Last week, Spotify (NYSE: SPOT) upgraded the user experience for Spotify Premium subscribers, creating a more personal intuitive experience. The streaming music platform began rolling out the changes to Spotify Premium subscribers on iOS and Android last Thursday. The changes include:

• Spotify has streamlined navigation by reducing its five navigation buttons to three: Home, Search and My Library to help subscribers find their favorite songs, artists, albums, podcasts and playlists faster.
• A revamped Search page is now a one-stop shop for artists, albums, playlists, podcasts and more. The improved Search function is more intuitive, helping a listener find music, even as their tastes change.
• Through the Personalized Search feature, listeners can easily find their Top Genres (e.g., Jazz, Chill, Blues, Heavy Metal, Punk, Reggae, Latin, Gospel, Funk, Comedy) and discover music that best suits them and their moods.
• Spotify Premium now offers Artist Radio playlists, so a subscriber can listen to a curated playlist based on one of their favorite musicians, bands or songs. The playlists are updated regularly and are available online as well as offline when downloaded.

The rollout of the revamped Spotify Premium comes just eight days after Spotify’s 10-year anniversary. The streaming music platform launched in October 2008. They now claim to be the largest streaming music service in the world.

“It’s been 10 years since Spotify officially launched for fans-and new music and artist discovery has never been the same. We built our Swedish company to create a legal, better alternative to piracy-one that helps to fairly compensate artists for their work and shape music listening and sharing via streaming,” said Spotify in an October 10 blog post.

Spotify shared some interesting statistics about their reach:

• 180 million monthly active listeners across 65 countries
• As of August 31, 2018, Spotify has paid 10 billion euros to artists and other rights holders.
• The Spotify music library features more than 40 million songs and podcasts.
• Spotify has more than 3 billion user-created playlists.
• Total time streamed on Spotify: 16,858,080 years
• Spotify offers more than 2,000 music genres, including Wonky, Shimmer Pop and British Blues.
• Listening diversity – the number of artists the average user streams each month – has grown at a pace of about 8 percent a year.
• In the last three years, listening diversity has grown 40 percent.
• The most streamed song in 2008: “Human” by The Killers
• The most streaming song in 2017: “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran
• The top three most streamed songs of all time: “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran, “One Dance” by Drake and “Closer” by The Chainsmokers and Halsey.
• The top three most streamed artists of all time include Drake, Ed Sheeran and Eminem.
• The first three 10 artists to reach 1 billion streams on Spotify: Rihanna (2013), David Guetta (2013) and Eminem (2013).

“Between Spotify’s expert-curated playlists, such as ¡Viva Latino!, Hot Country, and RapCaviar, as well as personalized playlists such as Discover Weekly and Daily Mix, we’ve helped music fans discover a world of new artists, allowing us to pursue our goal of supporting one million creators,” wrote Spotify.

Not a subscriber yet? Spotify Premium is currently offering a bundled package with Hulu. Trial users pay $0.99 for the first two months and $12.99 per month after that. The promotion is only available to new customers, and the Hulu package is the Limited Commercials plan. The promotion ends tomorrow – October 24, 2018. Spotify Premium is ad-free and includes unlimited skips.

Spotify offers an ad-supported free plan. Users can shuffle play, but they can’t listen offline or play any track in the library. After a 30-day free trial, Spotify Premium users can shuffle play, listen offline, get access to any track in the library and get high quality audio for $9.99 a month.

Insider Take:

With Apple Music’s growing dominance of the streaming market and SiriusXM’s recent acquisition of Pandora, Spotify’s timing couldn’t be better. It needs to step up its game to retain the Premium subscribers it has. These changes could make Spotify easier to use and improve the user experience – but will it be enough to satisfy existing subscribers and attract new ones? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am still a subscriber. Spotify offers me everything I need and want in a streaming music subscription and more.