Spotify will soon make some music from top-flight artists available only to paying subscribers.

According to the Financial Times, the music streaming firm has now conceded with multiple major record labels to restrict some of the biggest new releases to its premium tier subscribers only. Currently, all music on the service is available to both free and paid users.  The premium tier subscribers paying around $12 are able to listen to the music without ads and playback offline.

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The Financial Times also reported that Spotify will receive discounted royalty fees it pays to record labels as part of a bid to make its business more attractive to investors ahead of a much-rumored initial public offering.

Spotify currently has the largest paid user-base at 50 million and another 50 million free users. The figure is more than double that of Apple's 20 million subscribers and way ahead of Tidal's 3 million. The Sweden-based streaming service attributed its success largely for the longest time to the value of its comprehensive free tier as a marketing tool.

Troy Carter, Spotify's global head of creator services earlier said that exclusives were "bad for artists, bad for consumers, and bad for the whole industry." However, competition is heating up with big-name artists and their record labels opting to sign exclusivity deals with competing services which restrict new albums to paid tiers.

According to The Verge,  2016 was the year music went exclusive. New big releases from top-flight artists such as Drake, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Rihanna, Beyonce and Chance the Rapper were made available first on either Apple Music or Tidal.

Taylor Swift in 2014, meanwhile, pull her songs from Spotify, explaining "music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free."