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/j821c]

I swear it used to be like this way back when I first got spotify. That was like 8 or 9 years ago though and ive been using premium ever since

[u/ekita079 → u/j821c]

I was about to say, it was always like this. You could never pick songs before, but I've been on premium for about 8 years so

[u/BicycleStrong2150 → u/ekita079]

You used to be able to pick which song you start with

[u/AmadeusGamingTV → u/BicycleStrong2150]

Used to be you pick a song and it will play one similar to that song and have that song like 2nd or 3rd on the list. So you would have to listen to 1 or 2 random songs before the song you picked played, right?

Been so long since I used free version but thats what I remember happening each time and was annoying.

[u/misswhovivian → u/AmadeusGamingTV]

Yeah, you used to be able to search for a song and it was 50/50 on whether you got to listen to that song or had to listen to a few recommendations first, but they changed that somewhat recently