Spotify adds paid downloads to free streaming
Free streaming music site Spotify has reached a deal with online music retailer 7Digital to sell downloads of songs played on the site. Prices will vary depending on the album concerned.
As we’ve noted before, Spotify is a site which offers thousands of songs for free streaming – though it’s only available for online listening, it’s the closest thing going to an infinite iTunes library. The site is funded by adverts played between tracks and through paid subscriptions for ad-free listening.
While a few tracks already had links for downloading from online retailers, that was merely an experiment. From now “a huge number of tracks and albums” will have a ‘Buy From’ link which takes users directly to the relevant page on 7Digital. Eventually the plan is to offer a similar service with Amazon, with purchases from both sites available directly from the Spotify application. That should be good news for users as presumably they will be able to choose the cheapest provider of any particular track or album..
Downloading is currently available in the UK, France and Spain, but may expand to other countries later. At the moment the download deal works the same way for all users, with no free or downloaded discounts for premium users. If Spotify can make the numbers add up, it would certainly be worth considering a deal such as one free album download a month with every subscription.
There are a couple of theories about why Spotify is only now offering paid downloads. One is that it wanted to initially build up the site’s audience by keeping all the emphasis on the ‘free but legal’ aspect of the site.
Another is that the company didn’t have any serious plans to get into download sales at first but has been forced into it because paid monthly subscriptions have been lower than expected. The economics of Spotify aren’t public knowledge, but it’s possible that ad revenues for the free accounts are run with a plan to merely break even (or even take a small loss) to build a loyal user base for converting to premium services later.
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