You've also taken away one source for the recommendations-engine, the only thing making the site worthwhile.

Also how many indie labels will be willing to give their music for free to a service demanding payment from pretty much the entire world to listen to this music? I expect lots of indie-labels to withdraw their music based on this.

Finally when only people in the US, UK and Germany is feeding the system new input, except the recommendations to go stale, users to stop caring and the site to quietly die a slow death.

This article (in the context of being posted on slashdot) to me just seems like a chance for overly zealous Linux-fanboys to take a shit on Microsoft, .NET and "bloat".

Think people who spend a weekend to custom-compile their kernel with nothing as modules, everything else excluded and perfectly narrowed down to the things they need and nothing more. Just to save a massive 4KB of memory footprint.

After which they sit down and pat themselves on the back, knowing that their Linux environment is as optimized as it can be and that the lack of those 4KBs which can now be used as a system-cache will never impede their system's performance ever again.

Until they start wondering if compiling with -funroll-loops might save them 2-digit CPU-cycles per month and how that measures up to the increased memory usage.

You know: those guys. Ignore them, don't take them seriously, and don't expect them to know jack shit about development of any sizeable real-world project.