Lost Opportunity

Spotify has always been a must-have app and service, streaming music to your desktop, or - if you're willing to pay a fee - to every mobile device you have. Their Free service served a great purpose, providing a set number of hours of free listening per month. If you were willing to limit your listening to your home computer and stay under five hours or so per week, you could listen to whatever you wanted (as long as it exists in the Spotify database) into infinity.

Now that is going away. The Free service will still be free, the free hours will still be there, but the infinity part will not. All songs will be limited to five plays lifetime per user.

Considering Spotify had a slightly bewildering business model - one where people were actually wondering how Spotify could actually make money - it should be expected that additional constraints would be introduced at some point. In the battle between content demand and supply, I surmise supply has dealt demand a sharp blow. Well Met, though.

Truthfully, my interests would be best met if people wouldn't steal my money all the time. Spotify fulfilled a need for occasional music listening of hard to find tracks, and new song discovery. I suppose that's something that I could potentially pay for.

Bad thing's even if I could pay for it, I am not able to. For a large number of tracks some music label has determined it should not be sold in my country. It's the same with DRM, and region locks, content for some reason cannot be transported across borders. Which is ridiculous, since I don't suddenly stop liking a piece of music if I pass customs.

That's why I liked and used Spotify (and before Pandora). I want the option of listening to ANY music I like, regardless if a music label made a business decision not to release the track in my region. If I have to pay cash for it, that's fair, but GIVE ME THE CHOICE.

With Spotify moving its business model with limited plays, my choice is somewhat hurt. In practice I may not actually reach the upper limit on borderline tracks, but for some others I might, and if those are tracks I can't get here, I feel screwed. And so should the music artist (after all they've got a listener here, a potential buyer, and they cannot sell here - that's just lost dollars).