Why is music not available in some regions?

[Progboy]

This has probably been asked a lot. For example, I was able to listen to Ayreon and Pain of Salvation's albums, now it turns out that their albums are not available in my region (Costa Rica).

Why is that?

[user-removed]

@Progboy

Hello:

Ahh, the complicated world of music labels and regional license access. I would probable start with doing research on the label who currently holds the rights to those artist's music, as labels tend to be the ones who work out deals with different parts of the world when releasing music. Labels also work in conjunction with distributors all over the world, as well as making music distribution deals with other labels throughout the world, or create subsidiaries of their company, or buy into other regional subsidiaries to gain access to a region of the world to distribute music to. Music licensing and distribution is about as complicated as Movie distribution World wide and having regional restrictions imposed on the films, and such music tends to fall into the same issues with regional access.

There could be any number of reasons of why music is available and then not. Could be the music was only up for a short time to promote that artist's music in a given region of the world, and then it is pulled to see if digital or CD sales in music improves for the artist in a given region of the world. Could be the agreement between the label who owns control of an artist's music, and with the distributor of that music has come to an end and has expired, and so now the music is in a no man's land for that region of the world at the moment until a new agreement is reached to continue with distributing that artist's music in a given region. Could simply be the label and/or artist has decided to pull the content from a given region for any number of reasons, personal politics, the label and/or artist has decided to focus their resources in other regions of the World where there is signs of fan growth of their music to increase attendance at live shows.

In the meantime I have to give the standard response: 

Spotify wants all the world's music, and they're working hard on making this happen for you. However sometimes agreements can’t be reached with the artist or label or a change may happen in music ownership.

Spotify adds thousands of albums and artists are added every day. If you can’t find an artist you’re looking for, they may appear (or reappear) soon. In the meantime, feel free to contact the artist or their label to ask when they plan to be on Spotify. 

For you, you would want to ask the artist or label why their music was removed from Costa Rica access to the Spotify service. Could be the content is just down for your region temporarily for meta data updating or track information correction and the music will show back up again, but sometimes stuff comes down and stays off for a long while before it shows back up again.