Disadvantages And Advantages Of Spotify: A Complete Review

Online music streaming services have changed how we discover, listen to, and share music. It's hard to fully resist the allure of these platforms, especially now that the quality of streaming and features offered are constantly improving. Spotify stands out among vast music streaming services due to its large catalog, music discovery algorithms, AI DJ, and numerous other attractive features.

Should you choose Spotify? What can I benefit from Spotify? What should I pay attention to when using Spotify? If you're fresh to Spotify, we will show you the disadvantages and advantages of Spotify in this article to help you decide if using Spotify is worth it. We're not only concerned with the pros and cons of Spotify, we're also here to help you download Spotify songs in common formats for free that will really help the music you love to shine.

Contents Guide Part 1. Pros of SpotifyPart 2. Cons of SpotifyPart 3. Should You Choose Spotify?Part 4. Bonus: Download Spotify Music Without PremiumPart 5. Final Thoughts

Part 1. Pros of Spotify

To help you decide if Spotify is best for you, we’ve put together this roundup of Spotify. In this part, we will talk about what's the benefit of Spotify first. Let’s get things started.

1. Easy to Use

One of advantages of Spotify is its availability. Spotify is available in most of the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Oceania, with a total availability in 184 markets, so its availability speaks for itself. Every person needs to register for an account to get started with Spotify and the process is so easy. All you need is an internet connection, your email address, or Apple ID to create your account. Plus, if you have a Facebook account, you can use it to create a Spotify account. Finally, once you have registered an account, you can start listening to music.

2. Free or Paid

One of the unique pros of Spotify is that Spotify offers a free plan and four Premium plans catering to various needs and budgets. Free users can access all content and basic playback functions, but it comes with certain limitations. Compared with Apple Music, a subscription-based service that must require paying for, Spotify has been generous.

You can also buy Spotify’s paid plans to unlock more features, such as ad-free playback, higher audio quality settings, downloading and offline listening, etc. Spotify Premium plans come with four tiers (prices as of August 2024):

• Individual plan: $11.99 monthly
• Duo plan: $16.99 monthly. For up to two people living at the same address
• Family plan: $19.99 monthly. For up to 6 family members living at the same address
• Student plan: $5.99 monthly. For students enrolled at US Title IV-accredited colleges

Spotify Premium plans offer good value. You can save money by sharing the Duo or Family Plan with your partner or family for more savings. Moreover, the Student plan also comes with Hulu access!

Related Topics: How To Get Spotify Premium With Hulu Student Bundle?

3. Compatibility

One of the advantages of Spotify is its higher compatibility. both Spotify Free users and Premium users can access Spotify using its official Spotify apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux computers, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets directly. You can also open Spotify web player using the most common browser, including Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and more. The service is available on most smart home devices such as the Amazon Echo and Google Nest, set-top boxes, smart TVs, game consoles, and digital media players.

Related Topics: How To Play Spotify On Roku Device?

4. The Massive Music Library

Spotify provides both free and premium users to get access to massive music libraries, including more than 100 million songs and five million podcasts, from record labels and media companies, so the users can surely find something they like. Furthermore, Spotify takes care of your tastes, helping you find new music and seamlessly arrange your favorite music. If you upgrade to Premium, you can also listen to over 200,000 audiobook titles in its subscriber catalog.

5. Listen Offline

Spotify Premium lets you download up to 10,000 songs so you can listen offline when you lack an internet connection or just want to cut down on your data usage. And you can do this on up to five devices. Bear in mind that you will need to reconnect to the internet at least once every 30 days to maintain your downloads. Otherwise, Spotify will remove downloads.

6. AI-Powered DJ

Spotify AI DJ is a feature that blends artificial intelligence and music curation to give a tailored listening experience. Tap the DJ card on the Spotify app, and the new AI DJ delivers a personalized, curated musical selection based on your listening preferences. But you need to be a premium user to access Spotify’s AI DJ.

You may be interested: How To Use Spotify DJ Mode?

Note: Since AI DJ is still in beta, the feature is only available in select markets in Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as those in Australia and New Zealand. You need to check for the available markets that can access Spotify’s AI DJ from the Spotify website.

7. Additional Features

Although we can't cover all the advantages of Spotify here, these notable ones deserve mention:

• Spotify Wrapped: Spotify Wrapped is essentially your musical year in review. It highlights your most listened to songs, artists, and genres, along with other interesting stats like the total minutes you spent listening to Spotify throughout the year.
• Spotify Connect: With Spotify Connect, you can use one device to remotely control listening on another.
• Lyrics: Spotify has added lyrics support for both free and premium accounts on all platforms and auto-scrolling lyrics, giving you convenient sing-along functionality.
• Smart Shuffle: Premium subscribers can freshen up your playlist via Smart Shuffle. This feature is also for free users who live in Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, and Vietnam.

Part 2. Cons of Spotify

Many of the advantages of Spotify are way ahead of the competition, but there are still some underlying issues that can affect your listening experience. Now let’s dive into what disadvantages might be dragging you away from enjoying endless music playing.

1. Expensive

Spotify's premium tiers have increased in price across the board in 2024. But actually, you just push money into Spotify’s service to rent the music rather than buy the music so you can't play the downloaded DRM-protected music on third-party applications. It seems not fair to the consumer because they have paid for the subscription but get incomplete service.

2. Limited Features for Free Users

Most of the advantages of Spotify we shared in Part 1 are offered to Premium subscribers. For instance, only Premium subscribers can download music for offline listening and enjoy ads-free music listening. Spotify users with free accounts have to listen to audio advertisements between their favorite songs and podcast shows. Plus, you can’t stream individual songs on demand, and you can skip just 6 tracks every hour. This is an extremely bad experience for users, especially when you hear things you don’t like.

What's more, free users get low sound quality. The maximum bitrate at which free users can stream music is 128kbps on web player and 160kbps on mobile. Whereas with the premium version, you can stream music at 256kbps on web player and 320kbps on mobile.

Related Topics: Spotify Free vs Premium

3. Still Lacks Hi-Res Audio

Music streaming services like Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, Primephonic, and Qobuz offer hi-res audio. However, Spotify still lacks HiFi audio quality. There’s been no progress since the feature’s announcement in February 2021.

Part 3. Should You Choose Spotify?

We have shared with you the significant pros and cons of Spotify, and whether you choose it or not depends on your listening habits and preferences. If you just enjoy music and podcasts, Spotify can offer an extensive library for free. Budget-conscious individuals seeking Premium features can also save with Spotify’s Duo, Family, or Student plans. On the other hand, if you’re a more critical audiophile who wants better audio quality, you should go for streaming services with HiFi audio, like Apple Music.

Part 4. Bonus: Download Spotify Music Without Premium

The option to download music for offline listening by subscribing to Spotify Premium is the one of advantages of Spotify, but free users can download songs from Spotify via AMusicSoft Spotify Music Converter. This app already defies the barrier of DRM restrictions and enables users to convert encrypted Spotify songs to a common audio format like MP3, M4A, FLAC, or WAV with its superb decryption technology. The downloads can be played on any media player. Your music is free from those pesky and annoying Spotify ads!

The great thing about AMusicSoft Spotify Music Converter is that it keeps the original quality of your music intact, so you get a wonderful listening experience every time. You can start as many downloads as you want. It can easily handle multiple download tasks at the same time. Track details will be saved along the conversion including title, artists, Track ID, and album artwork.

Thanks to its built-in Spotify web player, you can log in to Spotify music and download tracks to the desktop ditrectly via AMusicSoft Spotify Music Converter. Now AMusicSoft offers a free trial, take a try! Try to download your favorite tunes for free!

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Step 1. Launch the software and click on the plus icon from the side of the software screen, or you can drag them to the button to import the items to the conversion queue.

Step 2. Then, you can move to the upper-right drop-down menu to select an output format. The output folder must be chosen as well.

Step 3. Click on the Convert button to start converting your Spotify music files to the more commonly used format compatible with your device. After following these simple steps, you may now listen to Spotify music offline with lossless quality and at your own pace and time, even though you are free user.

Part 5. Final Thoughts

After learning the disadvantages and advantages of Spotify, do you device to try it? Simply put, Spotify is still an excellent streaming music service. To get most of Spotify, free users can try AMusicSoft Spotify Music Converter to download music for offline playback.

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