I have been saying for a while that we currently are at a peak amount of receiving free content on the Internet. We currently receive free news, music, radio, TV, books and podcasts.
This is not commercially viable in the long term. The concept of always finding advertisers to fund this is too risky - it's the continuous balance of finding an equilibrium of advertisers and content owners.
Today's news of Warner stopping licensing of free songs on Spotify and other services should come as no surprise. Quite the contrary - we should expect this to ripple through the rest of the industry.
However I will be interested to see if Warner do allow premium Spotify subscribers access to it's catalogue.
Maybe this is the start of the demise of the 'Freemium' business model.
