Spotify Wants Your Profile For The Highest Bidder

While Pono makes news with their righteous promise to give you free content upgrades for life, Spotify is making news with an update to their privacy policy that informs the users of their service – particularly the free subscription tier – through a million words of legalese that they are agreeing to share their contact, photo album, location data, browsing history and Facebook profile in order to listen to music on the service.

Give your life away to hear rented 10% music files?  Haha yeah right.

Even previously happy Spotify customers are canceling subscriptions over this new (yet totally predictable) revenue stream.

I’ve been saying for a couple of years that the streaming services aren’t going to make it. I know they continue to get more and more subscribers, and more listeners. More 10%’ers.

But they can’t sustain their business because there is no margin. They can barely pay the crazy-low royalties now, and they won’t be able to pay the increased royalties in the near future.  Advertisers will ruin the service trying to get those clicks.

You simply can’t give access to the world’s entire catalog of music for $0.30 a day, there’s no margin there. There’s too much good music out there with more being made every day. This model will not sustain.

Buy your music people, whether it’s vinyl or digital download, and try to buy the highest quality you can get. The rental model is a disaster in the process.

Spend the $120/year that used to go to Spotify on buying legal retail music and trading with your actual friends and the music industry will survive and prosper.