Spotify’s trying to shake up the music world again with free streaming music on smartphones and tablets.
The tablet version of Spotify for iPad and Android is now just like the existing apps for Windows, Mac and the web. You’re free to pick and choose from millions of songs on-demand, listen to entire albums and create playlists for your favorite tracks. As with Spotify’s desktop software, the free tablet version is ad-supported.
Spotify’s free service is a bit more restricted on smartphones, but it’s still the most generous free offering of any streaming music service. You can now pick any artist and listen to all their music in shuffle mode. You can also listen to any of your own playlists on shuffle, or tune into other people’s playlists. Of course, the smartphone version is ad-supported as well.
So why would still want to pay for Spotify Premium, which costs $10 per month? The premium version lets you listen to any individual song, album or playlist without shuffle, and on mobile devices it lets you store songs for offline listening. Going premium also gets rid of the ads and allows for higher sound quality, so it’s more like a subscription iTunes replacement.
Spotify also announced that it’s adding Led Zeppelin to its catalog, marking the first time that the legendary band’s music has been available for streaming. Thom Yorke’s going to have to scream a little bit louder about the evils of streaming music now.
It doesn’t look like the free version of Spotify is live just yet. Keep an eye on Spotify’s iOS and Android apps for an update.