200 music labels bail from Spotify, get ready for the next big online music fight
Dan Seitz Ready for a huge shock? People don’t actually pirate music all that much. It’s true! Why? Well, partially because most would-be pirates can just pay $15 a month for a streaming service and get all the music they want. Unfortunately, that also means they’re not shelling out a buck per MP3, and that makes music labels angry. Which means your online music streaming is about to start sucking.
The first bullet fired in this latest Internet/music industry pissing match comes from STHoldings, some British music company that is apparently big into dubstep. They received the same study everyone else did, and immediately threw a massive hissy fit about how their music on Spotify was hurting their users and this was wrong and bad and you know the drill if you’ve spent more than five minutes on the Internet. Anyway, they went to the 200-plus record labels they represent and asked them if they still wanted to be on Spotify. The answer, obviously, was “no.”
It’s the latest kick to the crotch for the music service that’s seen argument over the royalties it hands out, people throwing hissy fits over the fact that it’s essentially become Facebook’s music arm (as in, you need a Facebook account to even sign into the service), and just the usual problems you’ve got to expect when you’re incredibly popular on the Internet and start changing things.
This probably won’t kill Spotify, even if some would like it to: announcing they’ve got less dubstep on their servers is a bit like announcing they’ve gotten rid of a painful and unpleasant disease. And it’s worth noting that the big labels own a chunk of it. But not shockingly, now that the service is established worldwide, the labels are going to see how much juice they can squeeze from this orange. Expect other streaming services, like Google Music and Pandora, to get in on this whole “BAAAAAAWWWWW PAY US MORE” fun sooner rather than later.
200+ Labels Withdraw from Spotify [Wired]
follow guyism:
Other Stories You Might LIke
Google wants to impress you with its seven inches of tablet
MindWave lets you control your phone with your mind, protects your virginity
Facebook Camera is not Instagram, thankfully
comment on this story
blog comments powered by Disqus