The hugely popular Spotify and other services being used to tempt file-sharers away from “the dark side” have been dealt a blow.

Warner Music, one of the Big Four labels, says that it will stop licensing its music for use on all streaming services.

“Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed,” said chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr.

“The get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price strategy, is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future,” he added.

Yet again a big label shoots itself in the foot. The question is, when will the rest follow?

Want to know which artists you won’t be able to hear streaming legally anymore? Click here.

Article from: FreakBits

This is a guest post by FreakBits reader James Scholes. If you’d like your file-sharing, copyright or piracy related article to appear on FreakBits, please email it to us at tips@torrentfreak.com.

Spotify, the ever-growing music streaming service still markets itself as one of the leaders against music piracy. But hundreds of blind and visually impaired users find themselves drawn away from Spotify to P2P and file sharing. Why? Because of the company’s shocking attitude towards software accessibility.

The battle for software and hardware accessibility is one that is going on all the time. No matter how hard they try, accessibility guidelines just don’t cut it, and blind and visually impaired computer users see themselves locked out of websites, products and applications more and more every day.

Its not a surprise when a new website, or software application is not usable by access technology such as a screen reader. But what does come as a surprise is when large companies cannot make the effort to even look into making their products open to everyone.

Spotify, a worldwide organization, can’t even be bothered, it seems.

Copy of e-mail sent to Spotify Team on January 07, 2010

I e-mailed you a while back regarding the accessibility of Spotify on a Windows machine. I was told that accessibility was something that would be looked at. That was around 6 months ago, and there has been no improvement to the pC client. To add insult to injury, you have released mobile clients for the iPhone, and Symbian mobile devices without any hint as to if they are accessible or not. Blind users are unfortunately not willing to pay for your Premium service, just to find out if mobile applications will be accessible. Also, we feel that you should have an incentive to make your service accessible for the following reasons:

1. Advertisements: One of your biggest strengths is your advertisements that are played to free account holders. Blind users cannot click on these ads as you have not made them accessible via the keyboard.
2. Premium accounts: As mentioned above, blind people have no reason to purchase your premium service because we have no way of knowing before-hand if mobile services will be usable by access technology.

So, at the end of the day, both you and the blind users are losing out. You are excluding a large number of people from your services, users who would gladly pay for your premium services if they knew that accessibility could be guaranteed. Many other, smaller companies who don’t have the resources available to them that you do have overcame the issues of accessibility in their products. Most blind people would jump at the chance to pay for your service to support a company who took steps to ensure that their products were accessible by everyone.

Have your say. Get involved here.

—————

In a response to this article, Spotify Customer Services representative Carl-Axel wrote:

“We will hopefully at some point in the future be able to improve the accessibility of Spotify, but currently we can’t say when or promise anything. But we do know everybody loves music and one way of proving this is to make Spotify more accessible.”

Article from: FreakBits

Last month, Swedish artist and composer Magnus Uggla launched a scathing attack on the owners of Spotify.

After receiving virtually no payment from his music being played there, he ordered Spotify to withdraw his tracks from the service declaring, “I’d rather be raped by The Pirate Bay.”

But now, just under a month later, Uggla is angry again. Despite demanding that Spotify remove his music it remains to this day.

Uggla is still blaming Sony boss Hasse Breitholtz for the continued problems, refering to him as the ‘Yoghurt Man’ on his blog.

Uggla says he will start making blog posts in English soon, as there has been international interest in his dispute.

Article from: FreakBits