Audio captured from the IP & Open Source round table

Alongside my role as Metadata Theme Champion (or Metadata bloke as I think i prefer) I also worked over the last six months with the Creative Industries KTN on the steering group of their IP & Open Source Beacon Project. The project reported back in June, and to launch their report, the CIKTN held a round table discussion, appropriately enough, at the British Library. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend, something which was particularly disappointing for me given that one of the event's speakers was Professor Ian Hargreaves, author of the Intellectual Property Office's important and much-discussed "Digital Opportunity A review of Intellectual Property and Growth".

However, all is not lost. The folks at the KTN have made the fascinating talk available as an audio stream:

IP and Open Source Round Table by creativektn

Public reaction to the Spotify debate... a couple of weeks on

We've written a lot here about Spotify - arguably a disproportionate amount given the proliferation of content services out there, but then it's been at the centre of so many strands of discourse around the present and near-future of online content provision, among them:

• streaming vs downloading
• the truth about ubiquitous connectivity - and how to hack it
• what access to the long tail really means
• being part of a greater ecosystem (think about scrobbling from Spotify or using Spotify as a preferable UI on your iTunes library)
• the huge success of a European company in an arena still dominated by the US
• the viability of the freemium model

Of all these areas, perhaps the last underlies the announcements made a couple of weeks back by Spotify about the future of its free service. I've let the dust settle on this one a little before pitching in, just as I did about the launch of Spotify mobile a year or so ago: surfing the Twittersphere for a scent of the zeitgeist is fun - exhilarating even - but sometimes one needs a little distance. More to the point, I wanted to gauge the public reaction to it rather than the response of the commentariat.

First, a recap on the changes. Until this point, users have been able to sign up for free for a Spotify account (albeit that for months, perhaps well over a year there have been occasional freezes on free sign-ups). The free service allowed access to the same large catalogue of recordings, but came at a price, namely adverts every three songs or so. 

Upgrading to a paid for account (roughly £10 a month), however, not only meant ditching the ads, it gave the user a number of substantial benefits: highly quality streams, a mobile service and the ability to cache several hundred tracks on a local device. But let's be clear: getting rid of the ads was a major incentive. 

This is a classic freemium model: get users sufficiently hooked on a free service that at some point they'll willingly upgrade (and if the words "users" and "hooked" conjure up another, er, freemium model-based business of a rather more dubious nature it's not coincidental, I think). In the meantime, ads will at least cover the cost of serving free content. I've seen the model at work in my own household. My two sons, students, are hardly in a position to fork out 120 quid a year for Spotify; they need that money for vodka text books after all. For them the ads are a necessary burden. On the other hand, while I wouldn't want to give you the impression that your humble writer has money to burn, for me a tenner a month for the service is genuinely well worth it (case in point: I'm writing this while holed-up in Paris for a couple days; I'm doing so to an album of music by Iraqi oud virtuoso Rahim Aljah; I'd have struggled to do this pre-Spotify, even more so had I only been willing to do so legally).

Anyway, founder Daniel Ek blogged about upcoming changes back on April 14th. The long and short of it appears to be that from this point on, users can access the free service as it stands for six months, but from that point onwards will only have ten hours' listening a month and, additionally, will only be able to play any single track a total of five times. Now there's a whole lot of speculation out there about what brought these changes about. For my money, Andrew Orlowski's coverage in The Register seems typically intelligent. Were these changes forced on Spotify by the major record labels? The service's relationship with the majors has always been a tricky one to figure out. On one hand, it's rumoured that quite a hefty slice of it is funded by the industry, on the other, it seems to be having trouble getting into the US precisely because of major label concerns. Certainly there's something in the tone of Ek's post which feels, well, reluctant.

Anyway, that's all speculation, and I don't want to get into that. What I do want to draw your attention to, however, is the comments thread at the end of the post. I suspected, as I first read the post, that this would be a hot potato for users, and sure enough, there were over 3000 comments by the night of the post. That figure now stands at 9100. That is a lot of blog comments. But what's really interesting is the various angles from which the comments are coming. Now, I can't pretend to have read more than a smattering, but I've tried to read at random and hopefully therefore representatively.

Perhaps expectedly, there's quite some anger out there: "Bye bye Spotify." "This is a bad move for your users and the artists." "ok, so your bad deals with record label mafia forces you to dump the load of manure on your customers?" "This smacks of pure greed." You get the picture. And an awful lot of people saying that they're going to move on - and very possibly back to illegal practice, née "piracy". "So long Spotify. It was nice nowing you. Guess I'll go back to pirating music again then." "Ah well, it was nice while it lasted. That's me over to Grooveshark/YouTube/piracy."

Well, as the kids say, haters gonna hate.

What took me by surprise was the strength of support for Spotify's move, and a pretty massive backlash against the naysayers. Get some of this: "To be fair, Spotify is well worth the monthly charge anyway. It's the best £10 I spend each month. I'd recommend it to anyone." "Good - finally! I'm satisfied premium user, and I really want to see Spotify succeeding and paid accounts are the only working method for that. Music cant be free -accept it!" "I think its a bold, but good move. The service is excellent, I am happy to pay for my premium account and I understand that Spotify have to make some changes to keep up the good work." And on and on. If I were cynical, I'd think that the industry had employed an army of commenters. Actually, I am cynical, but I think these comments are genuine (for one thing, I don't necessarily credit the industry with the wit to spin a comments thread). And looking across the thread on the first night, guessed that these kind of comments made up at least half - perhaps even as much as two thirds - of the response.

But that was in the first few days. If you skip to later pages, the balance changes massively. There are still people defending Spotify's move - and many that are astonished that people regard £10 a month as too much for this service. But the overall tenor late on is much more agin, and in many cases angrily so. There's certainly a lot more comments of the "greedy capitalist bastards" type. I'm intrigued at the change in the tenor of the conversation, and would welcome theories as to why it's happened.

In any case, the various positions seem to have settled down to these broad categories, with some considerable overlap:

• Greedy bastards, you deserve to fail.
• I'm going back to piracy.
• I can't afford the premium service, so will leave reluctantly.
• It had to happen, I wish it hadn't, but I'll pay if I have to.
• Premium is a great service and has always been worth it.
• You're an idiot/freetard bigot if you don't think it is worth paying for.

There's even the oddly rogue (but some how likeable) position that "I would be/was happy to pay, but won't be coerced into it." And quite a lot of commentators point out (very reasonably in my opinion) that Spotify needs to fill an awful lot of gaps in its inventory: it's anything but the mythical jukebox-in-the-sky right now. But I think that's somewhat to one side of the arguments here.

All of which said, I still find it surprising that this is a multi-viewpoint debate, and for all the usual cesspit behaviour of some of the commentators, there's a lot of intelligence and subtlety of thought about the decision. This is especially gratifying: that while so much of the industry, journalistic and policy world-based debate about IPR is polarised around the equally intellectually indefensible positions of illegal-is-theft and copyright-is-dead, the public, albeit in aggregate, can see this as a rather more complex discourse.

It didn't need "education" for that. It needed a brilliantly-conceived and thoughtfully designed legal service to come along - and then be threatened with withdrawal.