Some music services around the ‘net are getting a lot of criticism from anxious users, dying to try out their service, but can’t because of their geographical location. Due to legal reasons among other things, there are some services that are restricted to only some areas of the world.
Some have always been like this, and even claim to be working on the issue, while others have only done so recently.
However, the issue isn’t always availability of the service, but also some unfair practices.
For instance, in April of 2009, the music tracking and streaming service Last.fm started charging €3.00/month (roughly $4.43 USD) to make use of their audio streaming services, to all countries other than the US, the UK, and Germany. This (obviously) caused a lot of controversy to almost all users, whether it affected them directly or not.
And, while the decision may have been out of the hands of the site itself, it’s still unfair to see this happening.
Another prime example of one such site is Spotify. Spotify is a highly acclaimed music streaming service with a cross-platform (and even mobile) application and a lot of users.
The only problem? All of those users are in Europe. Many countries, including the United States, have yet to receive access to this service, and it has caused a lot of complaints to be thrown around the internet.
The website claims that this is due to licensing restrictions, and words it as being “not yet available” here, giving hope that some day we will all be able to access Spotify.
And, while not much controversy has been caused over this, rather than empty complaints, Spotify HAS still gotten their fair share of controversy for another issue — their iPhone application.
In order to use their iPhone application, which allows you to access music streaming from their service legally, conveniently, and on-the-go, you must be a Premium member of the site. This costs €9.99/month (or $14 USD). And, while the application itself is free, this restriction has left a bitter taste in the mouths of standard users all across Europe, and has also caused a lot of negative reviews to be posted about the application on iTunes.
Then we have Pandora. There are quite a few restrictions with Pandora, one being that you cannot even browse individual songs and build your own playlist. You create a “station” based on an an artist of song that you like, and Pandora finds similar music and streams it to you.
This is very nice and convenient in finding new artists that you like, but not quite right when you’re just in the mood to listen to music you’re already familiar with.
On top of that, a free user is restricted to forty hours of streaming music a month. Luckily, the fee to bypass this is a mere $0.99, but it would be nice for that fee to be nonexistent.
Boundaries in the legal music streaming business are actually pretty universal. I would be hard-pressed to find such a service with a complete lack of said boundaries…
The only service I can think of that has no absolutely debilitating boundaries is the ad-supported Grooveshark.
While you CAN opt to get a premium account (which is only $3/month, might I add), it’s certainly not necessary. It gives you the convenience of having no advertisements, early access to new features, and a nice “VIP” badge by your username, among other things.
The one downside (which is a bit unrelated, but is still good to know) is that there is currently a lack of any iPhone applications that support streaming from this service. (Pandora has a free one, we talked about Spotify’s, and there are several other music services with apps.) That would be a really nice thing to have.
I guess you can’t really complain… Free music is a wonderful thing to have (especially when it’s legal!), and restrictions are definitely understandable, to a degree. Forcing users to pay to even access it at all is too much, in my opinion.
On the other hand, nonintrusive banner ads, such as the ones on the Grooveshark website, are perfectly fine and actually easy to ignore.
Now, I’ve only touched the surface of the issue here… I didn’t want to drone on and on about specific restrictions, but there are more out there.
As of now, it seems as if Grooveshark is the best choice for anybody who wants to be able to listen to the music they want, free of charge, on their computers without obtrusive advertising or required payment (or even required membership at all).
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