Spotify Dirty Little DRM Secret Crucial On Mobile Platforms

DeSpotify, the most prevalent solution that has been used to hack Spotify, has been in quasi hibernation for some months already. Bottom line is without DRM, there would certainly be no mobile platform.

It got Andrew Orlowski from the Register to ask one significant question; "So does this mean people love DRM all of a sudden? Or begun to tolerate it? Or stopped caring?" before saying that he was not sure.

Users are still quite nervous when it comes to taking away files that they own and convert it to a service instead but it works. US-based Rhapsody essentially is the same service and most users have been quite happy about using a DRM-based system.

Spotify may also betting on the fact that users will be listening to the same old tracks over and over again. This is what drove the success of commercial radios and could allow Spotify to convince mobile phone networks that its service may not be as resource-taxing as one may think.

Over the past four months of using Spotify, we managed to listen to around a thousand songs weighing around 1.2GB at most (Spotify uses a lower-bit rate for free music) which is sustainable for the mobile networks.

But while Rhapsody appears to have been feeling the heat lately even with 750,000 paying subscribers, Spotify has managed to ride the storm by getting record labels onboard at a very early stage.