As Spotify -- the popular online music service -- nears profitability in Europe, the situation isn't quite as rosy across the pond. With Spotify's hopes of a
2010 U.S. launch officially dashed, the company is still facing an uphill climb in the States. The sticking point, according to sources cited by
The Telegraph, may be financial demands from the U.S. record labels. Concerned that users will heavily favor Spotify's free service, the labels (EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner) are apparently requiring "extremely high cash advances" to secure access to their catalogs.
Spotify is reportedly now seeking additional funding, though there's no telling how much longer it will take to get the service up and running in the U.S. At this point, Spotify is saying only that "negotiations are ongoing."
Tags: apps, audio, emi, freemium, labels, launch, music, radio, record, sony, spotify, streaming, universal, warner, web
Did A Google Earth Mistake Cause A Couple's Brutal Murder?
Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsr3loadedJan 5th 2011 4:27PM
Really? If anything, they should be paying Spotify cash for providing an awesome platform to get people to hear their music. These guys are business people - do they not understand a golden business opportunity when it's been repeatedly slammed in their faces for the past decade?
ShinzakuraJan 6th 2011 8:44AM
@r3loaded I've seen enough business "experts" to know that the only ones who will get this are the indie folks, who are smaller and nimble enough to deal with change. The RIAA cabal is run by a bunch of people who only care about the size of their bonuses.
drpepperdude00Jan 5th 2011 4:58PM
how is this better than grooveshark?
laeroJan 5th 2011 6:32PM
@drpepperdude00: Spotify is written in C. Thats about it. Not sure if that counts as better.
tuganpoeloJan 6th 2011 10:36AM
I'm really tired of hearing this crap from people who have no idea what the hell they're talking about. Grooveshark is a POS. The redesign is, admittedly better, but at the end of the day, just amounts to putting lipstick on a big.
Grooveshark may be good for top 40 lamers or the Billboard Top 100 freaks, but Spotify makes discovering new music (and above all, shariing it) a snap. Songs play with virtually no buffer, no matter what your connection is... something that can't be said for Grooveshark. Spotify's library functionality is... well.. there's no contest. With support for local files, it eliminated the need for Winamp for me even though I have about a 100 .ogg files.
The catalogue is vastly different than Grooveshark, but I guess you guys don't mind your 1990's Napster-era search results yielding 13 different misspellings of "Live and Let Die" all in 128kb encoding or worse...
Spotify has last.fm sync and Facebook social right out of the box. In Grooveshark, you either have to pay for premium to get that or the social features are buried under a bunch of different menus. How unwieldy. Grooveshark is good for a quick song that Spotify or Hypem doesn't have. But for all other purposes, for serious music listeners, it's absolute trash.
The ONLY thing that Grooveshark has over Spotify is the lack of audio ads. And really, if you paid any attention to this article, the reason why Spotify isn't in the US yet is because most people in Europe are fine with the audio ads. The only thing I'd like to see Spotify add at this point would be a way to export your library as an .xml file or at least a web app, but there's work arounds to that too.
So again... Grooveshark? Don't make me laugh.
shogaitakeratsuJan 6th 2011 10:39AM
i think you mean *pig up there, but other than that, cheers.