Music streaming service Spotify is getting lots of plaudits from users lately for its ease of use and vast catalogue but that’s about to change. In a blog post yesterday the startup outlined how it will be removing a number of songs from its catalogue and adding country restrictions to some tracks, which may make them unplayable for many users. The changes are being made because record labels have slapped restrictions on Spotify’s service. The issue is to do with the publishing rights associated with compilatoins. A user in one country might be able to listen to a track on one compilation in their country jurisdiction, but to share that track on a playlist with a user in another country could affect the publishing rights. It’s a bizarre situation to think of in 2009 but it means that a user could share a track with a friend in another country, but that friend wouldn’t be able to play that track. As the Sweden-based startups says: “…our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good”. Here’s the post:
Some important changes to the Spotify music catalogue
January 28, 2009Next week we are going to be making some changes to our music catalogue that we feel are important to communicate clearly. Unfortunately we are going to be removing a number of songs from our catalogue and adding country restrictions to some tracks, which may make them unplayable for you.
Why are we doing this?
The changes are being made so that we implement all the proper restrictions that are required by our label deals. Some tracks will be restricted from play in certain countries, this means that if you share tracks with friends who are in other countries it’s possible that they won’t be able to listen to them. The reason for this is that our agreements contain strict rules as to what tracks can and can’t be played in various countries that we are now capable of implementing. These restrictions are a legacy from when most music was sold on tapes and CDs and they have continued over into streaming music, our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good.
Additionally, some of the music that has been delivered to us had been delivered by mistake even though the artist did not want their music to be included in a streaming service. In order to respect the decisions of the artist we now have to remove those tracks. We have not lost any licenses and no labels have stopped working with us, this is just a matter of updating our catalogue to be in line with the agreements we actually have. In hindsight it would have been better to remove this in October when we launched publicly, we realize this now and apologize to you for not doing it sooner.
How will this affect you?
A number of the tracks that you’ve listened to previously will no longer be available for streaming, these tracks have already been removed from the search function. If you have some of these songs in playlists we will try to automatically replace those songs with versions from albums that we are not removing so you don’t lose the song. If there is no replacement available then the song will appear in red on your playlists.
What’s next?
From this point on there are no plans to remove any more music and our catalogue will only grow from here. We already have music from all the major labels and a vast majority of the independent labels licensed, between them we have millions of tracks that we still can add into Spotify. Now it’s a matter of importing that music into our system, which we are doing on an ongoing basis in an effort to add thousands of albums a week. We continue to work hard to sign deals with more labels and will work with the labels we have signed to fill the holes in our catalogue.
Our dream is to create a music experience where users can play whatever music they want, whenever they want, it may take awhile but we will keep working at it. Please feel free to leave any questions you may have on the blog or join the conversation on our forum if you require more information.
and just like that, Spotify becomes “just another” music streaming app.
back to pirating music for me.
Britain to suffer worst recession of any advanced nation, says IMF
Britain will suffer the worst recession of any advanced nation, the world’s leading economic watchdog warned yesterday.
The economy will shrink by 2.8 per cent this year, with Britain faring significantly worse than the United States, Western Europe or Japan due to its reliance on the financial sector, the International Monetary Fund said.
Its forecast was almost double its previous prediction for the severity of the UK recession and prompted leading experts to warn British families were facing an “extremely painful” period, with people getting poorer in the next 12 months.
The IMF’s gloomy assessment of Britain’s prospects also came as a severe blow to Gordon Brown, who faced fierce criticism from Conservative leader David Cameron yesterday for his “complacent” handling of the economic downturn.
The Tories warned that the UK was now heading for the “worst recession in the world” and its worst year for 60 years.
“Let us hope these forecasts are wrong. But if they are not, Britain is set to endure the worst downturn of any major country and the worst year for the economy since 1948,” George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said.
“Without a change of direction we will be living with Labour’s debt crisis for a generation.”
In an interview today, the Chancellor Alistair Darling admits Britain will endure a grim start to 2009, with “a lot of downsides” in the period ahead. Only days ago, official figures confirmed Britain fell into recession at the end of last year.
The IMF’s stark forecast came on another day of dire economic news:
:: The Institute of Fiscal Studies warned that British taxpayers were facing a “double whammy” of £20 billion tax rises and public spending cuts a year to get the country’s finances back on track – equivalent to £800 per household per year, or a 4p rise in income tax;
:: Oxford Economics said that Gordon Brown’s plan to fund short-term economic giveaways with long-term tax cuts would hold back growth and cost thousands of jobs.
The IMF’s warning came in its latest World Economic Outlook, published yesterday, which said the world economy would suffer its worst year since the Second World War, with growth coming “to a virtual halt”,
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) meanwhile, said the slowdown was so severe that as many as 51 million jobs could be lost worldwide.
However, it was the forecasts for Britain that were particularly grim. No other developed country will see their economy shrink to such a great extent as Britain, which is particularly exposed to the crisis in the banking sector and the housing market downturn.
The United States will fall by 1.6 per cent, France by 1.9 per cent and Germany by 2.5 per cent. The average drop among advanced economies will be 2 per cent.
The IMF did offer one crumb of comfort however, saying the UK economy would grow by 0.2 per cent next year.
Its forecasts for the UK were drawn up after Mr Brown launched his £20 billion “fiscal stimulus” package of tax cuts and increased public spending.
At the time, the Treasury claimed those measures would mean that the UK economy would start to grow again in the second half of 2009.
Mr Brown has since repeatedly refused to say if he stands by that forecast, which is widely expected to be abandoned in the Budget later this year.
In the Commons yesterday Mr Brown was pressed by the Tory leader to admit that by his own reckoning Britain was now bust.
The Conservatives claimed that showed that Mr Brown was responsible for leaving the country exposed to the worst ravages of the recession.
Mr Cameron said that in the last three months alone, 4,000 businesses had gone bust, over 11,000 homes repossessed and almost 250,000 people had lost their jobs.
“Shouldn’t those be the death throes of a failed premiership?” he suggested.
Mr Cameron added: “You seem to be denying now that the recession is taking place – extraordinarily complacent. I asked a specific question about your definition of an economic bust. I’ve discovered you were asked this question before in front of the Treasury Select Committee and for once you actually answered it.
“I have the transcript. You referred to reductions in GDP of 1.5 per cent. You were asked: ‘So is that the minimum definition of a bust?’
“You replied: ‘Yes.’ Now we know the economy shrank by 1.5 per cent in the last quarter alone will you finally admit, even on your own definition, something that every economist, business, family in the country knows to be true – you didn’t abolish boom and bust.”
But Mr Brown said: “This is a recession facing every country and continent in the world. Everybody except the Conservative Party agrees it is not a unique UK phenomenon. This is something that has got to be dealt with internationally.
“You mentioned the IFS. They also said: ‘In current circumstances the cost of doing nothing is larger than the cost of acting.’ That is the rebuttal to the Conservative policy of doing nothing.”
The IMF warning came as leaders from around the world convening in the Swiss town of Davos warned that the world was now facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions.
A full 40 per cent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed in the past 15 months alone, according to one of the world’s leading financiers.
Steve Schwarzman, chairman of private equity giant Blackstone, said: “Forty percent of the world’s wealth was destroyed in the last five quarters. It is an almost incomprehensible number. Business will be very different.”
Meanwhile Sir Howard Davies, a former Bank of England policymaker and now director of the London School of Economics, said: “In the United States and the UK people are going to get poorer. They are going to have to spend less than their income for a while as the economy deleverages. That is going to be politically extremely painful.”
Hey Mike:
Please tell me why anyone would consider you an expert at ANYTHING when in your last post, you claim the economy in the UK is fine and spending money in Barcelona for a technology conference is a sound idea.
Well, the article above puts your first idiotic statement firmly to rest.
As for the technology conference idea still being a good one?
Tell us, please.
Thanks for re-pasting a newspaper article but I think you have me confused with some other Butcher.
What’s her name?
They are really making a big usability mistake here that could had been solved differently. Why not, for instance, offer those restricted users to buy those songs since they already have them in the play list.
Secondly, I wonder how do they track user location? By IP or by user entered location? Out of topic for music, but on topic of location restrictions, Hotmail for a long time had offered a different options for users outside US, however the restrictions were based on the user entered location (as long as you enter that you are from US, you have no restrictions and IP didn’t matter??!!?).
Peter just nailed it. People will go back to Pirating.
I was *really* happy with the Spotify model, receiving adverts now and then was a great way to enjoy, share and discover new music. I’m not saving the tracks to my harddrive, I’m streaming, it’s like radio, commercial radio – except I’m making the playlists and in return you tell me about ‘The Energy Saving Trust’. It’s a fair deal.
It’s a shame the back and forth between copyright territories is a problem for the labels.
That is a great shame, especially as the reasoning behind it is so cryptic and impenetrable to the normal consumer. It’s very hard to blame people for pirating when disparate factions of the music industry and it’s outlets seem so hell bent on destroying each other.
This is so typical of the music industry. It’s better than the usual ‘one step forwards, two steps back’ – maybe 2 forward and 1 back. Which isn’t as great as it sounds since the two forward are made, in their entirety, by a third party (Spotify).
What an unbelievable bunch of muppets the labels are. And I say that not because of this incident but as a general observation formed over the last 5 years.
Peter’s probably going a bit overboard until we see just how restrictive this new system will be, but the essence of it is valid. I’m off to pirate a bunch of music now as my own little rage against the machine.
See, it’s their licensing model that prevents them from accomodating online services like Spotify. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s impossible for the labels to walk back 50+ years of licensing arrangements, but it seems possible that they’re having to lie in the bed they’ve made.
I hear you – and I appreciate it’s not quite as bad as the labels making these decisions with no history to deal with.
That said, they’ve had a long time now to restructure their system to adapt to the new climate. So zero sympathy from me on their current situation.
Hey, just to outline here… it’s actually very little to do with the labels. This is actually more to do with the artists.
It’s also very little to do with the hated majors and more to do with the indies.
If an artist is on the same label for worldwide, then it’s easy for the label to easily grant spotify worldwide use of the song. It;’s only really one decision, made centrally by a huge label.
However many artists choose different labels in different territories.
The reason? Many labels just don’t have the resources to operate in more than one country. A small indie in the USA clearly can’t afford to release an album all over the world.
The result is that an artist would choose who they most wanted to go with in each individual country. Traditionally this would be a GOOD thing. Instead of having a massive cooperation releasing your music, you have many small teams of people who care about you and your music in different places.
However, for spotify, how can they contact all these various small labels and get access straight away for the music?
Clearly they can’t – it will take time.
Lets not get too anti music industry here, as the people you’re probably most annoyed at are the small labels – the passionate indies. Such as WARP, K records, Kill rock stars, dischord, and many many more.
Spotify should really have explained this more clearly. It feels a bit like trying to create anti music propoganda in order to get headlines and people saying ‘you are the future’.
But in reality, it’s the locaslised independant music groups who are causing them the problems, mainly because it takes spotify such a long time to contact them / deal with their catalogues. And undoubtedly, these are not the catalogues that are the most profitable to release for them. A small DIY punk band from new jersey is not going to generate as much streaming as michael jackson unfortunately.
The silliest bit is this:
So it’s not songs that are being removed, it’s releases. You can’t listen to this track on this album because the publisher doesn’t allow it but you can listen to the same track on this other compilation because it’s from a different publisher!
That’s just weird.
Looks like Spotify are to blame for the fuss and they know it. Though the restrictions are daft, why did they launch their service without complying with the them?
Unless of course they’re only implementing the restrictions now as some sort publicity stunt….
If you’ve dealt with the music industry at all you would know that licensing is extremely complex. When I worked at a company that dealt with karaoke, we had a person whose entire job it was to find new songs to add to the service. The morass is such that he’d be ahead of the game if he cleared more than a handful of songs each month.
I don’t normally speak like this, but what an utterly moronic move, by the record companies.
You could say Spotify should have had these in place to start with, but why? Spotify as it is makes some sense, as it’s going to be, it makes no sense!
Once again, the record labels have pushed people to illegitimate sources to either obtain music or to /try before they buy/.
What else did the record companies think would happen?
If you’ve any other views, let me know on Twitter @davidgilson.
I’m also giving away Spotify invites on my website if they’re still worth anything.
We can’t have an actual good, useful online music service, can we?
One of the boons for me as a Swede living in the UK is that I can find Swedish music on Spotify that is not normally available to me.
..and now for country restrictions..
When will these record company cretins ever learn a damn thing ???? I hear their next “big thing” is embeddable mp3s in diapers…
Spotify have to take some responsibility for this – having whole playlists and favourite bands catalogs dissapear is a sad experience… especially if you paid up front.
Having said that, you’d think labels/publishers would be crawling over one another to support spotify – the only legal model that looks like it has any serious future. Don’t give up spotify!
- Sad but supportive spotify fan
I agree it was probably a bit hasty for them to charge people for tracks with unclear licensing.
Hang on though, this doesn’t sound like it’s the labels who are trying to stop it, it’s to do with publishing ie. different companies, even if sometimes part of the same corporate group as ‘the labels’… publishing being the people who aren’t losing out so much as the labels as their business depends on monetising the use of songs, rather than simply the sale/streaming of them.
They are – quite rightly – defending their business model and making sure that music service companies play by the rules.
Publishing is a whole different game and pretty complicated to boot. Spotify should get their game together and sort whatever blanket licenses they need for the regions in which they wish to operate.
Everyone who is automatically blaming “the labels” and holding up Spotify as some kind of poor innocent victim is slightly missing the point. Copyright is complicated, and the big bucks startups like Spotify need to recognise this from the beginning and deal with it, cos it ain’t going to change.
What if those licenses aren’t available? You seem to be defending a position that if the publishing rights are incompatible with the entire internet, then that’s just too bad.
Wasn’t ASCAP settings its targets on “Copylefters” as the new enemy? sickens me.
@Shaba
“Copyright is complicated”
That’s the whole problem. People don’t give a rat’s ass about copyright. Copyright needs to evolve. The only two solutions I see are:
1) Record labels actually compete with p2p, and sell short (5-10sec) ads every several minutes, and you play all the music for free (instead of trying to fight p2p)
2) Or artists get educated about their options, and everyone starts using newer and simpler versions of copyright licensing like Creative Commons, which suits perfectly to our technological reality.
Sitting down with any of the major labels is extremely frustrating. They’re so closed because of stupid lawyers, there’s so much they could be doing, monetizing EVERY play, but they can’t see past their old business model and stupid complex copyright laws that involve way to many people.
In the end, they’ll die if they don’t adapt.
That’s right, Jim, it’s all the fault of those “stupid” lawyers.
Hang on a second, something doesn’t smell right…
“The changes are being made so that we implement all the proper restrictions that are required by our label deals”
So, in other words, having made deals with the record companies, Spotify *ignored* the terms of those deals for the early phase of its operation?
Could it have done this to drum up lots of traffic and good publicity, while knowing that the record labels would, sooner or later, enforce the terms that Spotify had happily agreed with them?
Mike, I think you need to ask a few questions…
It’s an interesting point Ian. Either they delayed implementing the full terms, forgot to, or intentionally delayed. One must be true. However, since this doesn’t create great publicity I’d surmise the answer is more cock-up. However, I’ll ask, thanks for the suggestion.
I suspect they ignored it. Territorial restrictions are well-known and crucial aspects of any licensing deals.
If you look at any of the major tv network streaming sites, they check IP addresses for territory. As an example, I was unable to use Hulu while in Spain recently, and I can’t watch shows from the BBC in the US.
The problem gets complicated by the number of moving parts involved. Music publishers and the various territories they control get very convoluted (dozens and dozens of country groups and publishers per song). Unless you can get a world-wide license, the economics don’t make much sense.
Remember guys, Spotify is still in Beta. There is still plenty of time before an official launch to grow the catalogue and sort out licensing issues. I’ve been using the service for months now and none of my playlists have so far been affected. Lets not be so quick to write them off shall we?
As Swede moving to the US, and having beta tested Spotify abou 2 years, I will miss Spotify, until they launch in the US (if ever).
I think ultimately the only way to break through this muck is to start with the next generation of young musicians. We need to offer musicians basic services to run their own business and control their own content rights (like we have done for every other long-tail small business on the internet). Then the next generation of artists will have no interest in signing contracts with the labels. In 5 years the current contracts will expire and all musicians will jump ship. Problem solved – The labels will be starved of new talent and they will lose their control. So far reverbnation is the only decent thing i’ve seen that is trying to do this. Myspace is sadly outdated. Anyone want to join in a startup to make this happen? Cheers -
-Thinksketch
http://thinksketch.wordpress.com/
As a Spotify user I’m happy to say that none of the tracks I listen to disappeared. Well, I have to admit that I received my invite about a month ago. I really love the service and wish best of luck to the team.
And so Spotify is dead. RIP Spotify!
Here’s how I interpret this story (it appears to be a bit different from some of the comments above): innovative music technology startup continues to make tweaks in order to offer a compelling service that plays fairly.
Spotify is dabbling in a space fraught with legal landmines and they appear to be executing brilliantly. They are trying things quickly and being transparent about it with their users.
Yes, it’s a shame music licensing is such a clusterf*ck. In the meantime, you got to hand it to them for trying to find creative ways to *legally* work around licensing restrictions while offering a great product experience.
I think people are underestimating the challenges a small company like Spotify has making heads and tales over all the publishing restrictions for the content they are serving across international lines. Frankly, that they can even implement technology solutions and user experience flows that comply with the rule of law is impressive. I doubt companies with significantly more manpower could do even tackle what they’ve done thus far.
Could this be implemented better? Sure, what couldn’t be better. But, I have every belief that they will continue to improve the experience.
My hat is off and tipped towards these guys – we need more companies working hard to find creative solutions to difficult problems.
Xkcd on music and restrictions:
http://xkcd.com/488/
Isn’t the music industry shooting holes in the bottom of its own liferaft here?
In 3 years, the music industry as we have known it will be all gone because they still operate like its 1998.
You will find the tech heads at these labels are arrogant and just plain dense. They are all subservient to Apple and iTunes. Not 1 single label has made an attempt to come up with their own idea for a service or technology, but will attempt to steal others.
I am working on a technology right this second to end piracy for audio and video. I have determined I am tired of trying to get these label snobs to see the light and will only cater this new technology to video uses.
I no longer care about music and I think other technology holders will start to feel the same.
When you can’t get the entire Beatles catalogue on your service but the thing is on Bittorrent for years, quit placing your hard work in startups in music, you are wasting your time and in comparison with limewire and bittorrent, no one really cares anymore.
I told a friend of mine to BUY a popular artist’s discography from a record store, as it was “WORTH IT”, he told me yesterday that he could not find any record stores where he could buy the 3 albums so he simply found the whole thing in 1 rar bittorrent online for free.
Stop wasting your time on music startups..
Come back, William Blanchard, with your amazing secret new technology. Obi-Wan, you’re our only hope etc etc.
That’s just ridiculous man, don’t they realise that services like Spotify are great for music and the industry. If anything it was the answer to illegal filesharing, providing people with another way to preview albums before they buy them, but no, they’re scared they’re going to lose out on a few pounds. The music industry sucks, big time!
I understand it’s because they are respecting the artists contracts.
i.e. If Bob Marley signed a contract that didn’t include a digital clause then I believe this rules out Spotify streaming his music until the label can negotiate it with his estate.
It’s a great application and one that I am sure will experience hockey stick growth in the next year.
Perhaps we should wait until next week to see the extent of music being removed *before* condemning anyone?
The labels are probably planning to make some money on lawsuits before allowing decent and legal options for the consumers.