How to cancel Spotify — and should you?

If you’re besotted with Apple Music, just want to take a free trial or have heeded artists’ complaints about the service, then leaving is a few clicks away

General atmosphere view at Spotify presents An Intimate Evening With Shane McAnally at the Rosewall on November 2, 2014 in Nashville, Tennessee (Jason Davis/Getty Images)

Streaming music might be having its moment, but that’s for both good and bad. As Spotify is joined by Apple Music and other streaming services like Rdio, and gets criticised by artists and labels alike, many want to leave the service — and it’s easy to do.

The reasons for leaving are various. Apple Music is currently running a trial, to push iPhone users to jump over to it from Spotify or for their first streaming experience. And some have criticised the site’s payment plans, arguing that its free tier devalues music and its payouts to artists are too low.

If you do want to leave, doing so is easy. You just need to head to the right page and make sure you have your login.

You can head to the subscription page and choose the “cancel your subscription” option from the Subscription and payment section. Spotify will then ask you to confirm why you’re cancelling and that you’d like to, and then ask for your password.

When all that is done the subscription is cancelled, and a box will show the date when the account will revert to the Free tier. That will happen automatically, so you can keep using the account and it will eventually just switch over.

(This is the same thing that you’ll need to do if you want to change the renewal date or take a break from your subscription. You can cancel it and then wait to resubscribe.)

The only difficulty might be if you signed up for Spotify through another service, like the iTunes Store. If that happened, you’ll have to get in touch with whoever sold you the subscription in the first place.