{"id":945,"date":"2011-04-30T10:06:42","date_gmt":"2011-04-30T10:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andyparkes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/04\/30\/what-does-the-future-hold-for-spotify\/"},"modified":"2011-04-30T10:06:42","modified_gmt":"2011-04-30T10:06:42","slug":"what-does-the-future-hold-for-spotify","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andyparkes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/04\/30\/what-does-the-future-hold-for-spotify\/","title":{"rendered":"What Does The Future Hold For Spotify?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About a week <a href=\"https:\/\/andyparkes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/04\/07\/making-money-by-giving-stuff-away\/\">after I wrote about the future of DRM<\/a> and cited Spotify as an example they made an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spotify.com\/int\/blog\/archives\/2011\/04\/14\/upcoming-changes-to-spotify-free-open\/\">announcement about some changes they are making.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The changes will affect users of the free service. <\/p>\n<p>The announcement has the full details but in short,<\/p>\n<p>You get a six months grace period, after that. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Listening time will be reduced to 10 hours per month. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>You\u2019ll only be able to play each track 5 times. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That second restriction is a massive change to how Spotify works when using the free service.<\/p>\n<p>Something that jumped out to me in the announcement was this<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The changes we\u2019re having to make will mainly affect heavier Spotify Free and Open users, as most of you use Spotify to discover music<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It\u2019s a part of why I use Spotify, but not the sole reason. I like the fact I don\u2019t need to worry about music. I don\u2019t need to worry about storing files or DRM and the like. I just create playlists, and have the software installed on any devices I need. This means I\u2019m going to hit that five play limit very quickly. <\/p>\n<p>Am I different to the average Spotify free user or have they misunderstood how their users are behaving?<\/p>\n<p>As you can imagine there was quite a reaction to the blog post that made the announcement. <\/p>\n<p>On one side you had people who make use of the free service who were up in arms and the people who are on the paid for service who were basically telling the people on the free service to <em>\u201cput their hands in their pockets\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I can understand the reaction to a degree. But as one of those free users my understanding is that the trade off is having adverts dropped into my playlists. This effectively funded my free subscription which I was quite happy with.<\/p>\n<p>I have a choice now \u2013 upgrade to a paid subscription to continue using Spotify in the same way that I do now, stop using Spotify or change my reasons for using Spotify (music discovery which what they seem to think people are using it for)<\/p>\n<p>So <u>why<\/u> have Spotify made the change? <\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m no music industry expert but I do have a few theories. <\/p>\n<p>1) <strong>Spotify want more paid subscriptions.<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>Maybe this was the plan all along. Get lots of users onto the system, paid or free and then change the rules so that if those users want to stay they\u2019ll have to pay. Sure they\u2019ll lose some of the free users but they weren\u2019t paying anyway right?<\/p>\n<p>2) <strong>The business model isn\u2019t working<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It could be that the advertising revenue isn\u2019t quite quite as good as they initially thought. Maybe the free service was so good they haven\u2019t got as many paid subscribers as they were expecting and need to make the change. Previously the only reason I\u2019d considered upgrading would so I could use the mobile service (I was waiting until my phone upgrade was due before making that decision). Free service was that good for me I could have stayed on it quite happily for some time.<\/p>\n<p>2) <strong>They don\u2019t have a choice<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s no secret that Spotify have had problems launching in the US and that lots of the labels aren\u2019t entirely happy about the free service. It\u2019s quite possible they\u2019ve had to do some deals to keep the labels happy.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe it\u2019s a mixture of all three?<\/p>\n<p>The changes come into force as of May 1st and as a long time user I won\u2019t even get the six months grace period (if i understand the changes correctly)<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s to stop me creating a new account every six months though?<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019ll be interesting to see how it works out. <\/p>\n<p>How do you use Spotify? Will you be moving to the paid service or looking for something else altogether?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About a week after I wrote about the future of DRM and cited Spotify as an example they made an announcement about some changes they are making. The changes will affect users of the free service. The announcement has the full details but in short, You get a six months grace period, after that. Listening<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"readmore\" href=\"https:\/\/andyparkes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/04\/30\/what-does-the-future-hold-for-spotify\/\"><span class=\"arrow-right icon\"><\/span>Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.11 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>What Does The Future Hold For Spotify? - Andy&#039;s Techie Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/andyparkes.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/04\/30\/what-does-the-future-hold-for-spotify\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Does The Future Hold For Spotify? - Andy&#039;s Techie Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"About a week after I wrote about the future of DRM and cited Spotify as an example they made an announcement about some changes they are making. 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