Spotify takes down content

09:28 | Thursday January 29, 2009

The ad-supported streaming service, which has been under the media glare of late, will also next week impose country restrictions to some tracks.

Spotify says that the move is necessary as its agreements with labels contain “strict rules as to what tracks can and can’t be played in various countries that we are now capable of implementing”.

“These restrictions are a legacy from when most music was sold on tapes and CDs and they have continued over into streaming music, our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good,” it adds in a statement.

Spotify also blames label errors in delivering tracks that were not approved.

“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,” it says.

“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.”

However, Spotify says that, “from this point on there are no plans to remove any more music and our catalogue will only grow from here.

“We already have music from all the major labels and a vast majority of the independent labels licensed, between them we have millions of tracks that we still can add into Spotify.

“Now it’s a matter of importing that music into our system, which we are doing on an ongoing basis in an effort to add thousands of albums a week. We continue to work hard to sign deals with more labels and will work with the labels we have signed to fill the holes in our catalogue.”

The reaction among Spotify users was mixed. “Understood,” writes Fewmanchu on the Spotify site. “I will still support you and hope others will as well. Please try to implement frequent updates to the library as I believe this is much better from a psychological point of view.”

“Since this pretty much rid Spotify of all the music I really enjoyed that it were there I’m cancelling my subscription,” adds Tuxie.