The report said search engines “play a key role in copyright infringements”, with 54% of those downloading unlicensed music using Google to find it. — 123rf.com
Spotify has rolled out a lighter version of its app so music fans with less data or low-end phones can still enjoy its service.
“With Spotify Lite, you can play millions of songs, for free. The Spotify Lite app is small, so you’ll save space on your phone, and save data when using it on the go,” says Spotify on its Google Play page.
It has the standard features like custom playlists, favourite songs and new artist/music discover but uses less data when streaming music.
Also, it will display how much mobile data the app has consumed and users can cap it at 250MB, 500MB, 750MB, 1GB, 2GB, and 3GB a month.
Spotify Lite is only 15MB (compared to the full version which is above 100MB) and is still in beta and not yet available for some Android models.
“Spotify Lite is a test. Please share your feedback, so we can make it even better,” says the Swedish company.
Reviewer Ricardo Brenelli, who gave it four out of five stars, said the app was very fast but removed features usually provided to premium subscribers.
He says songs will only play on shuffle and there is no option to download songs to play offline, and no way to find saved albums without scrolling through a user’s favourites tab a lot.
Considering the app is meant to save data, it is unusual that it does not allow users to save music to their phones which can help minimise streaming.
A check of the app also showed several other differences: the navigation bar at the bottom shows Home, Search, and Favourites buttons instead of the usual Home, Browse, Search, Radio, and Your Library buttons.
As part of Spotify’s update in April, it added a data saving mode that claims to reduce streaming data consumption by up to 75%.
Product development vice president Babar Zafar said the feature works by proactively caching songs that users have liked or listen to a lot, and dynamically control streaming quality.
Also, Spotify has three streaming quality options: 96kbit/s, 160kbits/s, and 320kbit/s. This translates to data usage of 0.72MB per minute, 1.2MB per minute and 2.4MB per minute, respectively.
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