Spotify to update its free app
Earlier this month, on the third of April, Spotify went public on the New York stock exchange, and their share price increased more than the double in a matter of a couple of weeks. After this big step for the company, Spotify invited the press for a press conference on the 24th of this month, but what the conference is about was still a mystery. There was a lot of new rumors about Spotify’s next announcement, a couple of weeks ago some users got a new feature which is a Spotify personal voice assistant, and last week there has been news about Spotify’s first hardware, which will be a car music player. And now according to a Bloomberg report, Spotify will launch a new update for its free tire, this step would be the biggest change in Spotify since the streaming company went public at the beginning of the month.
The Swedish company already launched the new update to specific users, and there have been some screenshots of the new update published by The Verge, the new update will include some big changes in Spotify free version, perhaps the biggest change would be the ability to play songs on demand in certain playlists, which will make the free version of the service more like the premium one.
To differentiate between playlists on demand and other normal playlists, a blue shuffle icon would appear on the top of the playlist. Before the update, all playlist could only be played in shuffle mood.
It is visible that Spotify worked hard on this new update, nearly everything in the app has been changed somehow. From the bottom menus bar to the search menu. The browser button has disappeared and all its contents are now included in the search menu, where we can see
that it changed completely, it now has some colorful categories like Mood, Chill, Focus, and Workout. A preview of the playlist is now visible under the playlist title, and a premium button is added to the bottom menus bar, so it promotes users to subscribe to the paid version of the app.
Regarding the voice assistant, that the company was testing a few weeks ago, it doesn’t appear in the new update, but still, Spotify might surprise us and add it to the paid version soon.
Spotify wants to attract more users to subscribe, especially after it went public, to satisfy the shareholders and investors who look at the company’s user growth. The free service is so important for the company because it generates new paid subscribers.
After entering Romania, South Africa, and Vietnam back in March 2018, the Swedish streaming company is now available in 61 countries, with more than 159 million users, this number includes 71 million paid subscribers. The company is expecting this number to increase by 26 million to 97 million paid subscribers. paid subscribers generate more than 90% of the company’s $4.09 billion revenue, and this number is supposed to increase by 30% up to $6.6 billion by the end of 2018.
Other music streaming services provided by some tech giants like Apple, Amazon, or Google are struggling to get a bigger share of the market. Since the invitation for the 24th of April press conference, the music industry community has been talking about Spotify’s next move. Stay tuned next week to Samma3a, we will be covering Spotify’s press conference.
