Have you been holding off on YouTube Premium and Spotify due to subscription costs? Well, fear not! YouTube/Spotify bigwigs have picked up on community feedback and are currently trialing budget subscriptions, YouTube Premium Lite and Spotify Plus in limited numbers/territories. 

For example, YouTube Premium Lite has gone live in the Nordic and Benelux regions (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden).

The reduced subscription-only enables ad-free viewing, leaving features such as offline downloads and background play (Playing videos whilst your phone is locked, for example) for their vanilla subscription service). Ad-free content unfortunately doesn't stretch over to YouTube Music.

The Verge shared a spokesperson statement as follows: 

“In Nordics and Benelux (except for Iceland), we're testing a new offering to give users even more choice: Premium Lite costs €6.99/month (or local equivalent per month) and it includes ad-free videos on YouTube”

Spotify Plus on the other hand is a $0.99 alternative to their current free service that lifts the block on restrictive track skipping and allows users to pick any track they like. The catch being that ads will still be on the platform. Spotify released a statement on the new service trail:

 “We're always working to enhance the Spotify experience and we routinely conduct tests to inform our decisions,” a spokesperson said. “We're currently conducting a test of an ad-supported subscription plan with a limited number of our users.”

In terms of territorial locking, this doesn't really hold much water given that savvy subscribers have been using VPN services to pay their YouTube Premium subscriptions in Indian Rupees vs. U.S. Dollars and sterling. It's quite surprising how sites like Hot UK Deals advertise this loophole with little repercussion from Google/YouTube. 

If you're looking for a solid VPN service, here's some that we can recommend for PC, Firestick, Mac and general streaming. We would always recommend using a VPN service on all internet-enabled devices where possible for the sake of your privacy.