Today music streaming service Spotify announced that they are putting restrictions on the “Open” and “Free” accounts. Until now Spotify Open users could listen up to 20 hours of music per month for free. This is still the case in the first 6 months after registration, but after this it will be reduced 10 hours per month and each could only be played 5 times. According to Spotify these changes are necessary to continue offering the Free and Open services. These changes will take effect May 1st and will not affect paying customers.

With that in mind, here are five Spotify alternatives:

Zpotify

This service is a Spotify like service that gets its music from YouTube videos. The advantage is for using this service over the default YouTube interface is that it looks cleaner and filters the results for music. It also has a playlist and a radio feature built in.

Amazon Cloud Player

Amazon launched its cloud player a month earlier. It doesn’t have a free music library like Spotify, but allows you to upload your own music to your Amazon Cloud Drive. You get 5 GB for free and you can upgrade to 20 GB if you buy an album in the Amazon MP3 Store.



ProstoPleer.com

Prostopleer is a Russian online music player. It has a huge music library that consists of MP3s uploaded by users. The sites terms of use say that you are not allowed to upload any copyrighted material, however when looking at the library you only see copyrighted material. They recently added a limit of 15 songs per day for free users, but a premium account costs only 1 euro ($1.41) per month.

Grooveshark

With Grooveshark you can really speak of a Spotify clone. It has its own music library and includes features like playlists and sharing music with social media. The difference with Spotify is that you can run from your browser and that it is also available from the US.

Soundcloud

Soundcloud is another service where the users provide the music, but it is stricter than Prostopleer when it comes to copyright. Because of this its library mainly consists of upcoming artists and indie music, but there are also some well-known names active on Soundcloud (e.g. Avicii aka Tim Berg).