Spotify owned by criminals

Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? Unfortunately it's true. Not only is the music industry making money on royalties every time a song is played back by you on Spotify (*), prominent members of this criminal industry actually own 18 percent of the Spotify shares, which they got virtually for free in exchange for access to their record archives - no free stocks, no deal:

According to newspaper Computer Sweden, which has got hold of documents that Spotify send to the companies registration office in Luxembourg, the record companies bought the shares for 100,000 kronor (€9.700, $13.900).

The record labels are: Sony BMG (5,8 percent), Universal Music (4,8 percent), Warner Music (3,8 percent) and EMI (1,9 percent). Also Merlin holds a small stake.

Time to uninstall Spotify and stop feeding the monster. Try Grooveshark instead, and lose those annoying ads at the same time.


(*) At the very least I think they should provide some sort of record label filter, so the users could choose to exclude artists from certain labels, thus minimizing their income.