If you’re a college student, you’re presently heading back to school, or are back at school already. As you’re deciding what to take with you, where to get your books, and other aspects of college life (particularly dorm life), you really should consider getting a Spotify Premium account with the current Student Discount for college students.
In this article, I’m going to talk you through some of the benefits of a Spotify Premium account (especially as it relates to college life), and let you know how to score a student discount.
I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me — like food or water. — Ray Charles
Spotify 101
There is no shortage of music apps and online services out there. Pandora, Shazam (which we’ve covered before), the oddly named Milk… not to mention the various functions and services that Apple keeps adding to iTunes. With all of this that’s out there, it can be overwhelming, and it becomes difficult to remember which is which.
Even if you have no experience with it, yourself, you may remember Spotify from your friends’ Facebook posts. It is a music streaming site (which, like every site now, has its own app), with a current library of some 20 million songs. Like Pandora, you can find music by searching for artists, titles, genres, styles, etc… Unlike Pandora, though, you’re not limited to the algorithm-generated “radio station” wherein the computer tries to guess what songs you’ll like based on what youv’e searched on. While that is an option, you also have the ability to make and manage your own playlists, as well as share those playlists with any friends who are also on Spotify.
That playlist feature alone makes Spotify something to consider. Because that function is what separates Spotify from “internet radio,” and what makes it much closer to something like iTunes, which is for many people the default music management software. Except that with Spotify, unike iTunes, you aren’t limited to tracks that you currently own. You can build playlists out of any of the tracks on the Spotify library. (Of course, you’ll have to be online and connected to Spotify in order to play them… unless you have a Premium membership.)
What Does a Spotify Premium Account Get Me?
On it’s own, Spotify is a lot like Pandora: free streaming music, but you have limited control over what’s going to play (pretty much, you can just switch between a number of stations, and there are very limited skips if a song comes up that you don’t like.) And there are regular adds. So it’s basically radio.
However, if you upgrade to the Premium account ($10 a month — $5 for students!), you can play specific songs (as opposed to just hoping that they’ll come up on the radio), there will be no limit to your skips, and all of the ads go away.
Of course, this is also what Pandora offers. But Spotify goes even further by giving you the option to download selections for offline listening. Which is great if you’re going to be going on a road trip and don’t want to be limited to just the songs you own (or, for a multi-day trip, the songs that you thought of putting on your device before you left) when you put together a road mix. Also, the quality of the audio increases significantly with a Premium account.
Why Does Spotify Make Sense for College Students?
A Spotify Premium account is a great fit for college life, and should be one of those things which is just part of your digital “must-haves” for your life at school: along with Netflix and an Amazon Student account.
One good reason why you would want a Spotify Premium account as a college student is space: If you, like many college students, are living in a dorm, you probably won’t have a lot of space to call your own. This is one good reason to avoid physical media, like CDs, for your music. Also because you won’t be the only one in your room, and your roommate, or any of your various friends (or even passers-by) might just decide to “help themselves” to your collection.
And now some of my readers (especially those who by never shop for tech outside of an Apple store) are asking “Who still uses CDs?” Yes, people do. Fewer, admittedly, but my point is that it’s not always the best fit for college life.
But another benefit of Spotify for College life is that college is all about branching out, developing your tastes, and learning more about the world around you. Having a Spotify account is great for this because, if you just happen to hear about a new band out there, or a popular group from another country, you can listen to it immediately, with no risk. It’s not like iTunes, where (despite a limited radio function), you’re pretty much limited to music you’ve already paid for. Well, what if this band you’ve heard about sucks? (Some of them do. Especially in college.) You’re not out the price of an album, this way, thus helping you to continue to try new things.
With Spotify, you can always have some music going, and you never have to get annoyed by the limitation of selection. And not only will you discover some great bands you may not have discovered otherwise, these new tastes will help you make friends and connections among your fellow students.
Not to mention just how much the right mix of tunes can really help unwind when you take a break from studies.
How to get the Spotify Premium Discount for College Students
If this all sounds good, applying the Spotify Premium Discount for college students is actually pretty simple.
Online:
- Go to the “Go Premium” page. They aren’t shy about making this available. If they don’t have a huge, page-width link picture staring you in the face when you land on the site, then you can always just click on the “Upgrade” link.
- Now, this page makes it very easy to start a free trial (they keep pushing that one at you), but they do try to hide the Student Premium link. I guess they’re not too eager to lose $5 a month. Just scroll down past the Free/Premium comparison chart, and “Student Discount” should be right after “Spotify Family”.
- Click on the “Learn More” link under “Student Discount.”
- From there, there’s a giant green button in the middle of the page that says “Get Premium.”
Now, if you already have a Spotify account (and are currently signed into it), that should be it. If you don’t have a Spotify account, then you will be able to make one. You can either just connect it to your Facebook page, or you can create a new account with your email address.
Here’s where I’d normally say “It’s a free account,” and technically it is… until you go to the next step and actually get the premium membership. ; – P
Through the App
Upgrading to a premium account through one of the numerous apps is pretty easy:
- Go to the “Settings” menu in the app. (This looks like a gear.)
- This raises a menu. Choose “Account.”
- In “Account,” it will tell you you have a free account, and give you an option to upgrade. Follow up that link. Now, it takes a little bit for the app to recognize that you’ve upgraded (at least it did for me), so give it some time, or even close out of the app and restart it.
- You’ve upgraded to Premium.
However, although they make that process incredibly easy, I couldn’t find a way to get the Student Discount through there. Now, signing up through the app defaults to the 7-Day Free Trial, so it’s possible that the option to apply the student discount will come up when you get a follow-up communication from them, but I’m not sure of that.
If there’s anybody among the readers who has better experience on this point, I would be most grateful if you could spell it out in the comments.
But in the meantime, since I’m not entirely sure that you can get the student discount if you upgrade through the app, I’m going to recommend that you handle this through the website. But as long as you sign in with the same account that you use for the app (on however many devices you have it installed on), then you’ll get the upgrade to the app functionality all around. (Once again, according to some friends I’ve spoken to on this, you may want to close out the app and restart it just to make sure that the changes have taken effect, but this is no big deal.)
And that’s Spotify, Spotify Premium, and the Spotify Premium student discount in a nutshell, just in time for everybody to be getting back to college. If you have any questions about anything that we’ve mentioned here, or if you find that your particular mileage has varied from what we’ve described on any of these points, please mention it in the comments. In the mean time, happy hunting as you trawl through the amazing Spotify track library, and good luck in school.
Don’t study too hard.
I mean, that’s the entire reason you got Spotify.
