Spotify may upgrade its free account to give users more on-demand streaming

By Christian de Looper December 9, 2016

spotify vs. pandora — prykhodov/123rf

Spotify may make a lot of its money from subscribers, but that doesn’t mean it forgot about its free users. In fact, it looks like the company is preparing to beef up its free offering.

Spotify is testing a new feature it calls Jump — a feature that basically allows users to get some on-demand features in some of its playlists, according to a report from The Verge. Currently, only free subscribers get on-demand access if they want to hear a certain song, meaning that Jump is a significant upgrade for free users, who currently have to hope that shuffling a playlist turns up the song they want to hear relatively quickly.

According to reports, Spotify is also in talks with major labels, negotiations that will probably take quite some time. If the company launches a feature like Jump, that feature will most likely need to be a part of the conversations and Spotify would need approval from record labels to get Jump off the ground.

As The Verge notes, Spotify would likely argue a feature like Jump will help give customers more of a taste of on-demand music, something that could help push paid subscriptions to its music streaming platform.

It’s important to note that Spotify hasn’t officially announced the feature just yet, so even if it is in the works, it could be changed before it’s rolled out, or scrapped altogether.

Spotify is currently the most popular streaming service, but competitors are coming after it. Apple Music, for example, recently hit 20 million subscribers. While that may only be half of what Spotify currently has, Apple managed to achieve that figure in a much shorter amount of time.

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Christian de Looper

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Christian’s interest in technology began as a child in Australia, when he stumbled upon a computer at a garage sale that he…

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