At an event in New York City on Tuesday morning, Spotify announced a new version of its mobile app for free users. Unlike the old free tier, which forced users to shuffle through albums and playlists, the new version of the app allows unpaid users to listen to songs on-demand, as long as they appear in one of 15 personalized playlists.
Between the Daily Mix playlists featuring tracks you’ve listened to in the past, the Release Radar playlist packed with new releases, Today’s Top Hits and more, free users will have access to upwards of 750 songs at any given time.
While the 15 customized playlists will be front and center in the new app, Spotify will also offer up recommendations to users based on the songs you’ve included in your playlists previously. Whenever you add a new song to a playlist, Spotify will list other songs that it think you might like which you can also add with a single tap.
Finally, Spotify also unveiled a new “data saver” mode which cuts data consumption by up to 75%. With this feature, the app will cache music ahead of time with 3G, which means you won’t bleed through data quite as quickly. After all, free users can’t save music offline, so this feature should be a huge hit. You will have to manually turn the feature on when the update rolls out though — it won’t be turned on by default.
Spotify didn’t announce a release date for the redesigned free tier at the event, but the update will begin rolling out on iOS and Android in the coming weeks. And yes, there will still be ads in the free tier.
