Spotify’s free tier isn’t really free; it’s ad-supported. Companies are paying Spotify to make you listen to ads every few tracks. Spotify makes less money per-play from ads than they do from Premium subscribers, so to encourage people to upgrade, the free tier is limited in certain ways. Spotify Free: Monthly Price: $9.99 (or $4.99 for students or $14.99 for a 6-account family deal) Free: Annual Price: $99: Free: Library: More than 40 million songs. 6 things to know about the new free Spotify. The world's largest music-streaming service just amped up its freebie options. Here's what you need to know. April 24, 2018 1:43 p.m. According to various reports, the free version of Spotify’s music streaming service is going to get some pretty interesting feature upgrades. One of the updates to the free version of Spotify that is expected to come down the line is an option for free users to pick the exact music they want to listen to. While the app’s premium version has seen numerous updates over the years, this is the free app’s first major overhaul since 2014, and it could prove an important update: Spotify’s free app.
We recommend products and services based on unbiased research from our editorial team. We make money via affiliate links, which means if you click a link on our site, we may earn a commission. Any commissions we receive do not affect our recommendations; if you want to know more about how that works, read more. Spotify vs. Pandora
Launched in 2008, Spotify has grown into one of the most popular music streaming companies in the entire world. Its sleek interface and remarkable music discovery features have given it the success it enjoys today. Pandora started with the idea of creating a personalized radio station for each of its subscribers and powered its platform with what’s known as the Music Genome Project. Pandora’s subscribers enjoy creating multiple radio stations and finding new music through its Music Genome Project. Pandora is only available in the U.S. and in 2019 Sirius Radio acquired the service.
Spotify Premium vs. Pandora Premium OverviewSpotify Free Vs Paid Version
Spotify and Pandora offer free service tiers ideal for the casual listener seeking a radio-like experience. The difference between these two choices lies mostly in features like discovery and social sharing.
Interface and usability
Pandora has a user-friendly interface designed for simple access that’s easily traversable. Its mobile app is similar to the desktop design’s sleek appearance. Simply access your library, profile, and music discovery features sprawled across the bottom of your screen. Pandora takes into account your song and playlist choices by identifying your patterns of use and presenting future tracks based on your clicks. It’s also compatible with numerous devices, including your smartphone, TV, wearables, and more. And when it comes to offline mode, simply download your favorite stations to listen whenever you’re away from WiFi or in an out-of-service area.
In Spotify’s mobile app, the settings tab is located at the top right corner of your screen. From there you’re able to view your profile, alter your music quality, crossfade between songs, among many more features. Its menu is positioned across the bottom of the screen where you can access your library, search songs, or navigate to your home screen. It pairs with several devices including your smartphone, PlayStation 4, smart speakers, and so much more. You can also download up to 10,000 songs for offline mode.
Music discovery
Spotify’s world-renown discovery playlists, including “Discover Weekly” and “Daily Mix,” help listeners find new songs and artists. Spotify’s algorithm introduces tracks based on your previous likes, skips, and dislikes and exposes you to songs and artists you’ve never experienced before. While Spotify’s playlists are essential for many subscribers, it’s Pandora’s Music Genome Project that shines in this category. Using more than 450 attributes to describe songs, along with a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them, the Music Genome Project stimulates Pandora’s discovery with surgical precision. Choose a few songs, and Pandora will effortlessly fill the rest of your station with music you’re sure to like.
Social sharing
Due to the accessibility of Spotify’s free version, you can freely recommend artists, or share your favorite songs and playlists with your friends. With Pandora, you can share your favorite stations on Facebook and Twitter, but not to the same effect. Since its stations are locked behind its subscription service, you must be a member to enjoy — not the most conducive method for social sharing. With Spotify, you can share individual songs across Facebook, Reddit, Skype, Twitter, and other social platforms. And sharing is simple, just click on the three dots located to the right and choose your sharing options.
The best value
Spotify’s free tier is an incredible value that provides access to its vast music library, discovery features, and social sharing tools. When using Spotify’s desktop application as a free user, you also enjoy access to any of your favorite songs without shuffling like the mobile app. By comparison, Pandora offers two ad-free, subscription tiers — Pandora Plus and Pandora Premium — with Plus costing just $5 per month. So, if you don’t want to shell out $9.99 per month, you can choose either Pandora’s or Spotify’s cheaper alternative and still avoid ads altogether.
The Bottom Line
Pandora and its Music Genome Project provide an impressive approach to music discovery. With its complex algorithm, Pandora may enhance your scope of songs and artists based on your current selection of tracks making its service a good option for music discovery. If you want the best free music option, listen to music on a wide range of devices, or appreciate connectivity with friends, you can’t go wrong with Spotify.
Recently Added
At Spotify we try to be as scientific as possible about how we build our products. Teams generate hypotheses that we test by running experiments — normally in the form of an A/B test — to learn what works and what doesn’t. The learnings give us insights and fuel new product ideas.
Want to know why Spotify decided to build a new Experimentation Platform and how it works? In this two-part series, we’ll share what led us to throw out our old A/B testing platform (called ABBA) and details around the new architecture we’ve chosen to substitute it.
Early days
Today almost all product decisions are made with some input from one or more A/B tests. But it hasn’t always been like that. Back when Spotify was a small startup in Sweden, a team, simply called Analytics, played around with various kinds of tests.
Over time, interest in A/B testing grew, and in 2013 we decided to spin up a team to take on building a more robust system. Thus was born ABBA, an A/B testing system that allowed us to (more) easily run experiments. Now we had a place to see what A/B tests were actually running, and a pipeline that computed results. The introduction of the system was a step change in productivity, and over time it was integrated into pretty much every aspect of Spotify — in our desktop clients and mobile clients, backend services and data pipelines, in-app messaging, and email campaigns.
ABBA as a system was quite simple. Each experiment (or rollout) mapped one to one to a feature flag, named after the experiment. When a client fetched the value of the feature flag it got back the name of the treatment group — e.g., “Control” or “Enabled” or “Sort according to color” — anything the user decided to name the group. (Fun trivia: some users of ABBA started encoding more elaborate configurations as JSON in the group names. Life finds a way). Every time a feature flag value was resolved, an event was logged, which fed into the exposure and results pipelines. For each experiment, only a small number of metrics were calculated. Many of these metrics were not very sensitive, leading to almost all analysis being performed manually in notebooks.
Is Spotify FreeWhy we decided to build a new system
Around 2017, the system began to reveal its limitations. We had a few big projects that required a lot of experimentation, and the sentiment at the company was that the system needed to improve.
At a hack week in late 2017, a few senior engineers gathered to sketch out a new system, which aimed to address the following challenges (as well as some others):
The Experimentation Platform
The new experimentation system, dubbed “The Experimentation Platform”, is composed of three parts:
Remote Configuration
Remote Configuration is a way to change the experience a user receives. This is done through controlling the values of a set of “properties” of the client. A property is a variable with a type (enum or integer) and a default value, and can represent the appearance or behavior of pretty much anything.
The example above shows an imaginary version of Spotify’s home page in our mobile apps. It’s made up of a set of shelves, and each shelf has a set of cards. With Remote Configuration properties we can control elements for any purpose, i.e. the number of shelves or font sizes on the home page for experiments, rollouts, or personalization or localization.
The properties are defined in a yaml file living next to the code that uses it. When the code is built, all properties and their default values are gathered and published via an API to the admin interface together with the ID of the client being built and the version number.
The default value is critical. It allows us to have a programmatic understanding of what the end user experience will be if a client fails to fetch or apply property values. Also, we only have to transfer values to the client when they differ from the default, which saves a lot of time and data traffic when the client starts up. We know what defaults a client has since it identifies itself with the version number.
The way different users get different values for properties is through a set of policies that is evaluated when a client requests the configuration. The policy has a set of filtering criteria and a property-value mapping to apply if the filters match. The actual implementation of the policy is a PlanOut script that the Remote Configuration service executes.
An important side effect of the fetching of property values is that two events are being logged:
Property values are re-fetched in the background at regular intervals, but are only applied when the app is relaunched. The main reason for this is that we do not want the user experience to change mid-session.
Metrics Catalog
The Metrics Catalog is where we manage, store, and serve metrics to the Experimentation Platform.
On a high level, raw metric data is fed into a pipeline where it’s joined with information on which experiment groups a user belongs to. This data is then aggregated into a OLAP cube and put into a data warehouse. In front of the data warehouse sits an API that allows other parties to query for information without knowing too much about the underlying storage.
Exposure is assembled from the Config Assigned and Config Applied messages from Remote Configuration.
A user is considered exposed to an experiment if the following is true:
The custom exposure sources allow us to define finer-grained exposure events, such as when a user visited a certain page in the mobile app.
Experiment Planner
The Experiment Planner sits as an orchestrating layer on top of Metrics Catalog and Remote Configuration. This is where we create, launch, and stop experiments, as well as analyze test results.
The UI lives in Backstage, our developer portal. All of our internal teams have access to our internal instance of Backstage and are free to create as many experiments as they like.
When creating an experiment, we have to define the test treatments, what experience users should get for each treatment (by specifying property values), and all the things that go into testing the hypothesis. Having programmatic understanding of available properties in Remote Configuration and their types helps this process and reduces configuration errors. It’s possible to define values for properties belonging to different systems in a single experiment. For example, if Android and iOS are implemented differently, we still can run a single experiment on both platforms.
Summary
We have spent the last two years rebuilding our experimentation capabilities at Spotify. The new platform is a step change in ease of use and capabilities, but we still feel it’s early for experimentation at Spotify.
We are constantly evolving our Experimentation Platform and practices. If you would like to know more, or if you’re interested in joining the team and contribute to our journey, do not hesitate to reach out.
Johan Rydberg, Experimentation Lead
[email protected] / @datamishap
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