Music Ally

Users of Spotify’s free ad-supported service with La Roux on their playlists got a shock today – they can’t now play any of the tracks from her debut album ‘La Roux’.

When you try, a message is displayed saying ‘This is a Spotify Premium exclusive. It will later be made available in Spotify Free”. We’ve seen this for pre-release album streams in the past, but not for a record that’s been out for several months.

All of La Roux’s singles have been similarly blocked for users of the free version of Spotify – all that’s left are some remixes. Fellow Polydor artists like Take That and Duffy still have their albums accessible on the basic version, so it’s clearly not an across-the-board decision by the UMG subsidiary.

“The rights holders have asked that we remove La Roux’s album from the free service as of this week, so it’s currently only available to subscribers,” Spotify’s spokesperson tells Music Ally. “We look forward to adding La Roux back for all of our users in the near future.”

Some artists have chosen to block their music from streaming services altogether in the last year – Bob Dylan was the most notable – but this is the first example we’ve seen of an existing album being restricted to Spotify Premium users.

We’ve just checked rival UK streaming service we7, and the La Roux album is only available as preview clips there, so the decision appears to be for all streaming services, not just Spotify. We’ve reached out to UMG and we7 for their responses, and will update this post when we get them.

UPDATE 1: we7 boss Steve Purdham gives his views: “Take down requests happen from time to time and quite often the albums are reinstated as fast as they were taken down. Most of these things are trying to understand the new ecosystem that digital brings and the metric impact on CD Sales, downloads, streams, subscription, live events, piracy etc. For many this world is still in its infancy so searching for understanding is critical and that is why we work positively with the labels and artist managers to help understand the impact.”

UPDATE 2: I can’t play the album on my Spotify iPhone app either – which in theory is only used by premium customers. I’m a free user with a journalist-waiver to use the app though. There are mixed reports coming back on whether genuine premium users are also unable to stream the album on iPhone or Android – we’re checking this with Spotify now. It would certainly be puzzling for an album to be blocked not just from free users, but from premium mobile users too.

Tags: la roux, spotify

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.