Getting the most for your money with Spotify Premium

| Staff Writer

Music streaming services have revolutionized the music industry in the past few years. The business has shifted from one based on sales to one based on streams, and music marketing has changed dramatically. All of this brings up the question: Are streaming services, and more specifically Spotify Premium versus the free version of Spotify, worth it to the listener? My answer? Unequivocally yes.

I first got Spotify a few years back during one of their intermittent three-months-for-99-cents deals. By the end of that period, I was far too invested to back out. Spotify, and by extension music streaming services in general, are definitely worth their subscription. Spotify Premium generally costs $9.99 per month, but with the student discount, this drops to $4.99 and includes access to Hulu’s Limited Commercials plan.

Spotify Premium has helped me grow a lot as a music listener. Before I had Premium, I would use the service, but the ads were grating and the lack of other features, such as being able to choose specific songs on mobile and download songs to listen to offline, prevented me from really delving into the world of music. At this point, Spotify served as a way to help me listen to music I already liked, but not much more than that. Sure, if I heard a song that caught my interest, or one was recommended by a friend, I could check them out on Spotify, but YouTube served the same purpose.

Once I got Premium, everything changed. All of a sudden I was able to find music on a whim, listen to new albums at ease and make and download as many playlists as I wanted. I dove head-first into music listening in a way that my budget could never have sustained before. Not only that, but Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist was a tool that I used almost compulsively, finding many of my favorite artists today from that playlist every week.

By the end of my reduced price three-month trial I had listened to so many new artists and albums and had made so many playlists that I couldn’t imagine going back to the ads, using default shuffle plays and losing my downloads. After my trial was up I was happy to pay $10 a month to keep my music, as I would be paying significantly more than that if I were to buy the music that I was listening to at the time.

Now I use Spotify all the time. A quick check of spotify.me, a site that allows you to see your own streaming habits, will show me that I stream over 1,000 minutes of music a week, significantly more than the amount of Netflix I watch. Having the ability to find music without worrying about how to buy it and having such a large music library at your fingertips is a powerful thing. Spotify Premium has allowed me to expand my music taste and find much more music than I would be listening to otherwise. I am happy to pay the subscription fee for a service that I use so much and cannot imagine what I would do without it.

Sign up for the email edition

Stay up to date with everything happening at Washington University and beyond.

Subscribe