Despite Spotify Premium only costing $9.99 per month, many people choose to forgo the monthly charge and instead suffer through ads to listen to new albums for free. However, free Spotify users soon might not be able to listen to those new albums the second they are released.
Spotify recently signed a deal with Universal Music Group that would prevent free users from listening to new albums for the first two weeks after their release. UMG owns plenty of music labels that produce songs and albums from artists such as Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey, Kanye West, Adele, Lady Gaga, and Lil Wayne, among others.
Thus, if you love Taylor Swift and don’t pay for Spotify Premium, you may have issues listening to her next album (assuming it comes out while the current deal is in effect).
While this news may cause some Spotify users to splurge and buy the premium version of the service, the deal itself only keeps certain albums off the free version of the platform for two weeks. The goal is (naturally) to get users to pay for the premium subscription, but two weeks isn’t all that long.
“We know that not every album by every artist should be released the same way, and we’ve worked hard with UMG to develop a new, flexible release policy,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in a statement.
“Starting today, Universal artists can choose to release new albums on premium only for two weeks, offering subscribers an earlier chance to explore the complete creative work, while the singles are available across Spotify for all our listeners to enjoy.”
The deal signed by the two companies is for multiple years and an undisclosed amount. While Spotify receives permission from UMG to release albums to only premium users in an effort to entice users to pay for the platform, Spotify is also giving UMG something valuable: access to the service’s streaming data.
For a couple years now, reports have emerged claiming Spotify may soon begin to limit music for free users, but this is the first deal that has turned that rumor into reality according to Factmag.
It would be interesting to see how quickly other major music companies follow up with Spotify and sign a similar deal to UMG’s. Spotify is an extremely popular music streaming service that saw its 50 millionth subscriber sign up just last month.
Thank you to our 50 million subscribers. #Spotify50 pic.twitter.com/eXkOV71bwu
— Spotify (@Spotify) March 2, 2017
[Factmag]
