Are We Witnessing The Beginning Of The End For Free Music Streaming?
Spotify has long evangelized free listening as a way to pull users in to paying for its service. The music industry's patience with the strategy seems to have run out.
"Our theory was simple," wrote Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify, in 2014, "offer a terrific free tier, supported by advertising, as a starting point to attract fans and get them in the door."
So what happens after everybody's crossed the threshold?
At the time Ek wrote that post he was reacting to the high-visibility from his platform over a disagreement (to put it kindly) about the vast catalog of "free" (what the industry refers to as "ad-supported") streaming music it offered. At the time, Spotify had 12.5 million paying users and 37.5 million listening for free — it now
