Written by Jonathan Walker
Farewell then, Spotify. I hardly knew ye, as in an unlikely but nonetheless true twist of fate I signed up to the "free" music service earlier this week – days before it was announced that the unlimited free service is coming to an end.
What's on offer is still pretty good, even if you don't want to pay. You get six months of free music, after which you are limited to 10 hours of music per month.
The kicker though is that each individual track will only be available to users for free a total of five times. So if there's a tune you like enough to listen to more than five times in your entire life, you're going to have to find another way of doing so.
As you'd expect, users have expressed some strong opinions in the comments beneath the official announcement on spotify.com. However, as well as threats to "go back to pirating" etc, there are a few people arguing that "you can't get everything for free". The unlimited version of Spotify is available for 49 Swedish Kronor a month by the way – that's a bit less than five of your English pounds.
It looked for a while as if we were moving into a brave new world where you and I would enjoy all sorts of lovely digital stuff for nothing. Or, if you like, where businesses would develop new revenue streams which involved extracting cash out of us in roundabout ways rather than simply charging us for a product or service. But it seems that the age of simply paying for things isn't quite over.
2 days ago