Spotify Makes Music Free

Today, free options for listening to music on mobile devices are the most popular for listeners today.

On Wednesday, Spotify, based in Sweden unveiled a free mobile offering that is the first of its kind. The offering allows users of mobile devices to hear any song in its catalog -narrowed down to just one artist, one album or one playlist of singles – without charging a fee as long as the songs are shuffled.

It is a compromise from what we know as on-demand, but it is a huge step toward Daniel Ex’s dream to bring all music across the globe to everyone worldwide, with his company providing the soundtrack for everyone. Ex is the CEO and founder of Spotify.

What is more important, is that is shows that the music industry is finally gravitating from a premise of protection that free subscription listening is not good for the all important sales, typified in the beginning by records, then by CDs and finally iTunes. It does not give total control to users of free subscriptions, but it gives them better user control and it uses Spotify to accomplish it.

The task is getting the whole planet on the correct path to eventually subscribe and eventually pay something for all the music. However, the first and most important task is getting the users on the conveyor belt toward paid consumption.

Spotify officials said that was their vision and that record labels were in agreement.

On Wednesday, CEO Ek said the idea of moving the free service of Spotify outside the home was nagging him for the past year.

He changed his mind due to the habits of listeners changing from the desktop to mobile devices. When smartphones proliferated and new data plans allowed for more streaming, most of the rapid growth, Internet connection listening moved on to devices used by those on the go, regardless if they used them in their home.

The largest provider of music that is Web based in the world, Pandora, says over 80% of their listening hours take place on a connected device.

Basically, as labels began to let fans of their music to listen on computers for free, their listeners had already started plugging their earphones into their tablets and smartphones.

The deals made between rights holders and Spotify did not take that into consideration and making quick adjustments to a music license is not an easy fix.

Bio
Latest Posts

Nancy Young

When I was younger I used to spend almost all of my free time playing computer games. My mom and dad would go mental over this. “You’re never going to do anything with your life if you are going to play games all day” they used to say. What was even more unusual was the fact that I played more games than most of the guys in my friend group. Looking back, I have to admit that I probably played a bit too much, but I also learned a lot of great things. When I turned 20 I decided that it was high-time to make some money of my own, but the only jobs I could get were that of waitress or cashier. How exciting. After several excruciating months of serving tables I had a great idea: since I love gaming so much, why don’t I write about it? That’s when I started doing small writing projects on Elance. Eventually, I got an offer for a part-time job. During that time I learned all about content marketing strategies and how search engines work. I started writing about various topics such as technology, health and lifestyle and discovered that I was actually good at it. On November 24, 2014, I became part of the ArgyllFreePress team.