The Google Home is now compatible with free Spotify accounts, as revealed by the official support pages for the product which Google recently updated to reflect the new change. It’s currently unclear when exactly the Alphabet-owned company started supporting the free version of Spotify but the move itself was already announced at the latest iteration of Google I/O, alongside support for a number of other streaming solutions. The Google Home’s expanded Spotify compatibility was presumably activated by Google through a server-side switch and if the feature is already available in your territory, you can enable it in the Music menu of the Home app, provided that you already have Spotify on your device.
As expected, the free version of Spotify doesn’t behave any differently when used in conjunction with Google’s Internet of Things (IoT) offering, as users are still provided with a somewhat lower audio quality compared to the Premium service and aren’t always able to skip songs, in addition to being occasionally served with ads. Spotify’s recent statements indicated that the company’s business model has been yielding significant success, with the platform reaching 60 million paying subscribers last month and showing signs of maintaining that performance in the near future. Spotify has been hard at work improving its profit margins in recent months and has hence renegotiated a number of its licensing deals with major music labels and is still in the process of concluding its talks on the matter with Warner. The company’s recent efforts are said to be related to its ambitions to file for an initial public offering (IPO) in the near future, which some sources previously said may happen as early as this year. Having a rapidly growing business that’s close to profitability should raise the company’s valuation by a significant margin and Spotify is thus likely to continue pursuing a similar business strategy in the short term.
Regarding the Google Home, the smart speaker was also updated with Deezer support a few weeks ago and should become compatible with more services in the coming months. The tech giant may even introduce a new version of its Google Assistant-enabled speaker later this fall seeing how it’s now been almost a year since the Google Home debuted alongside the Pixel smartphone series.