It’s garnered some glowing reviews in the last few weeks, but now the genuinely wonderful Swedish-English free streaming music app has struck its first bum note. Spotify has told users it’s removing song songs from its catalogue and adding geo-blocks around others, because it mistakenly implemented the license restrictions when it first launched in October.
Community manager Andres Sehr: “Some tracks will be restricted from play in certain countries. Some of the music that has been delivered to us had been delivered by mistake, even though the artist did not want their music to be included in a streaming service. In order to respect the decisions of the artist we now have to remove those tracks. We have not lost any licenses and no labels have stopped working with us, this is just a matter of updating our catalogue to be in line with the agreements we actually have. In hindsight it would have been better to remove this in October when we launched publicly, we realize this now and apologise to you for not doing it sooner.”
Spotify, which offers loads of music with ad support or via premium subscription is currently in beta. Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde: “This proves (yet again) that having a centralised system based upon the good will of the current copyright regime, like Spotify, has some major disadvantages.”