experience, I wouldn't bother to note the limitations of the platform, insignificant as they are. Where the love affair becomes thorny however is when we review the royalty rate paid to artists. Granted, it's better than MySpace (ie: nothing), but if we imagined this as the exclusive future for recorded music, I see nothing more than a fast track to artistic death and a creative grave. Though the subscriber numbers aren't quite there yet, I can't see how Spotify will fail to usurp iTunes. Napster co-founder and early Spotify investor Sean Parker reiterated this notion when speaking at SXSW earlier this year, "If we [Spotify] continue growing at our current rate in terms of subscriptions and downloads, we'll overtake iTunes in terms of contributions to the recorded music business in under two years." 4 It's an arguably absurd statement when you consider iTunes' revenue for the record companies in 2011 was approx. 3.2 billion dollars, but Spotify's premium service worldwide subscriber rate has tripled in less than a year. 5 Spotify hasn't reached that tipping point yet, and to launch in Australia with a platform as ubiquitous as Facebook -- genius! Daniel Ek has created a legitimate, mass consumerist music platform with a vast catalogue that costs subscribers close to nothing. Economists could be forgiven for puzzling over this strategy. While iTunes offers users the chance to "own" the intangible under the hammer of their restrictive rules of use, Spotify have not simply taken measures to recalibrate the equilibrium. They've