For some weeks now, I’ve enjoyed the Swedish artist Marit Bergman’s album “I think it’s a Rainbow” on the streaming service Spotify. I made a playlist linking to the album, just like I do in iTunes etc.  Today when I clicked the link I got the message:

This track is currently not available in Sweden. Try finding replacements for all unavailable tracks in this playlist.

Not there anymore. I had to listen to something else :(

I’m not particularly happy with the thought of albums behaving like a yo-yo in Spotify. Is it Marit Bergman herself who have stopped the album? Probably. If it is, this is the first time I see a serious threat to this kind of music distribution. For a long time I have lived in some kind of illusion that streaming services would replace file based music distribution. But I am not sure about that anymore. Perhaps artists more and more will go Marit Bergman’s way and run a subscription service for new songs + a lot more things related to being a “fan” – a relationship I’m not particularly interested in myself. This kind of relation to the “fans” might be good in some ways, but if artists more or less arbitrarily can take their music in and out of streaming services we might never be able to view it as more than a radio hybrid.

But then again, perhaps the collecting feature in music will die. Perhaps it will be more of artists collecting music lovers than music lovers collecting music. The only thing we can be sure of is that music never will be “the same” as it was before music slipped out of its material container.