Spotify - Free in Spain but €10p/m in Ireland

APM

Have been using Spotify for almost 12 months for free (with the occasional advertisement) in Spain, but back home in Ireland I find that we are charged €10 per month with no free option.

Rip off

Royale with Cheese

I've heard you can proxy into it using a UK proxy, so it won't cost you anything. That said I don't really know what it is....

APM

Yes,
but its the point that our neighbours in the UK and elsewhere in Europe the product is free but in Ireland we need to pay. Doesn't make sense

jahalpin

Spotify isn't actually avaliable to people in ROI, the only way that you can get it is it you live in one of the countries that is in avaliable in and then use the travel option

On their website, Spotify say that this is due to licencing issues, which is probably correct as IMRO are a terrible crowd to deal with and make music licening as expensive and difficcult as is humanly possible

loyatemu

its free in the UK, Spain etc because they use advertising to fund it (there's serious doubts about this business model, but thats a different topic). This option is not available here as they have not yet started taking advertising from Irish companies, and given the size of the Irish market they may never setup here.

The "premium" version costs £10 in the UK and €10 here so its actually cheaper in Ireland - this allows you to use spotify on portable devices such as the iPhone, though due to high demand since the launch of their iPhone client I believe they've temporarily stopped opening new accounts. This is not a "rip-off Ireland" issue though - they're a business, they have to cover their costs and also obey music industry licensing restrictions.

Saruman

This was discussed on the Mat Cooper show a few weeks ago and was endorsed as a great idea. They did say it was free in other countries, or a free version but that due to licensing issues, they can only offer a premium version here.

As loyatemu said, its cheaper here than in the UK for the same service.

Nody

The business model don't work, period; the only reason it still exist is because all major record labels where allowed to buy a share in the company at a 90% discount and now proceeed to do bad things to their artists (well worse then usual if that is possible).

The artists get pennies at best (there was an article which detailed the amount and one artist had 56.000 downloads had been paid less then 10 EUR as example.). Many artists are starting to ask to have their music removed and one artist in Sweden put it like this (paraphrased for obscenity removal) "I rather have Pirate bay have gay sex with me then be raped by Spotify as at least PB don't claim to be anything more then pirates".