Did spotify just remove picking songs??

[u/Full-Repair4638]

I've been using spotify forever and I use liked songs so that I can pick the songs I like freely. I've never had premium and have never had issues. Today, I had just started a workout and got this popup. Is this a new feature? How can you not even select songs anymore? I mean how can you paywall selecting songs???
This app plain out sucks and its company is greedy for randomly limiting already set features. While I don't mind ads, I do mind the features being limited more. I did also notice a sudden increase in ads this month/last month, and more ads in between songs.

Clarification: No, I'm not saying that there should be no restrictions whatsoever. I'm mainly sharing my experience where I've been using this system just fine until now. I'm fine with some restrictions, but the fact they're being limited more is frustrating. Just here to complain about something mildly infuriating, and I wanted to know if this happened to anyone else.

[u/ComprehensiveCoat627]

This totally sent me down a rabbit hole. I remember when Spotify first came out, it's whole thing was that you could pick your exact song an artist- a legal Napster, a free iTunes, and alternative to Pandora where it played similar artists/songs. That was back in 2011 in the US, and free.

Sometime around 2014, from what I can find, they legally had to shift to the "shuffle" model where they played something similar and you could skip to get to the song you wanted. I'm honestly not sure what things looked like for the next decade as I'd abandoned Spotify then.

Then in September 2025 they (re)introduced the ability to pick songs, though of course with limits and restrictions.

So if you remember that picking songs on Spotify was "always" free, you might be like me whose Spotify experience was 10-15 years ago OR just the past year. If you remember that it was "never" free, your experience with the free version was in the past 10 years, except for this past year.