Turning musical ideas and concepts into things you can play on your laptop or iPod cost money! Every stage requires investment and it’s very difficult for artists to produce good work with out being given money for their efforts.

The ‘free’ Spotify attempts to address this more than say torrent etc. by raising some revenue for the artists, but i expect both the labels and Spotify (for their continuing operation) would prefer the far more solid subscription model which is obviously easier to project from.

The dynamics of these business models seem pretty obvious and to whinge about the adverts is like talking about channel 4 (in the UK) saying – “i really love the programmes on freeview! But oh! those adverts – there soooo annoying!”

It’s a bit of a non-story isn’t it.

BTW if you turn the volume fader down sharply when the advert comes on then push it up very slighly before you let go it will continue playing the advert almost muted.

Its spread so fast , the only thing that would slow it down would be labels removing content. Users seem to be 100% behind it.

http://www.dittomusic.com are also putting unsigned content onto Spotify free of charge which is great for unsigned bands.

I systematically use Spotify for everything i can get my hands on, iTunes for anything i cant!!!

Phil

If you appear to be somewhere for which Spotify doesn’t have advertising inventory, you won’t get any ads at all. If Kid_Spock and his brother have different IP addresses, this could explain their different experiences. Although, if Spotify is consistently misclassifying Kid_Spock’s IP address, it’ll soon complain and, after fourteen days, lock him out, until he uses an IP address that Spotify believes matches the country in his account’s profile.

I advise sticking to the countries for which the free service is available. Spotify Ltd should still get paid for delivering the ads, even if you can’t understand them.