Swedish music streaming service Spotify announced new changes to its site, including a cap on free music listening to 10 hours.

we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you, but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward.

Following are the new changes:

1) Total listening time for free users will be limited to 10 hours per month after the first 6 months. That's equivalent to around 200 tracks or 20 albums. Earlier, it was 20 hours of free listening.

2) New Spotify users will be able to enjoy our unrivalled free service as it is today for the first 6 months.

3) As of May 1st, any user who signed up to the free service on or before November 1st 2010 will be able to play each track for free up to a total of 5 times. Users who signed up after the beginning of November will see these changes applied 6 months after the time they set up their Spotify account.

... this (changes) means we can continue making Spotify available to all in the long-term. We'll be bringing out some awesome new features as well as significant improvements over the coming months, which will make the Spotify experience even better, CEO Daniel Ek wrote in a blog post.

Meanwhile, Spotify assured members that the new changes would not affect most free users, who mostly use the service to find new music.

The latest move from Spotify is considered as its efforts to push users to its two levels of paid services, which are unaffected by the changes, and also assumed

Spotify, which operates in seven European countries, offers ad-free subscriptions for about GBP 4.99 (about $8) per month for PC-only access and charges GBP 9.99 (about $16) a month with mobile access.

Spotify, which was founded in April 2006 by serial entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, is available in Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. In March 2011, Spotify announced that it has one million paying subscribers across Europe.

Spotify has been trying to venture in to the United States, but it has not been able to sign the major record companies, including Warner Music Group.

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