Can't even seek through songs.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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I assure you, Spotify would love nothing more than to reduce the label share - it's not as if they love giving away almost all the money they make - but they also have next to no real leverage, since the labels have all the power here.
Again, Spotify loses money with every single free user. There may exist some balance point where they can actually reach financial stability by converting a large chunk of them into paying users, and I don't think can really blame them for doing what they can to achieve that.
That doesn't mean it doesn't suck to lose features you liked, but an individual not liking something doesn't make in immoral.
I doubt major labels can live without Spotify as much as Spotify need major labels. They can push users to pay for Spotify by adding more cool features for payed users instead of removing fundamental features of the free version. Forcing people to pay is never the right solution
The labels could murder Spotify in a day if they decided to simply stop offering them licenses and went exclusive with Apple, Amazon, Tidal, or anyone else.
The labels of course do get quite a lot of money from Spotify so they don't have much of a reason to do that, but again, they really are the ones that hold the cards.
This is business. The only right solution is the one that gets them closer to financial stability. They have been developing features for the paid tier and have been exploring other revenue streams (hence the deep dive into podcasts), but ultimately, they have absolutely zero obligation to give away content for free.