If, like me, you signed up for a free year of Spotify Premium through Virgin Media you'll find that if you want to continue with the service you now need to pay. £9.99 a month to continue the Premium service, £4.99 for the Unlimited (no ads, but no mobile option either) or you can stick with the free service with those pesky ads every few tracks. Details at Spotify.
Which is fair enough - the original offer was last August so I have had a couple of weeks' extra at no cost. Somewhat surprised that neither VM nor Spotify emailed me about it, but the whole thing's been pretty half-hearted by Virgin Media from the start. And there are still occasional issues with the service streaming over the VM network, especially for Sonos users.
6 comments:
Morrisons sell Spotify gift cards for £10 (1 month Premium, 2 months Unlimited). Buy a £10 Spotify gift card and you also get 1p knocked off a litre of petrol. Buy a £30 gift card and get 3p a litre knocked off at the pumps.
If you are a student and have an NUS card you can get spotify premium for half price
As a salesman and businessman things like this from VM, and Spotify, baffle me. Surely the purpose of it was to try and get people using the service to then hopefully get them to pay the tenner a month for the premium service when the free trial is up. As Nialli said I have had no communication at all either from VM or from Spotify checking to see if I enjoyed the service and giving me the options and selling the product again to me. If your not going to do this then what was the point of giving it away for free in the first place. For a whole year! I too found the service hit and miss. Overall, for me, and it will be down to opinion, it was a nice addition to the service but not something that is worth a tenner a month. I actually found it more useful being able to use it on my iPhone and iPad than through the TV. But still not worth the tenner a month IMHO.
I agree that this has been very oddly handled by VM (and for that matter by Spotify). I found I made ever increasing use of the service on the laptop and mobile devices (not through Tivo) and have retained the premium service at the end of the free 12 months. However, I did this directly with Spotify. Quite what the gain has been to VM is not entirely clear. Offering some kind of bundled service would have been my expectation but clearly I was wrong.
Spotify doesn't seem to be advertising its availability as an app on VM on its website either, although it does mention similar availability in Scandinavia. Curious.
My free year is also up. It was nice luxury for the year but it's not really worth £9.99 a month.
I used it a couple of times through my tivo box but like the YouTube app, it's just easier to use a computer!
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