Spotify To Bait and Switch? 121
hype7 writes "The Harvard Business Review, of all places, is running a story suggesting that Spotify may have to rely on a bait & switch strategy — or might have one forced upon it by the record labels. From the article: 'Spotify gets all its content from the same place everyone else does – the same industry that has forced price increases on other online services once they have become successful. That appears to be at least partly what happened with Netflix last week. At least in the case of the existing a la carte music services, if you don't like the new price, you don't have to buy the new track. In Spotify's world, if you don't like the new price, there goes your music library. Or, if Spotify tries to stand up for its users, the labels can just pull the songs and those songs simply disappear.'"
Re:Rent? (Score:3, Informative)
Doesn't really matter. You paid for the subscription, you should own the content. http://www.spotifyrip.com/ [spotifyrip.com] is one solution. Legal? Grey area. Provable in court? Not in a million years. You're recording the playback. There have been apps that do this for everything from shoutcast to a variety of other things. Streamripper equivalents for spotify can probably do this. [sourceforge.net] I see http://spotiplay.com/how-to-rip-music-from-spotify/ [spotiplay.com] pointing to other alternatives.
That was the first result of https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=export+music+from+spotify&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t [google.com] , and I'm sure that more is coming, especially with US demand.
Do I trust Spotify? No. Do I trust my hard drive with what I choose to put on it? Yes. This is pretty much equivalent to forking an app, except that we can't really trust the labels any more than spotify.
Re:A somewhat obvious and panicky article (Score:5, Informative)
Look at how Amazon has deleted things people have purchased for the Kindle, with no warning and recourse.
You mean the single title which they found out (after the fact) that a partner did not have the rights to, so they pulled the book and refunded your money? Or are there a slew of others I just haven't heard about?
Re:A somewhat obvious and panicky article (Score:2, Informative)
Guess you couldn't read all the way to the bottom of the article where is said that was a technical problem for a short period of time and was fixed. No users lost anything.