To bite the hand that feeds you

Just a short entry about something that annoys me greatly...

Spotify has reported great losses even with a growing number of paying users and the company itself rapidly expanding. Being connected with Facebook has given it the edge to outrun it's competitors. Yet it is somehow a ship that is rapidly sinking. Why is that? Well, for some reason the huge record-companies of our time is demanding ridiculous sums of money from Spotify to allow it to use the music which the record-companies hold copyright to. Has this increased profits to the actual artists? No. They are still being given far too little compensation for their work. What a strange situation indeed!

I've been supporting Spotify since their closed beta-service and have since then not pirated music at all. Usually, if you can't find it on Spotify, you can listen to it on Youtube. I can imagine that Spotify has done this to a huge number of people around the world. It is a true testament to "getting rid of piracy by providing a superior service". No longer having to keep and organize MP3-files in any great length, no longer having playlists spread out through different programs and no longer having to feel like a jerk for piracy has been quite good.

However, this all seems to be coming crashing down soon enough. Not because of a bad service but because of the conservatism and frankly silly claims of record-companies who have been the big players since the vinyl. Even though Spotify and streaming-services are obviously the future (or at least the near future) of music distribution, from which these giants of old will need to get their income, the record-companies are biting the hand that feeds them. If they continue both they and Spotify will fall, giving way to a new wave of piracy from people like me who have enjoyed the Spotify-service immensly for €10/month yet will not go back to buying records and will, at least not in the beginning, start paying for another streaming-service for the giants of old to milk dry.

End of the line: Think really hard, people of the record-industry. You're doing both yourselves, the developing market and your consumers harm because you feel entitled to power which you no longer should have. If anything, more money should be going directly to the artists without a need for any fat bigots with their hands in the cookie-jar.