Spotify is rolling out long-requested features to its free tier

Spotify is making its free tier more appealing than ever. The biggest upgrade to Spotify’s free tier is the new “Pick & Play” feature. Spotify said in a blog post that you can dive into any album or playlist, tap the song you want, and start listening right away. Free users were once stuck with shuffled playlists, so this is a welcome change.

Spotify’s latest global update fixes one of the free tier’s biggest annoyances. Before, picking a song from an album or playlist didn’t actually play that track. Instead, Spotify shuffled random songs and left you burning through your six skips an hour just to hear what you wanted.

Even with the update, the new "on-demand" freedom still has its limits. You get to choose a single song, but after that, Spotify kicks you back into shuffle mode, so playing an album straight through is still a Premium-only perk, as per TechCrunch. Skips are allowed, but what comes next is a gamble, and Spotify hasn’t clarified if the six-skips-per-hour cap is any different.

Spotify is also rolling out “Search & Play,” letting you find a specific song and start it instantly. There’s also “Share & Play,” which lets you jump straight into a track from any shared link.

Ads aren’t gone

But the listening experience is less painful

Just to be clear: the ads are sticking around. You’ll still hear them. But now, once that ad ends, you’re going straight to the song you actually picked rather than some algorithm’s idea of what comes next. Still, this update makes it a lot harder to justify switching to competing music streaming services just to play a specific track without shuffle headaches.

Spotify rolled out some big upgrades lately. The long-promised lossless audio streaming is finally live, years after its first tease. On top of that, the new Smart Filters make finding music easier by letting you sort tracks by mood, genre, or activity.

The platform is clearly tired of hearing free users complain, so it’s stepping up to make the no-cost tier actually worth using. These tweaks make finding, playing, and sharing music way less of a hassle, even if you’re still stuck listening to ads.