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Who Me Too'd this topic

Country restrictions?

Hello.

 

I've been a happy spotify user for a long long time but today I noticed something that made me very weary. As usual I went to the discover tab to listen to some new bands. I saw a band who looked cool (Masters of reality) and wanted to give it a go so I pressed play and nothing happened. 

Capturar.JPG

 

Note it was on my suggested bands for being similar to band I really love (QOTSA). 

 

So, like I was saying... When I pressed play nothing happen as if it was some problem with my connection. I checked if everything was working fine and indeed it was... I pressed a few times and even tried a different band and this one again (figuring it could've been some issue loading the tracks and this way I'd be able to force the transfer again) but it didn't work (the other band played, obviously). 

Capturar2.JPG

So I got confused and tried to open the band page and select a track manually to see what would happen. And this is what happen:

Capturar3.JPG

 

So apparently this band isn't available in Portugal. As far as I can remember this is the first time I've ever had such an error. And this makes me quite upset... I know this isn't the best argument I can use but I actually PAY for this service. I feel happy with spotify... I have a premium account, and I can listen to all the music I have time to. I haven't had many issues and I reccomend it to all my friends. It's one of the best ways I know to listen to music while not pirating it. 

 

Region lock is one of the most bull**** things a company can do. It's a forceful way to give money to people who don't deserve it. If I pay spotify I assume some of my money goes to the artist. Some other portion to its publisher. Or maybe just to the publisher and then they give a cut to the artis. I don't really care about what happens behind the scenes. My money is used to give me access to music and I can't imagine a reason why some track/album/artist might not be available in my country.

 

I don't know if other users have this issue. I don't know if other services (such as Google Music) also share these restrictions. Maybe it's an old problem that I just found out about. 

 

What I'd would love to know is:

  • Do other users also have these issues?;
  • If someone could explain to me why I'm denied access to this content;
  • Is there anything I can do to "fix" this? (I don't have a lot of hopes on this one);
  • Why is it that a song I can't access is suggested to me (not to mention it's the 2nd suggested band for that artist)? 

I can (and do) tolerate a lot of problems but region lock just drives me crazy. For a long time I thought Spotify is awesome and now I feel like I'm back in 1999...

 

I'm sorry in advance if I'm overeacting but I really hate to think I'm going to start having regional restrictions on this service. 

 

Ps: The spell check doesn't seem to be working so please bear with me for some mistakes. English isn't my native language.

Who Me Too'd this topic