[jscholes]

> While this provides a short-term benefit to the customer, it provides long-term negatives as Spotify's competitors are forced out of the market, and new upstart competitors don't stand a chance.

Realistically how much more of an issue will this be than it is now? In the UK, mobile providers already offer 6-month Spotify/Netflix/whatever subscriptions as a sweetner with your contract, which seems like the same issue to me but in a non-technological sense. New upstarts don't have the money nor the brand recognition to make that happen.

Netflix has become a part of the Collective consciousness, arguably on a similar level to googling something. Even with all the net neutrality laws in the world behind them I pitty the upstart who think they can go up against the current big players in the market (which includes content studios) and win. Spotify can't be said to have the same sort of recognition but Apple Music probably can, owing to it being featured on every iPhone and iTunes installation. New upstarts can't afford to release a smartphone to push their services, either.

It's capitalism. ISPs love short-term customer benefits, because the customers love them too. Once their customer base are fed up with their free Spotify sub, the ISP will have had 12 months to come up with the next thing. And so it will continue in theory until we all have huge data caps as standard anyway so none of this will matter. And then somebody will come up with a way to double the size of Netflix streaming video for a few more pixels and then we start again.