Earlier this morning Spotify announced some new features alongside a new app redesign which could help to make it even more of a popular streaming music service in comparison to its rivals. For a long time Spotify has held a top spot as one of the most popular streaming music services with playlists, offline playback, and more, and this morning they announced that Podcasts, as well as video content would be added into the application. That likely sounds great to consumers, but if you’re a T-Mobile user and are on a plan which comes along with Music Freedom, before you start streaming videos all day through Spotify thinking it won’t count against your monthly data allotment, you’ll want to pay attention to T-Mobile’s statement regarding these features.
Music Freedom allows T-Mobile subscribers to stream as much music as they want through the cellular network from a list of supported services, like Spotify for example, and it won’t eat into their monthly data amounts. Now that Spotify is going to include streaming video into their app with partners like Comedy Central and others, Music Freedom is starting to sound even better than it did before, right? Not exactly. While T-Mobile’s music centric feature wants to help you rock out all day and all night without fear of sucking up your data, they explicitly state that Music Freedom only defines “audio streaming” as exempt from counting against your usage.
According to a T-Mobile spokesperson on the matter, “We distinguish the data traffic for Spotify (and all Music Freedom services) as all data flowing through these apps comes from HTTP or HTTPS sources. All of the apps we whitelist for Music Freedom have multiple sources for various medias and we identify and whitelist only the audio sources.” As it stands the “Video Capsule” feature within Spotify is not yet live, but once it launches from within the app and is available to Spotify users, it will count against your monthly data amounts if you’re a T-Mobile customer with Music Freedom as part of their plan. All this means is you’ll either have to watch your data a little more closely if you plan on using Video Capsule often (unless you have truly unlimited data) or simply use it while on WiFi if at all possible.