I don't pretend to know anything about the intricacies of consumer behavior or service pricing, but I think it would be interesting to see what would happen wit

I don't pretend to know anything about the intricacies of consumer behavior or service pricing, but I think it would be interesting to see what would happen with a different model. Instead of offering an ad supported free tier, you could have a free tier without ads, but other limitations like only shuffle, a time limit each day, no brand new releases, or similar. Then the no ads thing can be a benefit to other ad supported services, but if you want to listen to music all day you have to pay for premium. I'm sure smarter people than me have found this model worse than what's already used, I just hate ads and was surprised at the low value they seem to generate. And all those ad-supported users must generate plenty of streams that means payments to the record companies.