Subscription Comparison Chart

[Peter__]

Please Note: This chart was created by me for clarification purposes here on the Spotify Community. This chart is not endorsed by, or form any part of, official subscription information from Spotify. All details are correct at time of publishing.

As there have been a lot of queries about the features of each of the subscription tiers after the recent changes, I hope the table below offers some clarification. 

(Click to enlarge)

Fancy trying Spotify Premium free for 30 days? Check out: https://www.spotify.com/freetrial/

2014-11-06: Spotify Unlimited is being phased out, as a result you may not be able to (re)subscribe to Spotify Unlimited.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask below! 

[mikewhitephoto]

I'm a Premium user, but my mobile device will only do SHUFFLE PLAY. Please fix

[lativium]

You jost lost a customer by "phasing out" the 4,99€ Unlimited option. I can't afford your forced 9,99€ price tag. And I especially don't want it because I don't use Spotify on the go.

Great job eliminating options for consumers. Really great.

I'm puzzled and salty.

[stathis125]

We need unlimited back . Even so free is good too, but premium is not affordable.

[passingbat]

Are people who are currently on Unlimited being told that they can no longer continue on that plan?

Or is it just that the unlimited option is no longer available either for new users or for those people who are already subscribed to spotify and want to change from free or Premium to Unlimited?

There seems to be a bit of confusion over this.

[lativium]

Unlimited (4,99) is only there for people that already have it at this point. As far as I know if you have 4,99 and don't interrupt your payment you're fine.

The way I did it was to get a month of Unlimited and then cancel it right away so it doesn't renew automaticallly. That way I prevented paying for Spotifiy continously even if I don't use for a couple of weeks or whatever.

So a few days ago my Unlimited subscription ran out and I wanted to renew it manually. Only to find that the only payment option is Premium for 9,99.

[Lazza]

Spotify is discontinuing Unlimited, it’s true. But I think a lot of people is worrying for nothing. Unlimited did not entitle you to use Spotify on your mobile nor it allowed to sync offline playlists.

The only thing it was intended to provide was, as the name implies, unlimited listening. That made sense back in the days when there was that awful 10 hours limit in Europe and we needed to use a VPN to activate an American account. Nowadays, the 10 hours limit is gone and people can listen without time limits for free. Spotify knows that, and so it assumes (wisely) that most people would find the Unlimited plan completely useless. Because it is.

[lativium]

@Lazza, That doesn't make much sense to me personally.

Here's what I want:

Listening to music on my PC without limitations or advertisements.

Here's what I don't want:

Paying double the price for that.

What's not to understand here?

[passingbat]

---

@Lazza wrote:

 so it assumes (wisely) that most people would find the Unlimited plan completely useless.

---

Many people are prepared to pay £4.99 not to have to put up with advert interuptions. These same people don't need access on mobile phones etc. and object to paying the extra £5 for something that is of no use to them.

Therefore someone is being very unwise in my view.

[Lazza]

Here’s what I want:
[..]
What’s not to understand here?

You don’t understand that Spotify does not have to make a plan for every possible use case, nor continue offering it if they have one. It is their choice if they want to do so.

I would like a plan where instead I could use the mobile version as the free desktop version, even if with advertisement… and I would happily pay 5€/month for it. Does it mean that Spotify must create or continue to provide this kind of plan just because I want it? Absolutely not.

[passingbat]

---

@Lazza wrote:

Here’s what I want:
[..]
What’s not to understand here?

You don’t understand that Spotify does not have to make a plan for every possible use case, nor continue offering it if they have one. It is their choice if they want to do so.

I would like a plan where instead I could use the mobile version as the free desktop version, even if with advertisement… and I would happily pay 5€/month for it. Does it mean that Spotify must create or continue to provide this kind of plan just because I want it? Absolutely not.

---

You're missing a key point; Unlimited existed from the get-go. No one is asking Spotify to create a new plan at all.

[Lazza]

No one is asking Spotify to create a new plan at all.

That doesn’t matter, as I wrote:

Spotify does not have to […], nor continue offering it if they have one. It is their choice if they want to do so.

They may have lost customers, they may have earned new Premium subscriptions, we don’t know. It’s about their business decisions, not about our preferences. If they will notice a loss of profits it’s likely you will get the option again anyway.

[lativium]

Of course Spotify doesn't have to do **bleep**. They can do whatever they like. I'm just saying that instead of 5 bucks more from me they now make 5 bucks less. Or simply put they get 0 bucks from me.

Having more options is always better for consumers. That said, I would assume that they got their data and think it's better to go the road with just one payment option of 9,99.

The bottom line is that they lost me as a costumer. That's basically it.

[elvialo]

What I was complaining about is not Unlimited is not available any more, my complaint is that the Spotify have not told Unlimited users that they will not be able to renew anymore. And even more, they wait until credit card get expired to throw them away from the Unlimited subscription and force to Premium for doing a renovation.

[benl]

Same here. I only ever listen to Spotify at home (on a Mac connected to hifi via wifi audio receiver), and was perfectly happy to pay £5/month to get rid of the ads. I'm not willing to pay £10/month for the same thing. The mobile stuff is of no benefit to me as I don't use it.

[Peter__]

I am trying to gather more information about these changes for you guys, but it is proving difficult to get a straight clean answer from Spotify.

As far as I am aware, Unlimited is not being offered to new customers but anyone currently using Unlimited should be able to continue to use it. That being said as has been mentioned on this topic, there does appear to be an issue with changing payment cards whilst being able to stay on Unlimited. 

I have raised that issue here on the community via the Rock Star Channel and the Spotify response was to get in touch using the contact form and it will be passed over to the payments team to sort out. It looks like @elvialo tried this and was unsuccessful though. Has anyone else had a similar experience? 

Once again, I'm just the messenger on this one, but bear with me I am trying to push Spotify to either fix it or come clean. 

[asl8er]

Ooops, this did NOT work, says I am not eligible for this "discounted" program!  Nonsense...  Goodbye Spotify! 

[psaoup]

getting in touch does nothing. all they do is offer some random excuse of "not sure what's happening, here have a couple of months free".

all in all the lack of honesty and information (it's always "something beyond our control") is crazy, considering the profits are made form the user base, and with new apps popping up all the time, you'd think it would be a high priority to stand-out with looking after the customer base you have, not sneakily shifting them to a higher plan to squeeze mroe money out of them.

And so ... yet another successful, community based product slips into negative positioning in the name of quick bucks.

[Lazza]

not sneakily shifting them to a higher plan to squeeze mroe money out of them

Your subscription will not automatically shift to a more expensive one. Your credit card won’t be billed twice without your approval. There is nothing sneaky here: before you go Premium, you would have to accept the new subscription.

As said before, it’s unlikely they will “squeeze more money” since most users will be happy enough to listen to unlimited music for free, because the 10-hours limit is gone. Actually, it’s more probable they are going to lose some profit.

[psaoup]

stop trying to justify the scenario. they have dissolved one of their (I imagine one of the more popular) subsciriton levels — with zero justification. Now ... to get the same level of service ... users need to pay more money — which makes it an absolute money grab/squeezing more money. 

[Lazza]

stop trying to justify the scenario

One tries to “justify” when something wrong or unlawful happens. Here nothing wrong is happening. Maybe something unpleasant for some of you, but not wrong, nor illegal. I don’t have to justify anything, I don’t even work for them.

You stated that Spotify is sneakily squeezing more money by forcing customers to pay the Premium plan without their consent.

This is even a felony in my country, it’s called defamation. I don’t know in the US, though.

they have dissolved one of their (I imagine one of the more popular) subsciriton levels — with zero justification

Correct. Who said they have to provide one?

to get the same level of service … users need to pay more money

False. A Premium account gives a much higher level of service. One which probably you don’t need, but that’s another story. I don’t need it either, that’s why I always stay Free. This doesn’t mean Unlimited and Premium are/were the same. They are different.

If you think there is a big difference between the old Unlimited and the new Free in which you get maybe 30s of ads once in a hour, well, for you it may be big. For many other people it’s quite small. Every one has a different taste, deal with it.