By: Aseem Gaurav, April 15, 2011 (New Delhi)
Spotify, the popular European online music service, has said it is making major changes to its free services. The company plans to cut the amount non-paying account holders can listen to from 20 hours to 10 hours.
Moreover, each track will be available to play five times ever, before being greyed out and made unplayable. However, such restrictions are not applicable to the premium service.
Spotify, which is also looking to launch a service in the United States, typically lets users stream the 10 million songs on its service for free under its basic Spotify Open service.
Analysts see the move as an effort to convert free users to paid subscribers for Spotify Premium or Spotify Unlimited, given the huge cost of its music label licenses. Reduction in free music could also help the start-up reduce the amount of funds it is spending as of now.
However, analysts feel that the action taken by the company could eliminate a lot of users who have become used to accessing the free service of the company.
Founded in 2006, Spotify is one of the world's largest streaming websites and is available only in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands because of copyright issues.
Two year back the service reached one million total users and n July last year, it had about 500,000 paying users.
Spotify users can stream music for free from the service in exchange for listening to advertising, but can also pay five or 10 euros ($6.9 or $13.8) to gain ad-free access to the service.
Spotify, the popular European online music service, has said it is making major changes to its free services. The company plans to cut the amount non-paying account holders can listen to from 20 hours to 10 hours.
Moreover, each track will be available to play five times ever, before being greyed out and made unplayable. However, such restrictions are not applicable to the premium service.
Spotify, which is also looking to launch a service in the United States, typically lets users stream the 10 million songs on its service for free under its basic Spotify Open service.
Analysts see the move as an effort to convert free users to paid subscribers for Spotify Premium or Spotify Unlimited, given the huge cost of its music label licenses. Reduction in free music could also help the start-up reduce the amount of funds it is spending as of now.
However, analysts feel that the action taken by the company could eliminate a lot of users who have become used to accessing the free service of the company.
Founded in 2006, Spotify is one of the world's largest streaming websites and is available only in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands because of copyright issues.
Two year back the service reached one million total users and n July last year, it had about 500,000 paying users.
Spotify users can stream music for free from the service in exchange for listening to advertising, but can also pay five or 10 euros ($6.9 or $13.8) to gain ad-free access to the service.
