As a savvy artist who likes to stay informed on industry trends, you probably already know there are two main ways a music fan can listen to Spotify: as a premium subscriber and as a free user. We recently began rolling out a new free version of Spotify, with a bunch of new features, so we wanted to take a minute to review what the free experience is, what we’re upgrading, and how this impacts you, the artist.

There are more than 90 million people using the free version of Spotify. That’s a massive audience of potential new fans. One of the key differences in the new free app is we’re making it easier for these fans to discover their next favorite song. Free users will now experience better personalized playlists, designed to introduce them to new music, week in, week out. Fans can listen to songs on demand in playlists like Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mixes, as well as in select editorial playlists, ranging from RapCaviar and ¡Viva Latino!, to Ultimate Indie and Alternative R&B, and more, depending on their tastes.

We’re also improving recommendations for Spotify’s free listeners, with a new personalized home page based on their tastes, and providing track recommendations when building their own playlists. Finally, we’re improving the listening experience in low bandwidth environments by adding a new feature, Data Saver, which will allow users to conserve mobile data when listening to music.

This all adds up to a better experience for an enormous audience of potential new fans, who will now have even more opportunities to discover your music. And of course, we’ll continue to pay rightsholders from revenue brought in from both our premium and ad-supported tiers.

Regardless of which tier they use, your fans are your fans — you’ll be able to see engagement stats for both tiers in Spotify for Artists just like before. And your customizable Artist Pick and About Page will display to both types of user. We think these changes will increase the number of music fans using Spotify, regardless of whether they’re ready to pay a monthly subscription or not. Having more fans discovering more music brings us closer to our goal of reinventing the streaming music landscape, making it a truly rewarding experience for fans and artists alike.

You can read even more about these changes here.