Sweden-based commercial music service, Spotify, on Wednesday announced that they will be offering unlimited free music to desktop users. Given that streaming from the desktop client of Spotify was never an easy affair, the new announcement comes as a relief to users who have been struggling with it.
With the older Spotify desktop client, users had to abide by grace periods, monthly usage caps and even limits on how many times they could listen to individual tracks. The company has now announcedthat it was doing away with all these stipulations for desktop users. All those who do use Spotify on their desktops will now be eligible to listen to as much music as they want, without a subscription.
There is a downside to the entire issue though, advertisements will still be a part of the deal, but there is a little flexibility now in the otherwise very rigid structure of the service. There aren’t any shuffle-only requirements on the desktop version. Spotify recently went free on mobile devices based on the Android and the iOS platform, however there it is all based on shuffling, where one can listen to any artiste by shuffling.
The latest announcement will certainly be a boon to users who are using the services on a desktop, with the ‘unlimited’ the icing on the cake . To put this in context however, Spotify has always been under fire for underpaying their artistes, and now with this free service, there are industry concerns that Spotify’s payouts for the artistes may be affected adversely.
Source:NDTV
