Warner Music has decided that the free music model being offered by services like Spotify and Last.fm doesn't fit with its view of music's value and will be withdrawing their licenses to distribute its music.
Warner intends to continue supporting services which charge to 'rent' music -although as far as I'm aware both Spotify and Last.fm offer this service too.
Where those services score is that they use the free element of their service to draw people in to their premium service. Something that will no longer occur if these services are stared of content. Spotify has over a quarter of a million subscribers and is growing fast. Its not as if Warner isn't getting paid for the content that is being listened to for free - the service is advertisement funded, a model that seems to work fine for free to air television and radio all over the world.
Whilst the content owners are free to sell their content in whatever manner they see fit, actions like this just push users towards the sort of free sources of content where the owners get no return. Doesn't sound like an entirely sensible move to me...
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