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.

Every time you think record labels are finally, possibly, just maybe beginning to ‘get it’, you see a bit of news like this (from techcrunch) – “Record labels pressure Spotify to restrict service”… oh for f***’s sake, here we go……

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.