Personally I don't think licensing is the problem. Why would the labels let Spotify stream the new Paul Oakenfold and Beyonce album as exclusive pre-releases and, at the same time, not allow them to offer HQ streaming for those albums? What's the point? To force the audiophile users to buy 320 kbps mp3s or CDs? Many of the premium users don't even know it's not 320 kbps.
Personally I don't think licensing is the problem. Why would the labels let Spotify stream the new Paul Oakenfold and Beyonce album as exclusive pre-releases and, at the same time, not allow them to offer HQ streaming for those albums? What's the point?
The very same reason they pay some television and radio stations to broadcast particular material: to get people to buy the albums.
It's a combination of things that make Spotify subpar for many music enthusiasts. The lack of availability of lossless streams, incompleteness of the catalog in 320kbps, missing tracks on many albums, uncertainty about future accessibility of music, etc.
When Spotify was introduced in The Netherlands, I absolutely loved it, and was convinced that I'd never need to spend much more on music than 10 Euros per month (imagine what a save this is when you buy at least 4 albums per month). However, given the reasons listed above, I am now mostly using Spotify for music discovery, and still buy albums. It only helped me to make more 'accurate' purchases. As a side effect, I ended my Premium subscription, because the 2.5 hours/week, 5 plays per track is plenty enough for evaluation.
Personally I don't think licensing is the problem. Why would the labels let Spotify stream the new Paul Oakenfold and Beyonce album as exclusive pre-releases and, at the same time, not allow them to offer HQ streaming for those albums? What's the point? To force the audiophile users to buy 320 kbps mp3s or CDs? Many of the premium users don't even know it's not 320 kbps.