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Comment by EnderMB | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many people will pirate Taylor Swift's music since she's exclusively linked to Apple Music? I'm willing to bet a lot of Spotify users will dust off uTorrent (or whatever people are using for torrents nowadays) and just download the album she has restricted her fans from listening to legally.

It's all about ease of access, surely? The introduction of Apple Music is good for music, but if it means that Spotify and Apple Music are going to further fragment accessible libraries of music then piracy will probably rise.

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> ...the album she has restricted her fans from listening to legally.

Well, she is still making her music available online against a fair price. If you mean restriction in the sense of any restriction, then, yes, it's restricted. But so is Spotify, because for every service there is another one you don't publish on.

Miss Swift was not happy with Spotify's negotiating terms. Her not playing ball with Spotify should not automatically be considered "restricting her fans from listening to her music legally," even though that's a side-effect.

I'm not privy to the details of the negotiation, I don't know who's being unreasonable, if anyone. But just saying that she restricts her fans from listening to it, that implies it's her own fault and that people are in the right for just pirating it then.

Not really.

While she's entitled to share her music with whoever she pleases, fans aren't going to see it that way. They'll see a greedy artist that wants more money, and is happy to restrict what is essentially uploading a bunch of music files to a server as a ransom for not getting that money. Given the way she immediately backtracked, I think most people see her move as nothing more than a publicity stunt between her and Apple to promote both her new album and Apple's new service.

Spotify works because you're safe in the knowledge that you can listen to pretty much anything you want. With Apple Music in the picture, piracy will almost definitely rise, should artists decide to lock themselves onto specific platforms like Swift has chosen to.

uTorrent turned evil, same way as sourceforge did.

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