I know you want our views on borknagar.com, but I'd like to post this here since I don't really engage your website very often, and I guess the faces are more familiar here.
The move is understandable because Spotify increases the rate of an inevitable trend: almost all music will eventually be delivered via the internet. Physical discs and vinyls will settle to a collector's market, and most fans / casual listeners will not be purchasing physical products. There's a lot of reasons for this, but the main one is that you can instantly buy or pirate music online. Most people have accepted the model where they pay for music via iTunes or a similar service, at least in the sense that everyone knows that downloading without payment is pirating. It's one reason iTunes was able to restore some of the capital flow in developed countries in the Americas and Europe.
I love the record store, as I grew up on a small island in the Caribbean (with a lot of people, but few metalheads). The guy at the record store who brought in discs to our metal altar was our hero. I bought nearly all my music growing up buying through him. And you didn't just go in to buy music. You would go in, talk to him, hear the grapevine. It was information plus music. That relationship is hard to have nowadays. But in a certain way, I'm here and Jens might read my post... I would never have dreamed that in 1998 I would be able to put something online about the Archaic Course and someone from the band would engage with me about it and their future plans.
That being said... the record store is going to be like a comic book store or the hobby shop. Or a music center that primarily sells instruments and other things that have to be acquired physically. That means there also won't be many of them. Online is the future, and the future in that regard is now. Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, even Amazon... music's future is digital. The question is how to protect royalties for musicians.
While I like companies like Century Media that actually record good music, remember that most music sales are fucking trash. I have little sympathy for the garbage that passes for most of pop music nowadays. Or much of rap / "hip-hop," and basically any mass-produced, recording company created bullshit. Ultimately this trend favors people who are serious musicians, because it makes that kind of 1950s recording studio hit model impossible to replicate nowadays. That's why there's so much pressure to have television recoup a lot of these losses by pre-packaging hype for pseudo-musicians using shit like American Idol.
In other words, while there's going to be some legitimate victims early on (sorry, Century Media), I think that the move to digital music on the balance is good. CM should think hard about how they distribute. Their old CD distributing networks are just not going to cut it over the long run. They have to invest in getting your music to earn money online. Part of the issue is protecting intellectual property by getting people to pay, but the other part is having that music ready to be distributed. Can CM cut out the middleman (iTunes? Amazon?) to get everyone the maximum amount of income out of your music, so you can profit and we can get awesome music?
We'll see. I'm sure you guys will be fine. I'm not sure getting your band off Spotify does you good. They're going to have to be pathbreakers in order to survive the way the digital marketplace is changing distribution. Otherwise, they're going to end up like my old record store back home... gone.