The blogosphere is all a-buzz today after Spotify’s announcement that it’s free and open services are to come to an end relatively soon. As of May 1st anyone who isn’t a paying subscriber to the music service will find what they have access to severely limited – 5 plays of each track, and a further limit of a total of 10 hours a month after 6 months.

Spotify was unveiled in October 2008 in Sweden, and spread across the European launch countries very quickly indeed. Soon after the service boasted 15,000,000 users with as many as 1,000,000 paying a monthly fee of £10. On the back of such subscriber numbers Spotify AB has raised approximately $150m in 3 rounds; the most recent being $100m (presumably for a big push into the USA). Company valuations hover around the $1b-$2b mark.

The usual cries foul having been bandied about with the news of the changes to the way it works. Users who don’t, or won’t, or can’t pay the subscription fee are understandably distraught that they’ll have to give up access to Spotify’s extensive bank of music, and that they’ll have to either stop listening to music or find an alternative vendor. Existing subscribers who are happy with what they’re paying for are calling for everyone to subscribe because they feel it’s well worth the money.

It’s the same, sadly all too common story. A company raises a small amount of money to offer a service for free in order to attract a large userbase. They then use that userbase to ‘prove’ the popularity of the service to late-stage investors, and raise more capital. At that point those people who helped push the company to where it is, who put up with the outages, the mistakes, who provided feedback to the developers to make the product better, and who invited their friends to the service so it could grow, are all tossed out into the cold. It’s not the best way to thank your early adopters.

Now, of course, the reality of the situation is almost certainly that the record companies who license content to Spotify don’t want to give users in the USA completely free access. It’s a big market and there’s lots of money to be made from it. As a result Spotify have to close the doors somewhat. It’s (probably) not their fault or entirely their own decision to make.

I won’t be switching to a Premium Spotify account. I’ll use the service to check out new artists, as I do now, but I’ll listen to other services for the majority of my day-to-day music. Heck, I might even turn on a radio again. I suppose I ought to learn that free and freemium web services rarely remain free forever, but I suspect I won’t. I’ll keep signing up to alpha and beta test things and keep being disappointed when they kick me back out the door when I don’t pony up any cash later.