Borrowing a headline from a recent anti Apple tirade I’d like to lay out a few concerns I have with Spotify, and other music streaming services for that matter. The only reason I single out Spotify is that here in Norway it is fast becoming a household word on par with iPod or Walkman. I can’t think of any of my friends who aren’t on Spotify and I can send links to tracks or albums with a fair degree of confidence that whoever I send them to will be able to listen to what I send. The receiver, in turn, can play the whole track, indeed the whole album and in a lot of instances all albums of the artist, with nary a moment to wait for the music to download or buffer, and perhaps more importantly with no reason to give thought to your credit card running out while listening.

And that, right there, is of course part of what makes Spotify an alluring promise; most of the music catalog most people care to think of within seconds reach, for “free”. So what’s the problem? Actually, there are several:

Getting used to music being a borrowed commodity

I think of the 13-year old kid who used a walkman for a week and how quickly people forget about old music formats. Not everyone, mind you, but aside from enthusiasts, music formats come and go. Why should we consumers worry too much about how we get our music? Well, maybe because this time it’s different. This time, we’re incredibly quickly moving towards actually not owning any copy of the recorded music at all. It is at Spotify’s discretion we’re receiving our daily fix, and should they decide to change their terms or go out of business it’s tough luck: you have nothing to listen to. Ah, but there’ll be other companies like Spotify, right? In fact, there already are. WIMP, currently in closed beta is a very similar service. I’m sure others already exist or are about to go live. Still, I can’t help but feel some worry about us getting used to this way of listening to music.

To use a somewhat crude analogy, it’s as if a record store had the right at any time to come to your home and take back all the CDs they sold you. There are problems with that analogy, not the least the fact that with a CD you’ve bought a physical product that has value in it self aside from the music recorded on it. But the parallel stands. I am reminded of Amazon’s recent Orwell blunder, “taking back” books that the customer has bought. Amazon apologized, but I think the fundamental problem is not the retraction but the fact that Amazon or indeed Spotify has the possibility to retract.

We’ve, naturally, jumped at the offer of this free lunch. But I think it’s time to take a step back and think for a moment about whether or not this is good enough for us listeners. If we decide it is not, only we have the power to say so.

Bad payouts

A recent article (Google translation) in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet told of dismal figures for Norwegian artists featured on the streaming service: 55100 plays gave NOK 19 (~ USD 3, EUR 2.20). Hardly something to be happy about for an artist. You get your tracks played and maybe some publicity from it but to what end?

What in that equation makes Spotify a more attractive scene for an artist than getting the goodwill and attention associated with releasing your album on a torrent site or some other alternative means of distribution? Keeping control of your material? That control is an illusion. The music is on the torrent sites anyway, and on Spotify you’re not getting any money. Perhaps you’re reaching more people in total, but in any case this experimental relationship between Spotify and the record labels won’t last very long if the low payouts keep up.

As a music lover I want to pay the artist for their work. What I don’t want is getting the feeling that someone is screwing me over while I’m opening my wallet. I want to know that a significant portion of what I pay go to the artist somehow, not to fund a monstrous system of advertisement or to fund frivolous lawsuits.

Lack of offline client

This one is perhaps about to be solved, at least for mobile devices, the iPhone and Android – provided it passes Apple’s irrationally tight approval process. However, I’d like to use it to highlight another important point: you are not free to do with the music as you choose. There is, for example, currently no way to listen to music from Spotify in your car. There’s no way to take your favourite album from Spotify, whether you’re a paid subscriber or a free member, and put it on your mp3 player so you can enjoy it on the bus. I think it’s time here too, to stop a second and ask if this is really how we want the future of digital music distribution to look.

I’ve been on the fence about Spotify for a long time. I’ve gone back and forth with myself, swinging between asking myself how anyone can resist having this much music instantly available at ones fingertips, and on the other pole having a nagging sensation that this is – all told – not a positive force in the world of music distribution post The Pirate Bay. The elephant in the room had to be mentioned at some point but that is a discussion for another post.

So I’m trying to vote with my feet and wallet. I’ve canceled my paid Spotify account. I’m trying to buy music where I know a larger portion will go to the artist – CDBaby is an excellent example – or where I can get digital music in a format I like: NAIM Label is a good example of that. If you can find music on there you like, their 24 bit FLAC or WAV DRM-free downloads are well worth the price.

And finally I buy music from the artists that dare to stake new positive paths, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails being the most famous examples, or smaller labels I think are doing good things and are worth supporting.