Music streaming was meant to be one of the ways to solve music piracy. By creating a service where people could listen to as much music as they like for a fixed price every month, versus buying music piecemeal which could easily add up to the hundreds, it does solve one of the reasons why people pirate, which is pricing.
However it looks like Spotify might have a bit of a piracy problem on their hands as the company has recently revealed that at least 2 million of their users are listening to ad-free music without paying for it. For those unfamiliar, Spotify has a free and paid tier, where the free tier has certain limitations, one of which is that every now and then you will have to sit through an add.
Subscribing to Spotify Premium does away with ads and gives users full functionality, which means that there are at least 2 million users who are not paying Spotify’s $10 a month subscription, which when multiplied is a lot. That being said, the company is doing something about it and are going after users who have modified versions of the app.
It is unclear if other music streaming services are experiencing a piracy problem as well, but so far Spotify is the only one who has come forward.
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