limited skips? It doesn't mention that, and there has to be some difference right? Otherwise why is it cheaper?

(P.S the recent change to queueing on mobile where you now can't just tick a dozen songs and remove them from the current queue anymore is a horrible change which worsens user experience for no discernable reason and I hate it. Not the point of this post though.)

I bought a tablet a month ago and instead of installing Pandora as I normally use, I opted to try out Spotify. A friend of mine has used Spotify premium for well over a year, but he was not able to answer my question. Nor was I able to find it anywhere online.

So I made a new Spotify account. Didn't sign up for premium, and I did not elect for the premium trial.

It seems like I have access to some awesome features that I would think would only be available in premium. I can select individual songs to play immediately. I have been able to create playlists and save songs/albums. I have had no problems skipping songs or switching songs in the middle of play. I still get occasional ads during play and I am not able to share playlists, though I do not have my account linked to Facebook. My friend and I did a comparison and it seems like he is paying $10/mo to be able to share playlists and not have ads.

Am I crazy or is this how it is?

What's lost if we switch to basic family plan?

I see audiobook listening is but what else is?

Do any of the following change:

Audio quality

unlimited skip

Offline Listening

Addfree listening

The cost difference for me is only $1

Why is my only option to pay $12 for limited audiobook listening if the goal is for Spotify to take over the need for other audiobook apps?

I listen to music 15hr~ a day. I don’t really wanna pay 10$ but I don’t want ads. Anyone with Spotify premium, would you recommend?

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With the price increase, it looks like I can keep the $16.99 price by going from premium family to basic family. There are two differences listed: basic doesn't include audiobooks (fine), and there's a distinction between "up to 6 basic/premium accounts".

So does basic family include ads? Doesn't allow downloads? Anything else? If so, what is the benefit of basic family over just going with the free service?

I have a family plan with six people and I just downgraded us to the basic plan (when Spotify was going to automatically renew us for the more expensive premium plan) because it didn’t seem fair that everybody would be paying extra when I’m the only one who would get to listen to audiobooks. Idk if I missed something?

I was going to cancel my Spotify plan cause I have 3 month Apple Music trial but I noticed that my current plan is cheaper than Basic? This doesn’t make sense to me cause I thought the premium plan was $12.69 CAD now!

Don't forget to switch to basic family with the price increase if you're the account holder and not using audio books!

Back to $16.99USD on basic... For now.

Individual vs family

Besides sharing an account with the family is there a difference? In Premium Individual I was able to listen and download some books but now I just got Premium Family and it’s got this message:

You can't buy audiobooks in the app, but titles you've already purchased through Spotify can be listened to here.

In individual the lock icons weren’t on any of these chapters - what am I doing wrong?

I listen to Spotify about 5 hours a week. I'm a high school student, so I don't qualify for the Student plan. I can only work during the summer, so I don't have very much money. No one else in my family listens to Spotify, so I can't use the Duo plan. Could you all recommend to me if I should buy Premium or not?

I am SO SICK of the ads and how I get a limited number of skips. The worst is when they force me to listen to a random song. YouTube is annoying because I have to go all the way to the website and can’t even make a playlist there. Also free music apps seem to have shitty sound quality(Musi is one I use and sound quality is inconsistent). So should I just get premium?

My friends give me so much hate for this, but instead of spending $10 (now $11!) a month, I just create my own playlists and shuffle them. I can access unlimited premade and my own playlists, I get 6 song skips an hour which feels pretty reasonable to me, and don’t have an issue hearing a couple minutes of ads every once in a while.

What do you all think?

I recently signed up for Spotify premium. Some of my friends call me crazy. But as a mathematician, I decided to break down the math for them, along with you.

Let’s start off by assuming that you bought the Spotify personal plan, which would cost you about $9.99. Seems pretty pricy, right? Nope!

According to most websites, Spotify gives you a range of one-four minutes of ads every hour. To keep things simple, let’s just say that you get 2:30s of ads every hour. According to https://headphonesaddict.com, people in the U.S. listen to an average of 26.9 hours per week, but let’s just round that down to 25 to keep things simple. Here’s the data we have so far:

• You listen to 2 minutes and 30 seconds of ads every hour.

• You listen to 25 hours of music every week.

Looks good? Good. 2:30s of ads an hour doesn’t sound like too much of an inconvenience, but what if I told you that that’s a whopping 1:02:05s of ads every single week? Imagine having to listen to a whole hour of advertisement. And that adds up to a massive, MASSIVE 4 hours, 29 minutes, and 45 seconds of advertisements every month. Let’s re-analyze what we have so far.

• You listen to 2:30s of advertisements every hour.

  • That adds up to be 1:02:05s of ads every week (150 seconds × 25 hours a week)

  • That also adds up to 4:29:45s of ads every month. (1:02:05s × 4.34524 weeks in a month)

• You listen to 25 hours of music every week.

These numbers are getting pretty high. Without these calculations, it would be hard to believe that you have to bear with *four hours* of advertisements every month. This is where premium comes in. Assuming that you’re spending $9.99 a month on premium, you’re spending quite literally 0.0006 cents to remove every second of advertisements. To put that into perspective, that’s like if you took a penny and chopped it into 16 pieces, and spent each piece to skip a second of advertisements. Even better, that ads up to be just a little bit over three cents to skip a minute of ads. Let’s just re-analyze our data again.

• You listen to 25 hours of music every week.

• You listen to 2:30s of advertisements every hour.

  • That adds up to be 1:02:05s of ads every week (150 seconds × 25 hours a week)

  • That also adds up to 4:29:45s of ads every month. (1:02:05s × 4.34524 weeks in a month)

• It costs you about 0.0006 cents to skip a single second of advert.

  • That’s only three cents to remove a minute of advertisements, crazy!

I mean I think it’s quite obvious that Spotify Premium is obviously worth it. And those calculations are based on the individual Spotify Premium plan, not even the family plan. Assuming that six people are all using the family plan, each person is only paying $2.50 a month for their plan. That lowers the 0.036 cents to less than a cent (0.00924).

It’s crazy to think that everything I have calculated is only for advertisements. There are plenty of other rich features that come with premium, including unlimited skips, downloads, and some others.

I’m not here to say that you should be Spotify Premium, but please, stop saying that it’s a waste of money.

Tl;dr: premium is not a waste of money!1!!