Now the company is set to cave, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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Spotify’s premium service costs $9.99 per month, on par with that of Apple Music, and provides subscribers with ad-free listening, unlimited skips and offline listening, among other things.
The person wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Spotify will use an initial test of such a policy to see how it affects subscriptions, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The company has reportedly discussed the idea in “private talks” and has told music executives that it will test out the feature soon, but has not yet decided which artist to start with, WSJ reports.
The article makes it sound like the decision may have been brought about by Coldplay: Apparently, Spotify tentatively agreed to allow them to put out their new album, A Head Full Of Dreams, on the paid service tier only for a few weeks, but ended up not going through with it. Instead, the album (which was released last Friday) will stream on the service at the end of this week. Taylor Swift yanked her albums from the service roughly a year ago, and Adele withheld her blockbuster new record 25 from all streaming services, a decision that may have contributed to its record-breaking sales numbers.
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Though Spotify reps declined to comment on the matter, the service released a statement Tuesday reiterating the strength of the free tier. Music: “All I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment”. Earlier this year, the company didn’t initially make the 10-minute track “The Globalist” from Muse’s June release “Drones” freely available, one of the people said. She claims Spotify’s current policies doesn’t value her music in the proper way. Artists and labels are thus extremely interested in limiting streaming plays to paying subscribers. But, reversing course could create headaches for Spotify, which will have to decide which artists can window their music, and for how long.
