Spotify to allow artists to withhold music from free service

The Wall Street Journal and the industry news site Music Business Worldwide reported Tuesday that Spotify, faced with growing pressure and competition, would ease its insistence on the free tier.

Spotify hasn’t decided which artist will first get to withhold music from the free service, according to the Journal.

Spotify has been unwavering in its policy of providing the same music for both free and paid users, even as that approach has cost the company valuable music from popular artists such as Taylor Swift.

Last week Coldplay released A Head Full of Dreams last week but kept it off of Spotify, thereby avoiding free streaming.

Spotify will use an initial test of such a policy to see how it affects subscriptions, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We believe that a free, ad-supported tier combined with a more robust premium tier is the best way to deliver music to fans, create value for artists and songwriters, and grow the industry”.

Coldplay’s decision regarding the album’s availability is arriving in the wake of reports that Spotify may be considering “windowing” some content depending on the nature of a user’s subscription. Spotify now has roughly 20 million subscribers who pay $10 a month for unlimited, on-demand access, as well as 80 million users who are on the service’s ad-supported free tier.

Today, music videos on YouTube are primarily controlled by Vevo, a joint venture of Google and several record labels.

Spotify’s free service is unusually generous, allowing users who are willing to tolerate a few ads to select an entire album for free playback on computers, or on mobile devices so long as the tracks are shuffled out of order. “In that context, we explored a wide range of promotional options for the new Coldplay album and ultimately decided, together with management, that Coldplay and its fans would best be served with the full album on both free and premium this Friday”.

Spotify has already experimented in smaller ways with reserving music for paying customers. But that test will likely generate some interesting data on whether or not windowing converts a significant number of free listeners to paid subscribers and, perhaps, some big changes to Spotify’s streaming model.