Spotify Free vs Premium Audio Quality Spotify applied OGG Vorbis format in all kinds of its Spotify tracks, plus, for streaming Spotify music, there are 3 different quality settings. Over-all, the free users can listen to standard quality on web player, 160kbps on desktop and select Normal quality for 96kbps and High quality for 160kbps on. Many Spotify new members asked how to make a playlist play in order, the answer is to pay for the premium subscription. Ad Free: No VS Yes. With Spotify Free, you can listen to any music in Spotify, but you'll hear ads between tracks both on computer and mobile. Sometimes, the ads may ruin your mood totally when you are enjoying music leisurely. Get 3-month Spotify Premium Free Trial On PC/Mac. Spotify offers many promotion activities to attract new users. It includes 30/60 days/3 month free trial or 3-month use for only $0.99 Spotify deals. Still, it's free. Step up to Spotify's £10 per month Premium subscription plan and the audio quality shoots up to 320kbps. You also get ad-free music, unlimited search and skip, plus the option to listen offline. There's also a Premium Family subscription for the discounted price of £15 per month.

Being one of the most popular and best music streaming services, Spotify has long provided all users with easy access to a huge library of streaming music, say 40 million songs, according to Spotify, no matter if you are subscribing the Free or Premium plan. However, in order to encourage people to pay for music, Spotify has applied some limits to the free membership. If you are new to Spotify and have no idea whether you should subscribe to Spotify Premium or listen free, you can refer to the following review where we are explaining the major differences between Spotify Free and Premium from price, features and audio quality, etc. so that you can decide which Spotify plan is right for you.

• See Also: Everything about Spotify Premium for Family Plan

Price

The biggest difference between Spotify Free and Premium is the price. As the name suggests, Spotify Free is free for everyone with no cost at all. To subscribe Premium, you should pay £9.99 per month. The great thing for Premium is that Spotify offers you a one month free trial to test its features before you finally decide to sign up the account.

Accessibility & Limitation

Spotify Free Vs Premium Reddit

Both Spotify Free and Premium have their own capabilities and limits. As for the Free plan, the annoyance is that it supports ads.That's to say, every few tracks you play, a short advert or two will be played, which will somehow harm your listening experience. On desktop, you won't feel too limited by Spotify Free as it lets you choose any artist, album, playlist, or song that you'd like to listen to and rock out to it as much as you like. But on mobile, things get a bit more restrictive. Using an iPhone or Android device, you'll still have access to the Spotify catalog, but you'll be forced to listen to everything in Shuffle mode or pre-made playlists. What's more, when you're using Spotify Free, you'll need to be online to listen to music instead of downloading any track to play offline.

If you upgrade to Spotify Premium, it will remove all adverts on every platform so you can listen the music without any interruption. Aside from removing ads, Premium plan also unlocks full access on your mobile devices, meaning you can listen to any song at any time on your phone as exactly the same when you listen on your desktop or laptop. Another huge benefit of Premium, of course, is the ability to download Spotify music for offline listening, which allows you to save up to 3,333 tracks on up to three devices.

Audio Quality & Experience

The audio quality you'll get from Free and Premium is also different. Generally speaking, Spotify uses three different quality settings for streaming in the Ogg Vorbis format. Spotify Free provides 96 kbps as the standard bitrate for mobile, then jumps to 160 kbps for desktop and web player 'standard quality' and 'high quality' on mobile. As for Spotify Premium, you'll get 320kbps which is 'high quality' on desktop and 'extreme quality' on mobile. Therefore, if you've got nice headphones or concern much about the music quality, you are suggested to go Spotify Premium for its high quality audio option.

Other Features

Premium prevails in other aspects as it owns some extra features that Free doesn't include, such as Spotify Connect, which controls Spotify music across multiple devices, making seamless transitions between listening on your phone and computer, the Year in Music and the amazing Discover Weekly playlists that help you find new music from Spotify.

Conclusion: Should You Sign Up Premium or Stay Free

Our verdict is, if you don't care much about the music quality and listening experience, the Free plan might just be enough for you. But if you are the kind of enthusiastic music lovers who want to hear the latest and high-quality songs, save music offline, hate ads, then Spotify Premium is absolutely the best investment you should make.

Extra Tips: How to Download Spotify Music Offline for Free

As the Spotify music is protected by DRM, only Premium users can download Spotify songs for offline listening. However, if you are a Free plan subscriber, you can also save the Spotify songs to your devices for playing offline. In this case, all you'll need is a smart Spotify DRM removal tool, like TunesKit Music Converter for Spotify, with which you can easily download any Spotify music file, such as tracks, albums, playlists and artists and convert the songs to common MP3, AAC, WAV, FLAC, M4A, M4B formats to play on any popular mobile devices and MP3 players. For more details on how to convert Spotify songs to MP3, you can visit the following guide.

• See Also: Complete Guide to Convert Spotify Songs to MP3

Adam Gorden is an experienced writer of TunesKit who is obsessed about tech, movie and software.

For years Spotify has always offered free online music listening service. But since it has promoted the premium service, people may wonder if there any distinctive difference between the Spotify free and premium service, and whether I should change to a premium subscription. As such, reading this article will be a nice solvent for your Spotify puzzles.

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Part 1. Spotify Free vs. Premium: Price Affordability

Prior to talking about the obvious difference, the most urgent element is whether you can afford the charge fee. As confirmed, Spotify adopts two charging schemes. The individual premium plan charges for $9.99 per month while a family premium plan charges for $14.99 per month that can allow six people's participation. The charging fee is still within one's affordability if you find the Spotify premium offers you favorable service in the next difference.

Part 2. Spotify Free vs. Premium: Playback Review

Firstly, let's see the sound quality. Directly, Spotify premium offers music audio with higher bitrate up to 320kbps. Normally you can enjoy free Spotify music with a standard 160 kbps quality. Maybe some music lovers prefer a higher-quality music listening with the premium. Both services provide music streams in the Ogg Vorbis format.

Free and premium users both share the large Spotify library of over 40 million songs. A little differently, Spotify premium gives you the extra access to minus certain recent releases for up to 2 weeks. In this sense, free users are likely to be those accustomed to older and familiar jams.

Premium users are bound to share superior musical service for the charging fee. Here I refer to the ad-free listening and unlimited skip. Spotify develops the free music service through ad investment. Every time you play a few free songs on Spotify, you will unavoidably meet one or two trifling advertise. If you've had enough of the atmosphere-ruined ads, purchase the Spotify premium. I don't know whether you enjoy a shuffle play or not, but it is not fun when you want to turn to a specific song. Owing to this, you can use the unlimited skip function of the premium subscription to get away with the random playback of the whole album.

The device availability is taken the same on every Spotify user. Spotify users can stream songs to the mobile device including PCs, smartphones, connected devices, Smart TVs, PS3 & PS4, Android Auto, Apple Carplay.

A strong point of Spotify premium is its offline listening. Previously non-paying users are not able to save songs to their devices for offline use, which raises some complaints about wasting their mobile data traffic. Now if you subscribe a premium account, the offline listening will free you from the trouble. Pay attention that a premium user is allowed to download/sync up to 3,333 tracks on up to three devices. Somehow the downloaded Spotify music, as encrypted by DRM, is not playable on other players.

Part 3. Spotify Free vs. Premium: Conclusion

To sum up, let's see the table below to have a clear understanding of the differences between Spotify free & premium service.

According to the different services Spotify free and premium offer, I think you have made your decision. After all, it all depends on your preference to use Spotify free or premium plan.

With Behind

Is this possible if I choose to use Spotify Free and can enjoy offline listening? Yes, now you can. In virtue of TuneFab Spotify Music Converter, you can not simply download the Spotify Music for free but also you can transfer these converted files to other devices and even add Spotify Music to your iTunes. You can get the specific guidance on listening to Spotify Music with Free Member.

Spotify Basic Vs Premium

Tutorial:How to Download Songs from Spotify for Free

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Introduction of TuneFab Spotify Music Converter

Spotify Free Vs Premium

After knowing the detailed of Spotify Free and Premium, which is your best option?