Tidal
This was an alternative to Spotify that I’ve seen being recommended. I’ve tried it during work as a way to try and escape Spotify’s onslaught of ads. However, after I created a playlist on Tidal of songs I wanted playing, all of them went for 30 seconds a piece. I couldn’t deal with it and ran right back to Spotify to have a functioning playlist.
I tried the same thing and hit the same issue, it looks like free plans are all restricted to 30 second clips. I’m using Pandora now. It’s not good for listening to a particular song at a particular time, it’s really only for background sound and “ad silence” in f-droid works to mute its ads