Month: September 2025

• Spotify is giving free users a new perk.
• Non-subscribers can now pick and play specific songs, instead of having to shuffle through playlists.
• About 60% of Spotify’s monthly active users listen for free.

Spotify is giving its free users more premium treatment.

The audio streaming platform said it will let non-paying users pick and play specific songs. Before this, they could only shuffle through playlists and had limits on the number of skipped songs.

Spotify’s free users can also now search for specific songs to play and open song links shared on social media. Spotify said it is rolling out the changes globally from Monday.

A large majority — about 60% — of Spotify’s user base is free users. The company said in July it has 696 million monthly active users, including 276 million subscribers.

However, the free experience still has some limitations. A Spotify spokesperson told TechCrunch that free users will be allotted an “on-demand time,” and once they exceed the daily limit, they will have to abide by Spotify’s previous limited skips per hour rule.

Representatives for Spotify did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider on how long the “on-demand time” is.

The release did not give any updates on whether Spotify’s ad experience would change for free users.

These changes for free users come just ahead of Spotify’s biggest advertising season. The company said in its July earnings report that ad revenue peaks in the fourth quarter because of higher ad demand during the holiday season.

In July, the company reported that its subscribers had grown 12% compared to the same period the year before, and its free user base had grown 10.5%.

According to its earnings report, revenue in its latest quarter had grown 10% compared to the year before, to 4.2 billion euros, or about $4.95 billion.

Spotify’s stock price has risen about 108% in the past year.

• Julianne Moore says she likes to fit in “a little bit of work” even on her off days.
• “Maybe I shoot something, or I’m working on a script, or I’m learning something,” she said.
• The Oscar-winning actor says she prioritizes her health as she ages, partly because of her family.

Julianne Moore, 64, says she can’t resist working even on her rest days.

In an interview with People published on Sunday, the Oscar-winning actor spoke about her ideal day off.

“I like a little of everything,” Moore told People. “A perfect day is not having to get up too early and drink my coffee, and read the news and answer my emails.”

Her ideal day off would also include some time for yoga, a meal with her family, and unwinding with a show she enjoys before bed, she said.

Even though her schedule already seems packed, Moore says she still tries to carve out time for “a little bit of work” to stay engaged.

“Maybe I shoot something, or I’m working on a script, or I’m learning something,” she said.

Moore says she tries to take better care of her health now that she’s older.

“When you’re younger, you don’t think about much at all. I mean, you really feel impervious to everything, and to anything health and wellness related,” she said. “But I think, the more life you’ve accrued, the more precious it becomes.”

Moore, who has two children with her husband, film director Bart Freundlich, added that she also has family to consider.

“You have more people that you’re taking care of, you have more people that you love, and you realize that you depend on your body, and if something goes wrong with your body, then it really affects your function,” she said.

Moore has talked about aging before. In a 2021 interview with As If magazine, she said it’s “sexist” to say that a woman is “aging gracefully.”

“Is there an ungraceful way to age? We don’t have an option, of course. No one has an option about aging, so it’s not a positive or a negative thing, it just is,” she said.

A representative for Moore did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.

As conversations around wellness and aging evolve, we should also rethink what work-life balance means, Veronica West, a psychologist, told Business Insider in 2024.

“It used to mean dividing work time and personal time into neat, equal slices,” West said. “But let’s be honest, life rarely plays nice like that.”

Instead, it might be more helpful to think of it as “work-life rhythm,” West said. “The trick is learning how to balance energy, not just time, so you’re surviving and enjoying each part of your day.”

Engaging in purposeful work can help protect cognitive abilities even as we age, Karen Glaser, a professor of gerontology at King’s College London, told Business Insider in 2024.

Ben Meyers and Fabrizio Villatoro, researchers at LongeviQuest, told Business Insider in 2023 that one common trait among the over 1,000 centenarians they’ve met is working hard well into old age.

Earlier this year, several 80-something Americans told Business Insider that they continue working past retirement, not for money, but for the sense of fulfillment and social connection it brings.