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Spotify Wants More Paid Subscribers, So It Has Launched a New App To Give Away More Music For Free (recode.net)
Spotify on Tuesday announced a new redesigned app for free customers, its first major change to the free tier in four years, as it attempts to lure more customers into buying its subscription service. Free listeners will now get on-demand access to 15 playlists; they can play any song they want in those playlists and are no longer stuck in a world of shuffled playback. From a report: The idea: If people get more stuff without paying, they are more likely to end up paying in the long run. The new mobile app gives free users the ability to play more songs on demand, from 15 pre-populated playlists -- some of which are personalized for individual users, like its popular "Discover Weekly" feature. Spotify has always let users listen to on-demand music for free via an ad-supported option -- it's the main thing that set the company apart from other streaming services in the past. But it has limited full, free access to its library of songs to desktop users, and limited what free users could get to on its mobile app. Today's move doesn't remove those limits entirely, but gives users more opportunity to sample. Paid users get full access to Spotify's entire catalog, on-demand, without ads. The new app also offers users the ability to stream songs with lower data usage. The company says users can save up to 75% of mobile data with data saver mode while streaming on 3G.
If you have allowed yourself to get hooked on so-called 'streaming' music services then you are a SUCKER and will get what you deserve: PAY, PAY, PAY, forever, when you could have purchased music and listened to it for free thereafter.
Don't even BOTHER to give me all your dumb arguments about how it's so much better, knows what you like, blah blah blah it's just Broadcast Radio 2.0 but you're PAYING for it one way or the other, either with ads you're subjected to or a perpetual subscription fee. Wouldn't you be better off at least buying physical copies of things you know you like? Or have you drunk so much of the streaming-service Kool-Aid that it doesn't even occur to you anymore? Think about it.
I used to work in the streaming video space, and if the streaming music space is anything like it is with streaming movies and TV shows, then the hurdles to this sort of thing aren't technical. It's all about contracts and rights negotiations - usually the streaming provider has to jump through all sorts of hoops to convince the rights holder to license them the content and that they (the provider) will keep it "safe".
In some cases, the rights holders have already bought in to the sales story of various DRM providers, such that their licensing terms require that you use a specific DRM. In other cases, there's a lot of CYA going on (similar to the old adage of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), so even if they don't dictate a specific DRM, it's hard to get them to go along with some new DRM scheme unless lots of others are already using it. So to introduce a new DRM scheme you have to get some outside security experts to audit it, get a few key rights holders and providers to buy into it, and then finally be in a position to get others to adopt it too. This takes a lot of time and money and the difficulty is compounded significantly by the fact that rights holders of high-value content will demand that some aspects of the DRM be implemented in hardware, so any new scheme has to either leverage that or work with hardware vendors to introduce new stuff, which takes even longer.
Also, this specific example (developer-specific DRM key) could work on a technical level, but even assuming you overcame the above issues, it doesn't really mitigate the risk to Spotify or the actual content owners. To them, the content is worth billions of dollars, so they'd look at it as giving Joe Random Developer a DRM key with the possibility of a sliver of more revenue vs the risk of lawsuits and lost contracts and probably say, "not a chance!".