Thanks for the response. You’re right, my beef is probably more with consumer tech writing in general. “Anti-Spotify” still seems a bit hyperbolic to me, but to be fair so was my objection, and headlines are headlines I guess. Thanks too for linking to that piece by Allison McCann— it’s a thoughtful take and I enjoyed it. It’s also good to know about separation between editorial and advertising. I think my skepticism is understandable, given the way BuzzFeed (and to be fair, the so-called “social web” in general) seems to intentionally blur the line between person and corporate entity (for example, Geico and the incessant sharing of “delightful” things over the past few weeks). I guess what I’m saying is that advertising is built into the structure of the site in a way that isn’t always obvious, and sometimes this makes me doubt a writer’s intent when I shouldn’t.

I don’t know or care about the relationship BuzzFeed has with Rdio; editorial is produced and run separately from advertising. I don’t know what they’re doing, they don’t know what I’m doing.  I wrote this specifically about the new app because it’s one I like a lot. That’s what we do with products we like at FWD, and that’s what most consumer-oriented tech writing is about — products, the things people use. And while the Spotify and Rdio services are similar in the sense that they’re both subscription music services, my headline, and this piece, are very much about the app.  We’ve talked about some of the issues here, if you’re looking for that. And you’re probably correct that the model’s not sustainable, which we talked about a bit here. In the end it’ll probably be just Spotify remaining, precisely for that reason, and the reasons laid out in the piece you linked to.

“A lot of the tech writing on this site*…”, excuse me. I also seem to have messed up that link, so let me try again: http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/