Report: Spotify To Experiment With Subscriber-Only Window For New Releases

Pay To Play

SPOTIFY has told label executives that it will allow some artists to start releasing albums only to its 20 million-plus paid subscribers, while withholding the music temporarily from SPOTIFY's 80 million free users, reports the WALL STREET JOURNAL. The service hasn't decided which artists will be allowed to take part in the test.

The move was basically prompted after superstar artists TAYLOR SWIFT and ADELE refused to put their music on the service. SWIFT initially asked SPOTIFY to make her album “1989” available only to its paying subscribers in the U.S.; when SPOTIFY refused, SWIFT decided not to keep the album off the service completely, following up with pulling her entire catalog from SPOTIFY's free service several days later.

Since then, ADELE has withheld her new album, “25,” from SPOTIFY and other streaming services, which some believe helped it generate record-breaking sales of 4.5 million albums in just two weeks.

Seeing the writing on the wall, sources indicate that SPOTIFY tentatively agreed to let COLDPLAY put its album “Head Full of Dreams” on the paid service only for several weeks after its DEC. 4th release. It withdrew that offer when the group’s management couldn’t guarantee that it could keep the album off other free sites such as YOUTUBE during the time it was unavailable on SPOTIFY Free. Since its release, COLDPLAY’s album is only available on subscription-only streaming services; it will be available to the free streamers at the end of this week.

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