A note to artists and publishers: banning users from Switzerland is a mistake

[NightScape]

I'm a paying member of Spotify. I have a strong feeling that it happens more and more that titles are not available in my country, which is Switzerland. The latest example is the song "These days are gone" of Moonbootica. While I can listen to "These days are gone - Club Mix" the title "These days are gone - Original Mix" is not available in my country. Listeners of Moonbootica know the difference.

Following other Spotify members meeting my taste it happens almost every day that I cant listen one or the other song. This is very annoying.

Because I see no reason for this discrimination I start thinking about to ban every artist or label doing so from my playlists. I'm not willing to support artists that dont want me to listen. Even worse if they just let me hear the crap but not the fine recordings I like. At least I will no longer buy their songs, even I like them.

The reason for artists and labels doing so is probably the Swiss copyright law, which varies a little bit from the laws in other countries. The big difference I see is in the fact, that making copies for personal use (e.g. backups) is legal. But I think publishers excluding Switzerland are missing appropriate information to make the right decision.

I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I read the laws it's even legal to share copies for free with familly members and close real friends. This excludes mutual friends or friends from social networks as well as making music publically available by any means (server, dropbox, bit-torrent, public parties, office, coffee shops etc).

Personally I think this practice is good for both, the consumer and the artist. It protects the consumer from being incriminated for something everybody does anyway while it protects the artists and publishes from the real criminals. There are clear borders and there is no grey zone. I'm personally convinced that Swiss citizians dont disrespect copyrights more than anybody else in the world, at least none of my familly members nor friends does. Therefore I think artists and publishers should think twice before discriminating valuable Swiss customers.

[Soundofus]

Hello @NightScape

Thanks to pointing that to the community,

It's true that licensing laws are different from a country to another and that can lead to have, sometimes, some artists or albums available in some countries and not in some others.

We can read here and there some users putting the blame on Spotify but they forget that availabilty of music in streaming is up to the artists (or representatives) and/or their labels.

There is another point which is rarely mentioned : To not accept music on streaming service, on the release date, is, most of time, a strategic marketing way of act, for mainstream artist like Adele, Taylor Swift, The 1975 to name just a few...

Spotify wants all the music in the world to be available to stream and works hard daily to convince artists/labels to bring their whole catalog in streaming