Sound quality is capped at 128kbps with the web player and at approximately 160kbps on desktop and mobile. Of course, the adverts must be tolerated – and they pop up every few songs.

Spotify’s free tier isn’t nearly as robust as Premium, but there’s a lot on offer. That tells you two things: the majority of users take advantage of the free tier, but more and more are paying out. In total, Spotify claims it has around 433 million active monthly customers in 2022. As of Q2 2022, Spotify had reached 188 million premium users, up from 158 million in 2021. Paid subscribers can access most podcasts but Spotify also has a podcast subscription service, similar to Apple's platform, where creators can choose to monetise their content with paid subscriptions.Ī good metric of Spotify’s growth is the number of paying subscribers and that's on the rise too. If that amount of choice sounds overwhelming, there's a set of human-curated podcast playlists to help you find your new favourite shows with names such as 'Best Podcasts of the Week', 'Brain Snacks' and 'Crime Scene' – all well worth delving into.

Since the acquisition of podcasting production specialist Gimlet Media in 2019, over four million podcasts have been made available to stream and download on Spotify, including a raft of Spotify exclusives with big names such as Joe Rogan, Barack Obama and the Sussexes. More recently, though, Spotify has focused on podcasts for its content growth. In the modern day, Spotify’s peers have as many songs (or more) as Spotify does. Apple Music’s library, also as of last year, passed 90 million tracks, surpassing Spotify as the service with the largest library, while YouTube Music is right at Spotify’s level, having accumulated 80 million tracks by 2021. That figure is now past 82 million, as of 2021, but is also more closely matched by the library size of rivals Amazon Music Unlimited, Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz. At the time of our last review, Spotify’s catalogue had over 30 million songs – ‘significantly more than competing services’, we said, and more than you could ever listen to.

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