European streaming music service Spotify has had nothing but good press so far, and deservedly so – users are raving about it and labels are impressed too. However, the service appears to have hit its first hurdle, announcing that it’s removing certain songs from its catalogue and adding country restrictions to others.”The changes are being made so that we implement all the proper restrictions that are required by our deals,” says the company. Some tracks will be restricted from playing in certain countries, which Spotify says is because “our agreements contain strict rules as to what tracks can and can’t be played in various countries that we are now capable of implementing”, before adding “These restrictions are a legacy from when most music was sold on tapes and CDs and they have continued over into streaming music, our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good.”Meanwhile, although Spotify says it’s adding “millions” of tracks to its catalogue this week, it’s also removing others. Why? “Some of the music that has been delivered to us has been delivered by mistake even though the artist did not want their music to be included in a streaming service. In order to respect the decisions of the artist we now have to remove those tracks. We have not lost any licenses and no labels have stopped working with us, this is just a matter of updating our catalogue to be in line with the agreements we actually have.”Users with affected tracks in their playlists might not notice the change, as Spotify is aiming to replace them with versions from albums that aren’t being removed wherever possible. This seems less about Spotify cocking anything up, and more about the licensing hurdles that still affect anyone trying to launch this kind of pan-European streaming music service. See the full text of Spotify’s announcement after the jump (i.e. click below).SPOTIFY EMAIL“As you might know our dream is to create a music experience where users can play whatever music they want, whenever they want. That will probably take awhile but we will keep working at it. We are adding millions of tracks into Spotify this upcoming week but we are also making some changes to our music catalogue that we feel are important to communicate clearly. Unfortunately we are going to be removing numbers of songs from our catalogue and add country restrictions to some tracks, which may make them unplayable for you. Since you have been writing about us I just wanted to give you a quick update about what’s going on.Why are we doing this?The changes are being made so that we implement all the proper restrictions that are required by our deals. Some tracks will be restricted from play in certain countries, this means that if you share tracks with friends who are in other countries it’s possible that they won’t be able to listen to them. The reason for this is that our agreements contain strict rules as to what tracks can and can’t be played in various countries that we are now capable of implementing. These restrictions are a legacy from when most music was sold on tapes and CDs and they have continued over into streaming music, our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good.Additionally, some of the music that has been delivered to us has been delivered by mistake even though the artist did not want their music to be included in a streaming service. In order to respect the decisions of the artist we now have to remove those tracks. We have not lost any licenses and no labels have stopped working with us, this is just a matter of updating our catalogue to be in line with the agreements we actually have. In hindsight it may have been better to remove this in October when we launched publicly, we realize this now and apologize to you for not doing it sooner.How will this affect you?A number of the tracks that you’ve listened to or searched for previously will no longer be available for streaming. If you have some of these songs in playlists we will try to automatically replace those songs with versions from albums that we are not removing so you don’t lose the song. If there is no replacement available then the song will appear in red on your playlists.What’s next?From this point on there are no plans to remove any more music and our catalogue will only grow from here. We already have music from all the major labels and a vast majority of the independent labels licensed, between them we have millions of tracks that we still can add into Spotify. Now it’s a matter of importing that music into our system, which will take some time. We continue to work hard to sign deals with more labels and will work with the labels we have signed to fill the holes in our catalogue.Our dream is to create a music experience where users can play whatever music they want, whenever they want, it may take awhile but we will keep working at it.”
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