Spotify To Bait and Switch?

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.'"

Pirate FTW

[girlintraining]

Meanwhile, my collection pf pirate mp3s sits on my harddrive, perpetually available, can be transcoded into any forseeable format in the future, and has wide support on every modern portable and computing device out there...

The market has spoken! And it has said "f*ck you".

P.S. RIAA/MPAA I've taunted you on this website and dozens of others ever since the DeCSS incident, daring you to start legal action against me. I've got close to 2 terabytes of "your" crap on my harddrive and I have yet to hear so much as a cricket-noise from you.

Re:A somewhat obvious and panicky article

[ElectricTurtle]

It's not panicky, it's real. People need to wake up. Look at how Amazon has deleted things people have purchased for the Kindle, with no warning and recourse.

DO NOT TRUST THE CLOUD FOR ANYTHING.

If you do not wholly control a non-DRMed local file, you don't have shit. When you use services like Steam or Spotify or any content delivery service that retains the right to delete things you've bought whenever they feel like it, you're asking for a disaster eventually. Even if the whole service doesn't tank, it will just be a matter of time before they start doing things like Amazon and deleting things you've purchased without warning. Whether it's a licensing issue or 'for the children', it will happen and you won't be able to do jack.

You've been warned.