Spotify is making significant changes to its "freemium" model by reducing the amount of listening available to users of its free music streaming service by half and limiting the maximum number of plays for a song to five for non-subscribers.
The changes will be in effect from 1 May this year. Users can only listen to 10 hours of music a month which is half of what users are allowed to do at present. Moreover, the maximum number of times non-subscribers can listen to an individual track has been capped at five times overall. The company said that new users will be migrated to the new model after six months.
It is believed that the online music company, which has stressed in the past that its "freemium" model is essential to fight piracy, has relented to the pressure from record labels, who license their content to Spotify.
Spotify chief content officer Ken Parks said the company had to take the steps to grow and "balance a number of priorities."
He added, "Chief amongst those priorities is to keep the free service, which is what makes Spotify unique, and what you’re seeing here is a balance of these priorities."
"We’ve shown that the model is doing extremely well, but as things stand we need to tweak the service to ensure everyone has access to legal music in the long term."
