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This isn't really about the main thrust of your argument, but I wanted to address this:

What would be the end result of this? On a particularly music-filled day I might send 100+ posts about songs I've listen to? Really? People will ever look at that? If it's part of the main news feed, it's spam. If it's not, nobody cares... except Facebook, who can mine such data

Perhaps the key mechanism for new Open Graph developers to present their content in the news feed (and thus take advantage of the distribution possibilities there) is through aggregations. The workflow for signing up to be an Open Graph Developer actually makes you create one. What this means is that while there will be hundreds of posts from your friends about listening to songs in the Ticker, the news feed will have something like "10 of your friends listened to Foster the People today!", which actually happened to me yesterday and was actually the first time I had heard about that band. One click allowed me to listen to them on Spotify. I ended up finding a new band I liked through my friends, and I used Spotify a little bit more. So there are use cases here that can work really well, with aggregation making the volume of content that comes from autosharing more manageable.

I generally don't want to link any of my accounts - especially when I'm paying for the service - to another system. I don't trust Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any other company to act as a centralized place for managing my identity. And given Zuckerberg's statements on the idea of having multiple identities online, I trust Facebook even less than the others.

I signed up without connecting my facebook account to spotify (or at least, giving it permissions), and there have been multiple nag screens when I start spotify now to connect to Facebook, some without a close button, where I would just deny the facebook connection request. I wonder how long they will let me skip the publishing connection to facebook.

If they're anything like Yahoo and their "new mail interface" initiative, you still have a couple years.

I've had the same problem. On the rare occasion that I can launch Spotify without it crashing it forces me through a bunch of modal dialogs begging me to connect my Facebook. Needless to say they won't be getting any more of my money.

In the businesses that I've worked for we always took rational decisions based on the numbers, feedback from customers, our capacities, deals, etc. If you know those things, the vast majority of business decisions that companies take are really quite understandable.

There are several reasons they might have taken this decision, one might be that it was part of a deal they made with Facebook. Spotify is probably aware that like most websites, they are a fad, and they need a way to survive. They've chosen to become a cleaner fish for a much larger animal that will provide them with food and protection, in return for a valuable service. It's neither a good, nor a bad business decision. It's a rational one.

I disagree on your analysis of reasonability.

Much of life does not progress linearly or even continuously. Business planning requires that business people make assumptions. Some of those assumptions are good, but most are probably not. The question is what one will do to cope when your assumptions go bad.

Some failed assumptions you can shift with, others are fatal.

Spotify has made the assumption that people won't flock away from facebrick. There are all sorts of events that can kill social networks, and they're betting against that happening.

Yep. They're betting on Facebook and that might cost them. Business is about taking risks and the job of the people at the top is to assess those risks, and they're usually in a better position to do so than anyone else.

Just because it's their job doesn't mean they are any good at it.

>> don't care, who recommends such services to family and friends? It's us.

I completely agree with you but with Facebook they don't need us to tell family and friends.

>> all-you-can-eat subscription models seem like a far better solution

Far better than Spotify? You do realize that Spotify is an all-you-can-eat subscription model?

I believe he was referring to an unlimited sync-to-mobile, since he references unlimited storage in that sentence, as well. He's probably referring to a model like Rdio's.

I'm not a premium user but this page http://www.spotify.com/us/get-spotify/premium/ implies that it's part of the package "Add Spotify to your mobile phone and you’ll have immediate access to all that music - wherever you are, on or offline."

Yes it is part of the premium model. Offline playlists and mobile sync of those as well as other playlists is too. Sad to see them using the Facebook in such a short sighted fashion. They had till now been my best music service, not sure anymore.

Spotify seems like they're gunning to become the Zynga (meaning: first among equals) of social music.

Totally agreed with: While you can argue that "normal people" don't care, who recommends such services to family and friends? It's us.

So, I am telling friends/family now that the folks at Spotify are a bunch of corporate tools. Whereas I used to tell them how incredibly awesome the Spotify service was.

I am not a lab rat to be analyzed. I do not want corporate data miners pawing through every move I make. My god.

You can easily disable sending songs from Spotify to your Facebook wall. It's an option in Spotify. However, it's very useful to see what your friends are listening to inside of Spotify.

I disagree. In combination with the new "send a notification every time a friend inhales or exhales" model that Facebook put into place, it's extremely annoying to me. I don't want to be notified every time a friend listens to a new song on Spotify. My friends who have Spotify appear to concur -- every one of them disabled this "feature" as soon as they figured out what was happening.

I also disabled it because it's somewhat too spammy. They didn't get the wall-posting feature right. I like seeing what music friends are listening to within Spotify (without being notified).

Sure, but this should remain in Spotify, and not posted to your activity stream on Facebook.