I have been using Spotify’s free tier for a while now, but lately it feels like the experience keeps getting worse. The ads seem to play more frequently than before, and sometimes I can’t even skip songs when I want to. The shuffle feature doesn’t work the way I expect it to, and I keep getting interrupted by premium upgrade prompts. Has anyone else noticed that the free version is becoming much harder to use? I’m wondering if they are intentionally making it more frustrating to push people toward paid subscriptions. What has your experience been like with the free tier recently?
glad im not the only one! the worst part is how ads mess up your playlist position. i’ll be listening to something specific, then an ad plays and suddenly im back to some random song from hours ago. they also killed the upcoming songs feature in the mobile queue, which is super annoying.
Switched back to free about six months ago after canceling, and wow - it’s terrible now. The shuffle is completely broken. It’ll play the same 10 songs from my playlist over and over while totally ignoring the rest. More ads too, but the worst part? They interrupt songs now, not just between tracks. They also limit how many times you can replay a song you actually like. It’s obviously designed to make free so annoying that you’ll pay up. Thinking about jumping to YouTube Music’s free version - at least there you can pick specific songs if you sit through video ads.
totally with ya! like, the ads are so much more frequent now & it makes the whole experience frustrating. the skip limits? ugh! sometimes it feels like they just wanna force us to cough up cash. real bummer for us free users!
Same thing happened when I dropped my premium last year. The audio quality is noticeably worse now, and you can’t even listen to albums in order because of forced shuffle. The app constantly glitches after ads too - I have to restart it all the time. I’ve basically moved to other platforms because it’s so annoying. They’re clearly making the free version terrible on purpose to force people back to premium.