why you can't listen to adele's '21' on spotify.

Multiple sources confirm that Adele was willing to play ball with the streaming service, as long as the content was accessible only to paying subscribers and not to its freemium users. Spotify has a freemium-to-premium model: Users can gain ad-supported access to Spotify's entire music catalog for free; to remove the ads and gain mobile access, users have to pony up as much as $10 a month. Ultimately, Spotify decided it did not want to split up its content catalog, so as to create separate music libraries for paying subscribers and freemium users. Thus, it was essentially Spotify that decided against providing streaming access to Adele's content for paying subscribers--not the other way around. (via)

thx starla!