> but why would you want to help people circumvent one of the (to me) reasonable ways of enjoying and paying for music?
Because DRM sucks. Why can I only listen to Spotify through their player? Why am I restricted to using it only on computers/devices that they've ported their player to?
It's not exactly the same, but back when iTunes sold DRM encrusted music files, I used to strip all the DRM from the files I legally purchased, so that I could play them on my Linux system, stream them to my Philips wifi speaker system, etc.
Being locked in to a single vendor's ecosystem sucks. This is part of the reason why I currently refuse to purchase video from iTunes or Amazon. When the industry wises up and drops DRM from video, I will happily start patronizing them.
Spotify is a bit different—it's more like Netflix than iTunes or Amazon. Still, if I'm paying for it, it's still frustrating to only being able to use their players [1].
[1] My TiVo has a built-in Netflix player, but it really sucks. Much of the newer content doesn't actually decode properly. Being locked into their system means I'm at their mercy. If I could get at the stream I could use a computer somewhere to transcode it into something the TiVo could reliably play... But the DRM prohibits me from doing that, and that's frustrating.
Frustrating to use their players? Not for 99% of their customers who don't even know what you're talking about. Don't like the restrictions? Don't buy it. Isn't America great?
Because DRM sucks. Why can I only listen to Spotify through their player? Why am I restricted to using it only on computers/devices that they've ported their player to?
It's not exactly the same, but back when iTunes sold DRM encrusted music files, I used to strip all the DRM from the files I legally purchased, so that I could play them on my Linux system, stream them to my Philips wifi speaker system, etc.
Being locked in to a single vendor's ecosystem sucks. This is part of the reason why I currently refuse to purchase video from iTunes or Amazon. When the industry wises up and drops DRM from video, I will happily start patronizing them.
Spotify is a bit different—it's more like Netflix than iTunes or Amazon. Still, if I'm paying for it, it's still frustrating to only being able to use their players [1].
[1] My TiVo has a built-in Netflix player, but it really sucks. Much of the newer content doesn't actually decode properly. Being locked into their system means I'm at their mercy. If I could get at the stream I could use a computer somewhere to transcode it into something the TiVo could reliably play... But the DRM prohibits me from doing that, and that's frustrating.