Is Spotify Premium Worth Its Premium Price

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Spotify has solidified its name among music lovers and podcasts fans. It’s one of the best (and the most popular) platforms among its close competitors, and it never fails when it comes to suggesting new music.

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You can always listen to Spotify free of charge, but often you would hear about the Premium experience and now you’re asking yourself: Is Spotify Premium worth it?

Let’s take a look at the features you can enjoy when you pay for Spotify.

Spotify Premium Lets You Listen Offline

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Spotify Premium lets you download all the songs you want so you can listen to them offline — and for free! This is extremely advantageous to anyone who’s planning to travel and want to take a break from the internet for a while.

This feature isn’t available with the free version of Spotify, obviously, and you’re not allowed to download songs either. So in a way you’re still spending money but in the form of data usage.

And with Premium, you won’t have to deal with ads, which can be really annoying. This feature applies to both mobile and desktop options.

Control Over Your Music

Let’s say you have an earworm and just need to listen to that particular song over and over again — you can do that on Premium. On free Spotify, on the other hand, nope. Although, you can always select a playlist or an album and shuffle the songs in it.

But there’s a little trick here: you can actually select songs for playback and have unlimited skips with free Spotify but only if you do it from one of the platform’s 15 curated playlists under the Home page or Made for You. These include playlists algorithmically designed for you, like Daily Mix, Discover Weekly, and Release Radar. These playlists have their songs in them change all the time. If you see a shuffle icon next to the playlist though, you may only shuffle songs.

Spotify Premium Has Better Sound Quality

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All Spotify users have no high-res option, but keen listeners know that there’s a huge difference in sound quality between Premium and free Spotify. With the free version, you can stream at 160kbps on the mobile app and 128kbps using the desktop app. In Premium, you get a 320kbps streaming experience on both the mobile and desktop versions.

In simple terms, Premium offers more music punch and is more detailed than the free version.

Unlimited Song Options to Your Heart’s Content

Not many people pay attention to this, but here goes: If you’re an artist, Spotify will pay you less per stream if the user does it on the free version.

To address this discrepancy, Spotify has allowed artists to set up a paywall for the first two weeks after a release. Should an artist opt for this option, their release will only be limited to Premium subscribers until the two weeks have gone by.

If you’re the type of person who’s hunger for the latest releases is insatiable, you’ll need a Premium account then. And this is also a great way to support the artists you love, by giving them a better value for every stream.

Go Ad-Free

If there’s one thing most annoying with free Spotify is the frequent ad interruption. Those ads are needed, but boy, are they annoying. And Spotify designs it that way to entice you to get the paid version.

For example, Spotify will play the sound of a traffic horn and the voiceover will say things like, “Is this annoying? Go Premium and you won’t have to hear this again.” It’s great marketing — it works. I know people who signed up for Premium just to get rid of these annoying ads.

Is it Worth To Pay $9.99 Every Month?

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While $10 doesn’t seem like a huge amount of money, just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean you should throw away your cash like that. Ten bucks is fair though, especially when you have a seemingly endless choice of songs. It’s worth noting that the price isn’t even enough to buy one album, so for a month, $9.99 is superb.

Compare it to iTunes, where you would buy songs in digital form outright, the price for a Premium account will only get you a few single tracks. So from a pure value point of view, $10 is a pretty good deal. You’ll get all your favorite music on a single platform plus a chance to discover new artists each day.

But like all streaming services, there’s a caveat. But this doesn’t only apply to Spotify — it affects all actually. Let’s say Spotify suddenly goes out of business. Naturally, you’ll lose all your music too, including the specially curated playlists you probably toiled for several days. And whatever goes in and out of Spotify isn’t your business. If the company decides to take off your favorite songs one day, you can’t do anything about it.

But get the Premium service and anything improved will be your gain. If Spotify drops feature updates, you’ll be among the firsts to get it. And that is awesome.

Spotify Family Plan

If you’re one of the people who think $9.99 is still expensive, wait till you hear about the Family Plan. This tier costs $15 a month, but with that comes individual accounts for each member of a family of six. That’s like $2.50 per person! Well, of course, it’s not just for families — a group of friends can benefit from this deal.

Spotify’s Family Plan has a slew of fantastic features as well, including a shared family playlist. For the younger folk, there’s Spotify for Kids too, offering youngsters safe content. And even if you split the Family Plan to just two users, it’s still a pretty good deal.

So Which Spotify Plan Works For You?

The answer to that question depends on the kind of music listener you are.

If you don’t mind hearing ads here and there or listen to a sub-quality sound, free Spotify works just fine, as long as you can get a signal that is.

But if you want access to the latest songs, safe music offline, avoid ads, control the playlist, and get the best sound quality that the platform has to offer, by all means, get Spotify Premium.

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