Why Spotify is More of The Same Old Thing

Anyone who knows me at all knows I’ve been a semi-pro musician for a loooong time and that I love to follow trends in that industry. Please read the following quotes:

Spotify have always had something in common with the record companies…
They’re just another exploitative middleman and in truth don’t care about the music or the artists, they only care about themselves. When a shop gives you free tomatoes does it make you love them? … or does it leave a bad taste once you realize they’re screwing the farmers on your behalf?

Kenny Laurenson
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i’d feel sick after reading this article, but i’m listening to aretha.
all an artist is asking for is r-e-s-p-e-c-t. is there any other business in the world that could operate this way? could you imagine going to the gas pump, without prices listed but you had to buy and they’d charge your card an undisclosed price?

marvin etzioni

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Spotify ties its service to Facebook or Twitter and thinks that’s cool? Paying for their premium service should mean privacy. I can’t even set their app to not post on my FB wall without losing the ability to listen to music. So for something that could be so cool, it becomes just another piece of malware.

Bye bye, Spotify

Dave Abbitt

Spotify was supposed to be the new model for legitimate, social sharing of music. Everyone was excited because they could listen to anything they wanted, anywhere they were. The holy grail!! It was going to take iTunes for a ride, usher in the new cloud-based model. But it turns out they are paying artists a pittance, mostly shilling for the labels, and sucking your profile from Facebook right into their vortex. They also do a pretty disappointing job with search, catalog accuracy, and curation.

I have decided from all this that the intersection of privacy and commerce is essentially nonexistent; comments like those above along with the IPO of Facebook signal the end of any hope of that dream for me. Now that they have unending pressure to increase revenues every quarter, they will be forced to exploit all of our data for their own purposes and folks will run, not walk away. If the reactions of these Spotify users are any indication, we should be prepared for a revolt against big data without transparency. Hell, maybe I was naive.

What do you think? Am I overreacting? Is there a way to have profits and privacy?