Spotify to restrict some music to paying subscribers only
Spotify is planning to make some music available only to paying customers in a major change to its service.Until now, all music on the service has been available to both free and paid users but Spotify has now agreed with multiple major record labels to restrict some of the biggest new releases to members of its premium tier only, according to the Financial Times. Spotify has for a long time attributed at least some of its scale to the value of its comprehensive free tier as a marketing tool. By restricting some music from free users Spotify stands to gain a reduction in royalty fees paid to the labels per stream, and a chance at exclusive releases from artists like Kanye West, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, all of whom have restricted new albums to the paid tier of competing services such as Apple Music and Tidal. Labels believe the free tier, which pays lower royalties per stream, can serve to cannibalise other audiences, hitting album sales and lowering the incentive to upgrade to premium. The reason why Taylor Swift decided to pull away her music from Spotify was because she argued, "“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.”
[] 50m users who currently listen for free will not be able to access the latest releases from some top flight artists
[] The premium tier currently costs £9.99 a month enables offline playback and ad-free listening.
[] 50m paying subscribers and another 50m free users.
[] Competitors of Spotify; Apple Music and Tidal [big ones]
My opinion: Streaming music is something that is so assessable in this day and age and yes, consumers do take advantage of it because it means that we don't have to pay; expect if people do pay for things like Apple music or Spotify premium. Personally, I do have a premium Spotify account, and i do appreciate the fact that i can stream any music that I would like to hear, it is cheaper and I do think that it benefits us as audience. These developments in technology are bringing benefits to the audience in much better way in terms of the availability although it does mean that traditional media is soon to be dying out in all areas.
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