Spotify mulls a ‘paid only’ option for new music releases

Swift has been particularly vocal against Spotify’s freemim policy, calling Spotify a “grand experiment” in an interview a year ago, and pulling her music from the service.

Spotify is in talks with music executives to allow some artists to release music exclusively to the service’s 20 million paying subscribers, the Wall Street Journal reports. But, reversing course could create headaches for Spotify, which will have to decide which artists can window their music, and for how long. 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. Swift’s opinions in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) that music should not be available for free were met with ambivalent shrugs from Spotify, which didn’t suffer much from losing her catalog.

Spotify couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

However, WSJ says the current plan would only be a temporary embargo on new music for free users. The band reportedly held the album from Spotify upon its initial release on December 4th because of concerns over the service’s free listening tier.

And YouTube itself has shown some kind of willingness to offer a premium tier, by launching YouTube Red in the U.S. in October. Services that require paid subscriptions like Apple Music and Tidal were given access to the album as soon as it was released.

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

Even on an experimental basis, it is a big reversal for Spotify, which has so far maintained unequivocally that its free, ad-supported service needed to have all the latest tunes so that it could compete with free sites such as Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube.

The streaming “radio” firm is odds-on to launch its own Spotify rival next year as a fully interactive streaming service. The first is good for the long-term health of the music industry. The music industry has increasingly been agitating for Spotify to find some middle ground between the two.