Brace yourselves, readers. We’re going back in time!

How far, you say? This is exciting! Are we going to meet Napoleon?

Sadly, no. This time machine only goes back ten years. Yes, that’s really barely a blink of an eye in the scope of human history. That sucks, right?

Anyway, here we are, back in boring old 2001. And you’re just minding your own business, doing whatever it is you’re doing, not buying stuff from iTunes, not downloading poorly tagged, thrice transcoded CD rips from The Pirate Bay because Bram Cohen hasn’t got around to releasing a BitTorrent client yet. And all of a sudden, you get this bright flash of premonition. And in this flash, you see a service that offers unlimited access to about a million albums worth of music, stored for your convenience on a remote server, and that this service costs a paltry 5 euros per month. For an additional 5 euros more, you get this library on your mobile phone and thus are able to play it in the park while you kick back in a hammock and have a couple of beers.

Strange, huh? Wait, it gets even stranger! You also see that in this future, there has been such a shift in values that people actually feel indignant, offended and ripped off that this service isn’t offered for FREE.

That concludes our brief journey in time. Now, let’s get back to 2011, where all this science fiction is actually happening.

One thing that’s characteristic of the information age is instant gratification. We are immersed in so much minutiae at the click of a button that we have trouble not taking this gratification for granted. This leads to a sense of entitlement, described here by Louis CK much more cleverly and funnily than I ever could. Essentially, if we gain something and then lose it, we feel as though we’ve somehow lost value in the whole process.

So, you already know where this is going. Spotify is going to issue limitations for its Free and Open accounts. The two major things that baffle me about this are:

1. How did it take so long?

2. Why are people actually surprised by this?

It should have been obvious to everyone from the start that Spotify Free can’t possibly be economically viable. How much revenue can a few measly ads here and there generate? Certainly not enough to keep Spotify from earning bad PR for only paying artists so and so many fractions of a cent per play - blatantly disregarding the high percentage of plays that don’t generate any considerable revenue even for Spotify itself. The main function of the adverts has been to annoy - and as a previous Free user, I can attest that they did a very good job at it - and to provide incentive to upgrade to a paid account. Essentially, the function of the Free and Open accounts has been to establish Spotify as a household name and eventually to be phased out in favour of the paid accounts.

As a side effect of this, you’ve all been taken on a free ride. And if you ask me, a free ride is something you should be thankful for. Yes, I’m looking at all you whiners on Slashdot or wherever. You should just shut up and be grateful for something for once in your privileged lives.

In the end, however, this whole uproar will likely be nothing more than another minutia in the endless stream of minutiae. The Internet folks are going to have their fits of rage for a day, perhaps two. Some Free users will probably quit. A few paying users will grunt and groan for a while out of some misguided principle, but in the end, only a handful will leave. In a while, it will be like nothing ever happened.

Now, I’m not saying that Spotify is forever. Orkut and MySpace certainly weren’t forever. And I’m not saying that Spotify is without problems. Offering sweeter deals to major labels is certainly a problem. I’m just saying that this is hardly a deal breaker for any of the million users who have so far found Spotify a service worth paying for, and therefore, talking about Spotify dying over this is just ridiculous.