8.5.11 Adam News & Info

Criticism

The service has come under fire for failing to compensate independent artists fairly. Helienne Lindvall of The Guardian reported that "indie labels... as opposed to the majors and Merlin members, receive no advance, receive no minimum per stream and only get a 50% share of ad revenue on a pro-rata basis."[77] Swedish musician Magnus Uggla wanted to pull his music from the service, stating that after six months he'd only earned "what a mediocre busker could earn in a day".[78] Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported in 2009 that record label Junior Racing had only earned NOK 19 ($3.00 USD) after their artists had been streamed over 55,100 times.[79] According to an infographic by David McCandless, an independent artist on Spotify would need over four million streams per month to earn US$1,160.[80]
Luke Lewis of NME points to problems with the Spotify business model, saying he was "convinced the 'free' aspect of Spotify is unsustainable" and that if "Spotify is to have a future, it needs to be a viable business".[81]
A 2011 blog post alleged that the higher 320 kbps bitrate supposedly available to Premium subscribers was in reality only available on around 30% of tracks.[52] A large majority of the content was actually streamed in 160 kbps.[52]
The usefulness of Spotify for listening to classical music has been criticised, because playback is not gapless (there is a slight pause between tracks), which affects much classical music, and searching is very poor.[82]
Spotify has also been criticised for bugs in the Android version, which prevents the use of offline playlist functionality on Honeycomb-based devices.[83]