Spotify – a music streaming services promising to offer ‘Music for everyone’, particularly if ‘everyone’ pays a £9.99 monthly subscription (Spotify Premium) in order to gain access to the entire track collection available on the podcast. It’s a justifiable move considering the content available on Spotify is subjected to strict copyright restrictions – every time a song is being played on the podcast, the artist/owner of the song receives a sum of money.
Apart from the full access to the podcast’s music library and few other perks, Spotify Premium has a special feature: it allows users to download for free and listen offline any track available within the streaming service (3333 tracks, to be more specific). Wait a second. You can download for free any song without infringing the copyright law? How? Let me enlighten you. While the podcast offers this opportunity, the downloaded music files are encrypted in a way they become playable only on Spotify. And as I’ve mentioned before, anytime a song is played on Spotify, the performer of the song receives money in return. Fair enough, Spotify.
But what would happened if Spotify would share music under a Creative Commons licence? According to the Creative Commons licences, the songs would be redistributed (commercially or non-commercially) as long as the artist is being credited and his/her work doesn’t suffer any changes. If a track is used for commercial purposes, it is compulsory to be distributed under the same licence terms as the one used by the artist.