Spotify Introduces Silence Premium at $4.99 a Month. The Algorithm Still Learns From Your Silence.
The new tier offers an ad-free version of not listening to music. Spotify says it is the company's fastest-growing product since the audiobook expansion. The audiobook expansion is not mentioned again after this sentence.
Spotify has announced Silence Premium, a new subscription tier priced at $4.99 per month that provides users with an ad-free version of not listening to music.
The product, unveiled at a press event in Stockholm that several journalists attended in person and several others did not, fills what Spotify’s Chief Product Officer described as “a genuine gap in our offering.” The gap, specifically, is the period of time users spend with the Spotify app open but not playing anything. Staring at the home screen, scrolling through playlists without selecting one, or simply sitting in silence while the app remains technically active in the background.
Under the existing free tier, this silence is interrupted by advertisements. Under Spotify Premium, the silence is uninterrupted but costs $11.99 a month, which is more than some users feel is appropriate for a service they are currently not using. Silence Premium addresses this directly. For $4.99 a month, users receive uninterrupted silence with no other features. There is no offline mode. There is no skipping. There is nothing to skip.
“We noticed that a meaningful segment of our users were opening the app and then not doing anything. We asked ourselves: who is serving those users? The answer was nobody. Now the answer is us.”
— Spotify Chief Product Officer, in remarks that were either an admission or a product pitch, depending on how you read them
The algorithm, Spotify confirmed in a follow-up FAQ, does continue to operate during Silence Premium sessions. The company says it uses patterns of silence, duration, time of day, and what the user was doing immediately before opening the app, to refine music recommendations. A user who regularly sits in silence at 11pm will receive more recommendations for late-night ambient playlists they will also not listen to. Spotify describes this as “personalisation.”
Privacy advocates contacted by Not News raised questions about the data implications of an algorithm that learns from the absence of behaviour. Spotify’s response noted that silence data is “treated with the same care and respect as all user data,” which is a sentence that means different things to different people.
The Silence Premium tier is available immediately. A family plan, which Spotify calls Silence Premium Duo, allows two users to not listen to music simultaneously for $7.99 a month. The Silence Premium Student discount brings the price to $2.49 for enrolled students, who Spotify’s internal data suggests are already not listening to music for approximately four hours a day during exam periods.
A Spotify spokesperson confirmed that artists do not receive royalties from Silence Premium sessions, as no music is played. When asked if this raised any concerns, the spokesperson said the question was “interesting” and moved on to discuss the company’s podcast strategy.
Silence Premium has already attracted 2.3 million subscribers in its first 48 hours, making it Spotify’s fastest-growing product launch since the introduction of the audiobook tier. The audiobook tier is not mentioned again.