Artist Claims Spotify Won't Remove His Music

Swedish-based, proprietary, peer-to-peer, music-streaming service Spotify has recently found itself in the midst of a huge media scandal with local music artist Magnus Uggla. The 55-year-old musician claims that he required Spotify to remove his music tracks from its database at the start of August 2009, but the service failed to follow his request.

The artist goes on to blame not only the Spotify service itself, but Hasse Breitholtz, Sony Music's Sweden head executive, too. Mr. Uggla and the rest of the world recently found that Spotify was not only sponsored by music labels that pitched in with $14,000 at his birth (and received 18% of the whole company), but was actually turning huge profits every month, even surpassing iTunes in revenues in Sweden for the last month.

Mr. Uggla was very drastic when it came to his decision, stating that he would prefer his music being downloaded for free on Pirate Bay than offering it through Spotify. His displeasure and anger at Spotify comes from the fact that the company offers meager and insignificant payments to artists being streamed and played through the Spotify P2P services.

The artist got tired of Spotify making big bucks on his back and decided that this was another way of stealing his music, but instead of regular users and fans, this time, the music was stolen by big-name companies that were additionally stealing money from the users too. Currently, Spotify is said to be valued at around $250 million on the stock market, a value that is sure to rise after the company launches on the US market in the near future, as a clear rival to the iTunes. The Guardian has recently ranked Spotify on a Top 10 list of tech media investment opportunities for 2009. Also, Time Magazine has ranked Spotify as one of the 50 best websites of 2009.

Until now, no answer has been issued by Spotify about this incident or the reason for Mr. Uggla's music still being available for streaming to this day after his specific request.