Arguably the biggest difference between Spotify's Free and Premium tiers is the latter's complete lack of ads. That goes for both the visual ads you'll see when scrolling through the app, and the ads that play radio-style between songs on Spotify Free.

Spotify makes less money per-play from ads than they do from Premium subscribers, so to encourage people to upgrade, the free tier is limited in certain ways. When using the desktop or web app with a free account, you can listen to any song, album, or playlist at any time in any order.

With Free Spotify, the maximum bitrate you can stream at is 128kbps on the desktop app and 160kbps on the mobile app, whereas Spotify Premium affords you 320kbps streaming on both desktop and mobile. In essence, this means that Spotify Premium’s music contains more data points and therefore more detail to its sound.