Hasta La Creative!

Spotify announced yesterday that its mobile listening service will be free to users who do not subscribe. This is a significant shift for the Swedish company, which had offered mobile on-demand listening to subscribers only. It has been using mobile convenience as bait to lure about six million subscribers into a monthly paid relationship.

Tablet listeners can now have the same free, ad-supported experience that’s available on the PC desktop. On mobile devices, users can get Spotify Shuffle, a Pandora-like service that lets users shuffle songs, based on a specific artist, or to shuffle among existing user playlists. This stops shy of mobile, on-demand music listening; there’s no way that music labels, which have invested in the company, will permit that for free.

Spotify’s hope is that the free mobile service will draw another six million people to try out the service and eventually splurge for a subscription to the on-demand version. The folks at Spotify have to be thrilled that the labels have finally come around to this way of thinking, even if it is only a partial solution for listeners.

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