Spotify has a pretty cheap paid option that removes all of that. To those who justify wanting the paid service for nothing by saying Spotify won't "take responsibility" or "assume liability" for their ads or those ads "might deliver malware" or are "intrusive" as a weak rationalization, you present a false dichotomy. There are at least three options:
1. Pay for the service
2. Suffer through the ads
3. Don't use the service
This thread is an object lesson in why basically every large service on the Internet is ad-supported. When people aren't willing to pay for 1-2 coffees for a month of unlimited music streaming are you really surprised that companies have no choice to use an advertising revenue model?
Contrary to popular belief, ads can be delivered without arbitrary code execution. The Spotify app already has the ability to deliver audio and video, that's all they need. The mistake here is letting third-parties onto users devices. It's a disgusting industry-wide practice that needs to stop. Using the existing audio/video delivery system would render "ad blockers" useless. "thrid-party blockers" would still work as intended though.
And if the approach is “I won’t use services that want to use 3rd-party-RCE-style ads”, it makes sense to me. But the folks who are blocking ads are taking Spotify’s offer (pay us, let us run our ads, or don’t use our service, pick 1) and trying to shoehorn a 4th option that Spotify doesn’t offer: get the content w/o Spotify getting paid.
To tell Spotify “I’d use your service if you added an option where the ads didn’t give 3rd parties the ability to run JS on my system” is different from “I picked your current ad-supported option and then prevented the ads from running”.
Pandora and Google Play Music (and maybe Spotify too I don't know) put ads in the audio stream (and video, if you are looking at the app screen while listening to music for some reason).
Seems simpler to do this than get into a technical arms race with users.
They already do this, there are constant interruptions for 30-second audio ads. Currently, you can turn the audio down, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do something akin to the black mirror episode "fifteen million merits" where you have to look at/listen to the ads for them to go away.
The main gripe is using adsense which can still often be used to deliver malware.
I've paid for Spotify for a while, so its been some time since I've heard an ad. But from what I remember, if you put the volume below ~30%, the ad pauses.
Buy headphones with their own thumbwheel attenuator and/or mute button, or plug your corded headphones into an extension cord or dongle that has them.
Traditional broadcast radio gets zero feedback from most receivers. Spotify is already a step ahead of that by preventing users from avoiding ads just by changing the radio station, and I think that the clever tricks with the volume are really pushing it in terms of user hostility.
I pay to not get ads, so I'm not really motivated to explore avoiding them.
But if you try to advertise at me no matter what I do, or overestimate what I would pay, I will join in the arms race against your advertisers. I'll block the ads, and block the ad-blocker detectors, and block the ad-blocker-detector-blocker detectors. I'll crunch your cookies, and squash your pixel, and firewall your home-phoner.
Maybe I put a 30-minute buffering program on the audio stream that the music program is allowed to use, and tell that program to skip ahead during the ads. Maybe I also train another program to recognize the ads, and tell the first program exactly how far to skip ahead. Maybe I lock the music program in the matrix, and control all the data it tries to get from the system, to the point that it cannot ever say what reality truly is.
There's something to be said for just playing the ad audio without trying to ensure someone is listening, or identifying who it might be. After all, Spotify could be playing music to a cat in an otherwise empty house, with the mobile device quietly displaying "Now playing 'Meow Mix Theme - Metal Version' on device 'Bluetooth speaker'."
(If that song actually exists, I cannot attest to its quality, because I swear I thought I was making it up.)
Payments to artists are based on total listens, not who is paying or who you listen to. So your money goes to the artists listened to by others :(
They are also shockingly bad with snooping on you and sharing data.
Ads that come from third parties are open to exploitation and not properly vetted, not to mention may be jarring to your experience.
I was a paying customer for a long time but i dont like basically anything about how they work. I quit after the privacy policy got repeatedly worse and given that i was paying more than it cost to just buy all the music i listened to (when taken over years assuming youtube is as good when you are just showing someone a song not listening for quality). And they were still insisting on spying on me and keeping the data, wanting to know as much as possible about what i was doing! Even though i was paying for the service :(
And to top it all the money was going to effectively top playing radio artists :( direct purchase of flacs from the artist FTW. If you are going to pay for a service make it dropbox or something else more agnostic / flexible.
sometimes annoying UX can turn users away instead of leading the users to give them money.
They know the ads are annoying and can turn users away. So they nudge the users with one of those "hey, these ads suck don't they? pay us for an ad-free experience" during ad spots or in place of ad spots.
I don't think I've used another service that uses so many of their prime ad spots to try to advertise getting rid of ads.
This may also suggest that Spotify makes muchmuchmuch less than $10/user/month on ads. So much less that they can afford not to show paid ads in an ad spot if it'll lead to more paying users. Which I'd agree. Or maybe supply and demand kicks in and they just up their ads pricing as a result of showing less ads. But I don't think the ad-buying market can bear increases in ad pricing, otherwise facebook could just up their ads pricing instead of destroying the newsfeed with so many ads, which hurts user retention.
I've never had issues on Mac, Windows, or Linux with the operating system's mute stopping ad playback.
On a related note, Spotify's volume controls should never be touched, because no matter what you set the music volume to, ads will play at full volume. It's usually louder than the music anyway, but the damage to your ears can be minimized.
I haven't ever used spotify, so forgive my ignorance. How are they measuring the system volume from inside a webapp? Shouldn't that information not be visible to them?
It pauses it if you put the in-app volume too low. I think the desktop client also reacts to the system volume setting, but it's been a while since I had the free plan.
I have this issue with the NPR One web player on Windows7. When the laptop is muted and I press the physical button to unmute it, the mute light goes off, but the web player soft-mutes. Argh.
Why can’t the mute button just be a physical switch!?!?!?
You could try getting a 3.5mm stereo cable, cutting the end off and using that as your physical mute button. Not sure if that routes audio to the "headphones" at the software or firmware level, but anything reading volume levels would still see it set to whatever level the OS is at.
That was one of the annoyances that finally made me pay for the service. The other one was that they were constantly changing what the free plan allows you to do back then.
If I'm not mistaken the audio ads still use ad servers, so if you're on a network where someone is running a PiHole or something similar, the ads will be blocked. So running Spotify on an another person's network could get your account suspended if they're blocking ads, I guess.
This is just the argument against piracy. And if anyone proved that convenience combats piracy, it's Spotify. If you ever find your users trying to circumvent part of your process in order to make their experience better, the proper response isn't "hold up now, your experience with our product wasn't supposed to be THAT good." It's on their business to figure out how to maximize their customer's satisfaction, while still remaining profitable. Or another service will come along and do it for you.
People who use their service and also block ads aren't their customers though. They have no incentive not to block them. Sure it'd be best to come up with an alternate revenue stream that's less annoying and equally or more profitable than ads but obviously no one has or they'd be using it successfully.
Okay, but your agreement with Spotify on the free tier is "we provide music, you agree to be subject to our ads." If you block the ads, they can then yank the music.
Personally, I haven't jumped on the streaming music thing (iTunes Match is about as close as it gets for me with buying CDs or MP3s to add to it in time), but I don't think what they're doing is a bad thing.
Now, if you have some means to force the various ad networks to prevent hijacking a device and then telling me congratulations for being an Amazon customer and some random item blinks on my screen, I'm all ears. But ads in and of themselves, I don't have a problem with.
>> your agreement with Spotify on the free tier is "we provide music, you agree to be subject to our ads." If you block the ads, they can then yank the music.
Companies have a habit of trying to squeeze all kinds of stuff into their ToS/AUP, hoping they can get away with it.
Who'd want to bet Spotify's bans would survive both a) the courts, and b) public opinion? Remember they'd need to win in both.
a) absolutely - they are not stopping you from doing whatever you want on your machine, they are just not allowing to use their service. I don't think anyone would advocate making "ad blocker" a protected characteristic alongside race, gender, sexuality etc
b) absolutely - most people either don't use ad blockers, and of those that do, most people are not militantly committed to them. There will be a set of people who stop using the service out of principle, but almost all of them weren't making any revenue for spotify anyway.
The only risk to spotify I can see is if they use somekind of nefarious method to detect ad-blockers (eg root kits) and I 1) don't think they're that stupid 2) don't think they would be necessary or useful anyway.
I guess another risk is if they force people to turn off ad blockers, then accidentally serve them malware, but afaik, various other sites have done this and nobody seems to care.
I would advocate for legal rights to use an adblocker! If we don’t, it’s going to be banned under CFAA in the future. Ads suck! Nobody has the right to force these on me!
The closer you are to a monopoly, the more required you should be to serve all. We don't allow the electric company to kill your power because you made disparaging emails or bad messages online.
And if you're a monopoly, you should be dealt with heavy handedly. Because power and money only further power and money. Anti-competition laws stem that to an extent.
There are plenty of music streaming services at the same level of quality and within the ballpark of paid subscriber base as Spotify. It wouldn’t qualify as a monopoly.
Music streaming isn’t the kind of good that falls under common carrier so I don’t think the analogy of the electric company fits. People can easily go through life not subscribed to one. I for one only have iTunes Match which isn’t the all-you-can-eat style of Spotify/Apple Music/Play Music/Amazon Music/Tidal/etc.
Actually, it's "you agree to allow us to run code on your device with no ability to audit it or analyze it ahead of time for malware". If they want to "play" an ad, they certainly have the ability to do it.
On a related note, getting unapproved access described as "stealing" (or theft, or piracy, or...) didn't stop being a nasty rhetorical trick just because it became standard.
Creating another copy or playthrough of a song without permission doesn't have zero cost, fine, but the entire conversation is cheapened when people talk like it's the same thing as pocketing a cassette tape from a store.
If I took a copy of Stephen King's next book off his editor's computer and post it for free online before he sold a single copy, would it be a nasty rhetorical truck to call that stealing/theft/piracy...?
Totally different question, which is itself a nasty rhetorical trick - but also yes.
You switched the topic from receiving for personal use to distributing. Demand promotes supply, I'm not unaware, but that doesn't make them equivalent - unless we'd like to equate drugdealing with possession, and scalping with buying a secondhand concert ticket? You also escalated from 'distribution' like burning a CD for a friend to invading someone's computer and publicizing a nonpublic work. This is the same sort of dodge the RIAA has been using for years, pursuing downloads and uploads indifferently and targeting private, unpaid sharing with laws aimed at systematic, for-profit fraud.
But even ignoring every part of that, yes. It's still a rhetorical trick. Theft is, by legal, dictionary, and common-use definitions, an act that deprives the victim of the stolen property. Stealing King's manuscript off his editor's desk would be theft. Copying the book would be a lot of things, like a real CFAA violation, probably either B&E or wire fraud, and debatably trespass to chattels. Posting it online would prompt another list of crimes and civil suits relating to the potential monetary harm to King.
I'm not excusing all acts described as 'piracy' or 'theft'. I'm saying that the label actually matters, and the discussion is harmed by applying law and rhetoric about deprivation to an act of duplication.
Speaking of nasty rhetorical tricks, "personal use" is just a distribution at small scale.
It's just a rhetorical trick that pro-theft people (people who steal the hard earned labor of other people because of entitlement or, perhaps, just devotion to technical pedantry) use to justify their immoral behavior.
The creators of the content intended it to be available for purchase only and distributed it so that only those who pay could listen.
When you violate that intellectual property, you steal from them. You steal their labor, their time, their blood sweat and tears.
I'm always fascinated at the kind of evil it takes to justify this kind of stealing.
Just because they don't want you to have access to their labor doesn't mean you're entitled to it, no matter how many rhetorical tricks like "Personal Use" you use.
That's different. You'd be copying data off a personal computer that isn't publically accessible. Piracy usually involves a third party purposefully giving you access to the data.
It is and it's also within your rights not to use the service, or pay for it. Why should you be allowed to use a service in a way they don't intend you to use it?
> Why should you be allowed to use a service in a way they don't intend you to use it?
The Free Software movement has been fighting against this exact mentality for decades. Digital autonomy should be a basic human right. Anyone should be able to download and execute whatever code they want on their own computer.
Spotify also has this right, of course, and is free to block users if they choose. I am not morally obliged to support their business model. At the same time, I choose to have a paid Spotify account because it's more convenient.
If you're running the Spotify client, you're using their computer, too, not just your own. You have the right to kick them off of your PC or phone, and they have the right to kick you off of their server. What's the problem with that?
No problem at all. Spotify has every right to do this.
The original comment seems to argue that ad-blockers are morally wrong, which I disagree with. Ad-blockers are a morally neutral technology, even if they hurt some company's bottom line. Companies that dislike this reality can deploy technical countermeasures, like Spotify is doing.
If someone opens a shop and invites me to walk around, browse and chat, then that's nice - maybe i will buy.
but saying "now you must pay an entrance fee because you are wearing earphones - we want customers to listen to our trained shop staff" is kind of defeating the point.
yes they can set up weird rules for their shop, but it's dishonest to change the game now, and frankly counter productive
> yes they can set up weird rules for their shop, but it's dishonest to change the game now, and frankly counter productive
You agree to their terms before entering the shop. Everyone understands and knows this. Pretending you don't know their terms is willful ignorance. The moral issues here have been settled in law for centuries now. The only thing that actually changed is technical capability.
A much better analogy is this: You walk into a music store, and there is a sign that says "Please do not play the instruments". The shop owner walks out of the store, and you start playing the guitars because "they're not here to enforce it, so the rule doesn't apply".
I've never used this phrase in my entire life but it seems absolutely perfect for the described scenario. Sorry not sorry.
I personally chose not to use Spotify at all, but I'm not going to fault anyone for using it with a thrid-party blocker. Even if Spotify didn't also do advertising the right way (e.g. branded playlists (I believe paying users get those too)), no one is obligated to subject themselves to personal harm, even if someone is dumb enough to expose people to that risk as a subsidy for their service, no matter how useful the service is.
I believe I have the right to choose whenever possible which resources my computer downloads and what code my computer executes. That includes selecting which parts of a specific website or application I download and execute.
If Spotify wants to refuse to fulfill requests for one resource (e.g. songs) separate from requests for another resource (e.g. ads), I have absolutely no problem with that. But if Spotify chooses (as appears to be the case, at least before this account suspension policy) to fulfill both requests independent of one another, I believe I have the right to make either request, both requests, or neither request.
In other words, I have absolutely no qualms with users using ad blocking software, just like I have no problem with users using firewalls, antivirus software, or content restriction software. And I also have no problem with Spotify attempting to prevent this activity, either by making ad blocking technically infeasible (radio figured this out over 100 years ago), or by suspending accounts that violate their terms (especially free accounts, since the customer would have no case that Spotify owes them a refund or compensation).
The agreement between you and your significant other is that both parties will be faithful and to perform various duties within the relationship. Also, if the marriage is ended, both parties leave with their individual things/pay/etc.
You decide to play the field. Your significant other decides to leave you and you are now responsible for the tasks/financials that your significant other previously assisted with.
In agreements, you can't pick and choose the terms of the agreement you're willing to subject yourself to once they're settled (beyond renegotiating). In the Spotify case, they literally get nothing out of the arrangement if someone blocks their ads on the free tier whereas the person blocking said ads would be of the belief they're owed limitless listening to free music? That's pretty comical.
Should I be expected to monitor changes to a living document that I never read in the first place in order to know whether the current version means I am married to Spotify and act accordingly?
Spotify is the one who defaulted first by not providing me the limitless free music I am owed.
If the terms change, they contact you that they changed. At that point, yeah, you’re bound by new terms if you continue using the service. That’s kind of been the way things have been since the advent of Internet services in general.
I’m curious how you’re certain they defaulted first when you state that you never read the document in the first place.
I used Spotify during a Sprint promo (when they were my carrier way back when). At one point, I received an email stating that an update to the terms was made. I imagine they still do this, but I guess they could just as easily have stopped, not certain.
A lot of services that I’ve signed up with will announce new terms either via email (quick search of my email lists the most recent ones as Papa Johns, PlayStation, Disney Movie Rewards, Skype, Gamestop) or on next launch of app (Blizzard and Steam being prominent ones off the top of my head). I don’t know many that announce they will in advance though (ie at sign up saying they’ll communicate changes to you), so probably better to be proactive than reactive? I don’t know.
You agree that they can serve them to you. Blocking them kind of stops that, yeah?
8 Rights you grant us
In consideration for the rights granted to you under the Agreements, you grant us the right (1) to allow the Spotify Service to use the processor, bandwidth, and storage hardware on your Device in order to facilitate the operation of the Service, (2) to provide advertising and other information to you, and (3) to allow our business partners to do the same. In any part of the Spotify Service, the Content you access, including its selection and placement, may be influenced by commercial considerations, including Spotify’s agreements with third parties. Some Content licensed by, provided to, created by or otherwise made available by Spotify (e.g. podcasts) may contain advertising as part of the Content. The Spotify Service makes such Content available to you unmodified.
Granting Spotify rights means that the user allow them to show them ads. It's in there to protect Spotify. A user agrees not to sue them, if Spotify put ads on their phone.
It has nothing to do with whatever the user does to avoid being exposed to those ads.
That’s a very interesting take. What prior legal action justifies it?
This seems more akin to cable services here. For all intents and purposes, all of the channels they provide are served to the home, but they then restrict based off the package you’re paying for. In Spotify’s case instead of restricting (unless they have premium only channels/content), they’re adding advertisements. To block the ads is analogous to using a method to remove the restriction on channels you can access, and the typical remedy is to terminate the service to that customer and/or seeking civil remedies.
I don't know if that's an interesting take. That's what it means. I'm unaware if there's any prior legal actions but terms are written not only for any prior legal actions but also for any possible legal actions.
An analogy to cable services would be if you had something installed on your TV that automatically switched channel or put on a cat youtube video, when the commercials are on on and switched back when the commercials were done.
Your example would be an analogy to having a script on Spotify which gave you access to some premium music library that only paying customers should have access to.
Okay, how about this: it’d be like granting an entity (Spotify) the ability to put signs (advertisements) in your yard (browser window), and then when they go to do so, you prevent them from entering your yard (browser window).
If it isn’t against the agreement directly, it certainly is against the spirit of it. And that holds a lot of weight. Because what is the point of being able to show you advertisements if you’re going to block them from even rendering?
I get it. I don’t like ads either. Well, I’m generally fine if they make some degree of sense (none of the odd ones where it has a picture of an onion partially covered by a sock or something) or don’t hijack the browser (massive redirect that eats back history and presents me with some “congratulations, click here” thing). But if I don’t like the ads, I’m free to either pay for Spotify without advertisements or not use Spotify at all. No one is holding a gun to my head that I must have them (and I don’t after a promo period with Sprint) and they do have to pay licensing for that music (to include some kind of fee per x streams of given songs to ASCAP or whatever). That doesn’t even factor in the infrastructure requirements on their end. So why would anyone expect this to be totally free to a user?
> circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service, or creating or distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify Service
However if I change the country id to "us" I get the same version as you, and I can see this new section 9.10.
If I google the new text, I find articles from yesterday about Spotify changing their terms in order to ban users using adblockers. So it appears that up until now, users has not had any agreement with Spotify that they will not block or circumvent ads.
I guess they are changing them incrementally. The terms changed for the UK last week (there seemingly was little interest from anyone). Unless there's something special in Danish law I'd expect yours to be updated soon.
ToS's (online, at least) aren't legally enforceable. If they were actually legally binding companies would be sueing users for violating them all the time. Theres a reason the extent of ToS enforcement is just account closure, its because they have no legal standing and just act as a safeguard against actual legal challenges.
My only point is that you don't have a "right" to use the service. The ToS not being legally enforceable does not change that fact. Spotify can kick you off for violating their terms, but they can also kick you off for whatever they want.
Being barred from the service is not some sort of injustice or violation of your rights, especially after breaking the terms.
The people in this thread claiming they can do whatever they want and block ads is true. That does not give them some sort of moral high ground, just because they can.
You would be absolutely incorrect. I've received scores of C&D's over the years, which I've always complied with, and seen several people get sued and lose with penalties being both criminal and financial.
I would say it's unlikely that Spotify would even send a C&D to an adblocking user, but the folks that make their own apps to bypass the advertising or rip the streams are at legal risk.
The legal enforceability of the TOS isn't really important here, when you use a service there are conditions with that service. Go ahead and try walking into starbucks, paying for half of a tall americano and walking out the door with half of a tall americano. Service providers have the inherent right to place conditions and limits on the services they provide.
Did they succeed? I've seen a man with mental health issues walk in an order a coffee normally, paying money for the coffee, then start ranting while waiting for it to be made and end up being led off by the police because he was getting uncomfortably aggressive. There are conditions for service outside of the absolutely obvious ones.
Yeah...I dunno maybe the baristas are more accomodating at the one I go to but they're usually pretty happy to make things like that and charge less for it.
If you look at starbuck's prices you'll see some drink x being sold as a Venti - 5$, Grande - 4.25$, Tall - 4$, for a while this really annoyed my brain since a Venti is 2x a Tall (or so) so the low price difference makes it silly not to just get a Venti half as often. In actuality the price of what you're buying is contributed to very minorly by the ingredients and much more by the labour and that 4$ might be as close to the floor as starbucks is willing to go. That's a bit interesting and different...
Additionally, good on your baristas for being flexible, though the corporate office might object and come down on them if they found they were offering this, as they're either losing money or making less money serving you then they'd make if they served a different customer - so the time to make your drink would be particularly economically suboptimal.
Anyways, these are mostly fiddly points and my original comment was less about the fact that businesses always did things like this... and more about the fact that they do have the right to refuse. If you go in one day and a different barista is behind the machine, they may refuse your request and so it goes - alternatively maybe your usual barista got a talking to from management and can't do it any more. Either of these cases work, declining partial service is an option for a business... in fact, declining normal service is also usually an option, maybe you're going to a ramen place that's open until 7 and arrive well before, but the owner has a headache and is closing up at 5:30 when you walk in - you're not _owed_ service.
The only exception to this is cases where people have historically been terrible and the government has specifically stepped in, if you were black and starbucks refused to serve you after serving a white customer and before serving another white customer then the onus would be on them to rationalize why they refused service (and they'd probably end up paying a hefty fine or being targeted by a lawsuit).
Oh I agree with that. I was just pointing out the example itself doesn't work so well. I do understand that it's not necessarily store policy, but comes down to the choices of specific employees. This is why i think it's a poor example. With spotify you'll never have a situation where an individual employee can make the decision to allow someone to say use an adblocker or something.
In a lot of ways you can't really compare it to real world examples, because even within corporate chains individual employees can just say fuck it and choose to give the customer a discount or a custom order or allow something they shouldn't.
With an online business like Spotify that utilizes algorithms and automatic actions, this is unlikely to ever happen.
Having worked in a few customer service jobs, or hell even now where I work now, you'd be surprised what customers think they're owed vs what they actually are and how often they do end up getting their way.
In some ways maybe it's because of this people take this mentality onto the web and expect to be able to do the same things.
The real world usually ends up being a lot more grey than the black and white of the legalese and terms and conditions of the internet.
Not really, you're using a service, the cost of that service may be incidental but the classic superman/office space bank hack of diverting all the partial cents on interest to a separate account isn't legal just because each action is so small... It is different because it'd probably be silly to enforce that everyone using their wifi has paid for a drink, but there isn't a distinction there ethically or legally... Unless you think that wifi should be a free social benefit for everyone everywhere - but that particular wifi is being provided by starbucks for a cost to them.
I just think it would be very hard to legally argue that there is any implied contract that you must buy a coffee to use the WiFi. But then again, IANAL.
There is a literal contract for Sbux wifi. You need to agree to a ToS when you join the wifi network. That ToS includes "you must be a starbucks customer".
Obviously what a "customer" entails is up for legal debate, but it generally does not include people who purchase nothing from Sbux.
IMHO, the more correct analogy will be to walk into cinema and watch cinema without paying for pop-corn, despite the fact that theater makes most of their profit on pop-corn.
I have no obligation to make a business profitable.
If the ticket price was bumped up by $20 and popcorn was included free you might rationally object to the fact that you didn't want their overpriced air anyways, but it doesn't mean you'd have any inherent right to utilize the service at the old cost - competition might fix that problem (a new theatre with slightly more expensive tickets than the old one originally offered, but far cheaper than the new tickets to movie + popcorn) or regulation might (especially if movie theatres don't scale well (and they don't, a mall with 20 movie theatres isn't going to be rolling in money)).
Customers who use too many company resources or hurt the bottom line get dropped. Like when a suspected card counter is banned from a casino. That's just what's happening here.
>> I have no obligation to make a business profitable.
Do we have an obligation to allow script in our browsers? >90% of my "news reading" on the internet is done with NoScript running; from my point of view it's all good, no ads, no GDPR pop-ups, pages load quickly, fewer worries about tracking.
That's where the question gets interesting! Your browser definitely (under current laws) has the right to refuse to allow NoScript to run, so if a similar program specifically targeted google ads then chrome would not be obligated to support it and could use the laws around your legal right (and lack thereof) to proprietary modify software to order you to cease & desist running it.
I think that websites do, legally, have the right to refuse you service if you run NoScript and some websites go through crazy hoop to exercise that right. I _suspect_ that using NoScript to alter the page is actually illegal under current intent since that usage could cause the software to misperform and potentially cause damages and it violates the agreed upon usage contract on that site. That said, it's _mostly_ unenforceable on a technical level (usually it's at least not cost effective to do) and I personally think it's unethical to force people to run malware to view your content - it needs a clearer definition in the law though, all this stuff is stupid hazy.
>> I _suspect_ that using NoScript to alter the page is actually illegal under current intent ...
Yet some would say the pages get altered by the scripts that stuff in the awful ads
In any case, you don't need an add-in to disable scripting. Hell, use curl to fetch the damned page. That's about as "pure" a way of fetching one as you can get.
The day they rule that curl is illegally blocking ads is the day I become a monk.
I interact a lot with ads on eBay and similar sites. I even subscribe to them! Moreover, I also like ads at Facebook news feed, because they are relevant and delivered at time. I unlike but click sometimes at ads in Google. Everything else is banned with NoScript.
IMHO, ad-driven business model is OK, but implementation matters. If site will _serve_ me with ads, I will use it. If site will try to abuse me with ads, then I will try to shield me from this abuse.
I have ideas how to solve Spotify problems, but it looks like Spotify employee are downvoting opponent comments to death, so they will have my f*ck instead of hint.
Spotify does NOT have the right to run arbitrary code on my device. That is not something that fits into the category of me using their service. That rather fits into the category of me being forced to provide a service to Spotify.
Spotify isn't reaching into your computer and running ads, you are running Spotify. If you don't want Spotify and its dependencies, you can simply not run Spotify.
I'm not sure why a "technical" dependency matters. A shirt at a shopping mall doesn't "technically" need a security tag, but it's not my prerogative to remove it.
It is my private property (my screen). I absolutely do have the right to use it partially if Spotify is emitting it freely. Their terms of service have utterly no relevance to what I disallow to be shown on my private property.
Ok so they'll ban you and then... what? You'll have no recourse, i.e., you have no inherent right to use their service as you see fit (outside your own head anyway).
At the same same time you are stealing a service if you don’t accept either of their revenue proposals when taking advantage of it. If you don’t want ads, then you need to pay in some form. Spotify is not a charity.
It's not stealing or violating any law (as far as I know, and if there is a law against it, I vehemently oppose the law). It's no different than muting radio commercials or recording live TV and fast-forwarding through the commercials. I'm not responsible for Spotify's business model or tech stack.
If Spotify wants to deliver free music bundled with advertisements, it's on them to implement that bundling correctly. If their implementation is two endpoints, one that returns music and another that returns ads, and they just politely suggest that everyone who uses the first endpoint also uses the second, I am in no way obligated to follow their suggestion.
Spotify is free to implement a less laughable implementation of ad bundling, and they're free to block my free account if they don't like my behavior, but I will always oppose any claim that I am obligated to make a request to endpoint B (and execute the code it returns!!!) if I make a request to endpoint A.
For clarity, the "I" in the above paragraphs is hypothetical. I don't use Spotify, but I do pay for Apple Music (not because I feel like I owe them, but because I like the service and think it is worth the price).
What is so special about network requests that should be an exception here? If you sign a lease for an apartment that requires you to get liability insurance from a separate provider of your choice, do you also think you have every moral right to not purchase such insurance because it's a different "endpoint"?
Isn’t the penalty for not getting the liability insurance that you get evicted? I don’t think there are criminal charges or damages that would be rewarded. So that’s just the same as Spotify suspending your account.
It's no stealing, it's not even lying. Show me where in the agreement it says exactly "you must to listen to ads from a third-party if you listen to music". There are things like "we retain the right to...", or "by using this service, you agree to allow us to...". There are no commandments, only stuff that covers their ass so you can't sue them for closing your account, exposing your personal information or letting other people hack your devices.
Stealing is taking property with the intention of permanently depriving the rightful owner of said property.
One cannot steal data by not watching ads because you can't deprive the owner of said data. Misusing a word to evoke an emotional response is intellectually dishonest and manipulative. Entitled is another overused manipulative term.
I am in fact entitled to decide what runs on my computer and spotify is entitled to decide who accesses theirs. If spotify closes accounts for not watching ads and I choose to block ads literally nobody is in the wrong. We are both exercising our respective rights.
At that point it becomes a discussion on what is prudent.
If you arne't in the habit of reading 5-10 pages of legalese when you walk into random stores I wonder why you believe people will read 5-10 pages of legalese before reading the dozens of sites they visit. People care about the terms and conditions exactly when they are informed of being in breach of them and only to the extent that being in breach of them effects their life.
In this case it seems incredibly likely that said users who aren't customers in the first place even if some of them watch ads will just watch free music on youtube.
On net spotify will save money on bandwidth which is incredibly cheap to start with, gain a modicum of new subscribers, and shrink their supply of free users that are their primary source of paid users.
Presumably they are in the best position to figure out if this is worth it and we shall all see.
> Stealing is taking property with the intention of permanently depriving the rightful owner of said property.
> One cannot steal data by not watching ads because you can't deprive the owner of said data.
Well, it is. Spotify grants you the temporary license to play the copyrighted song for you listening to their ads. They _pay_ for the right to distribute that song. It's like taking something from a store and refusing to pay for it because "that store does not decide where my money goes".
> I am in fact entitled to decide what runs on my computer and spotify is entitled to decide who accesses theirs. If spotify closes accounts for not watching ads and I choose to block ads literally nobody is in the wrong. We are both exercising our respective rights.
Fully agreed.
> On net spotify will save money on bandwidth which is incredibly cheap to start with, gain a modicum of new subscribers, and shrink their supply of free users that are their primary source of paid users.
Well, as said above, they pay licensing fees and that is actually most of their business cost. I highly doubt that they loose many customers who would bring in any money with this move.
Stealing is a term of art for the legal arena. Just like a million idiots who call their entire tower a cpu doesn't serve to redefine a technical term you "feeling" like not watching ads is stealing food from your mouth doesn't mean that it is.
There are a number of pieces of actual property involved but the user isn't carting off Spotify's servers and spotify isn't breaking into the users home and stealing their laptops.
What you do want to cart of is the users autonomy to manage how their actual property is used in service to an imaginary moral duty to be brainwashed by propoganda based on terms and conditions that we don't agree are a moral obligation.
You have a moral right to the actual money your users have agreed to pay you if you provide the agreed upon service.
The fact that you actually believe that you can buy their thoughts, their autonomy, their attention, and their time with your cheap crap doesn't mean if they opt not to give you those things you have been stolen from because those things were never for sale and you can't own them.
The best you can do is not do business if you feel like the deal isn't mutually beneficial. Take your ball and go home if you like but don't be dumb enough to call your users thieves for claiming unalienable rights to their own brains and machines.
> a: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
Using Spotify without paying them, either directly or by watching ads, falls under that definition. The fact that there is no actual object being taken does not impact this.
If you create a great piece of software and I copy and then sell it, would you not consider it stealing? After all, you still have your copy.
Or, if a client contracts you to configure his network and then refuses to pay, is that not stealing your work? After all, you just used knowledge and time. Nothing stolen here, you still have your knowledge and you can surely make a copy of the configuration files :)
> The fact that you actually believe that you can buy their thoughts, their autonomy, their attention, and their time with your cheap crap doesn't mean if they opt not to give you those things you have been stolen from because those things were never for sale and you can't own them.
I don't believe you can buy their thoughts and I don't think Spotify attempts to. But you can definitely buy their time. That's exactly what you sell when you're employed.
> The best you can do is not do business if you feel like the deal isn't mutually beneficial. Take your ball and go home if you like but don't be dumb enough to call your users thieves for claiming unalienable rights to their own brains and machines.
Again, I totally agree. I would not use Spotify with Ads either. But if I'm not willing to fulfill my side of the deal, be it paying with time or money, I'm in no way entitled to their service.
"But you can definitely buy their time. That's exactly what you sell when you're employed."
The relationship you have with your employees is the inverse of the relationship you have with your users. I think you don't understand the idea of entitlement anymore than stealing.
They aren't entitled to spotify if spotify doesn't want to do business with them but they are entitled to have a negative opinion about spotify and or spotify's actions.
The fact that an increasing share of spotify's users neither want to pay them or watch their ads is a failure on Spotify's part to capture those potential users and reliance on a business model that is fundamentally stupid.
The fact that ad supported multimedia worked for so long is not an indication of future longevity. Horses were a great method of transportation for longer.
Section 8 grants Spotify and their business partners the right to provide advertising and other information to you. That's you granting them rights should they succeed in doing so, not you guaranteeing the ability to do it.
Section 9, item 5 only mentions "circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service". Nothing about "third party" ads, when "third party" is explicitly mentioned in other rules, separate from "the Spotify Service". If they legally can, I'm sure they'll "fix" that wording, at which point using a typical ad blocker with become lying, but still definitely not stealing. That rule is redundant anyway as it would required circumventing DRM, already illegal.
I guess there are plenty of "commandments" there, but they're all for show as they're either already illegal or fall under the fact that Spotify can deactivate your account whenever they want, even for reasons not listed there.
It only allows them to TRY to provide ads to me, according to particular web requests, etc. It does not mean I am compelled to allow it to be displayed on the screen I own, regardless of whether I consuming from the free content stream they decided to emit.
I could cut out a small rectangle of construction paper and create a robot with a computer vision apparatus, and have it follow me around, constantly check if an ad is visible on the screen, and dynamically block my field of vision to ensure I don’t see it.
Or I could miniaturize that whole thing and place it as a browser plugin or mobile app.
I’m frankly surprised you believe terms of service regarding a data stream that a company chooses to freely emit are in any way related whatsoever to a person’s right to restrict what is displayed on a physical device that they own.
My screen is not Spotify’s property. They are allowed to TRY to display something on it, and it will only be displayed IF I LET THEM. There’s no discussion here.
>My screen is not Spotify’s property. They are allowed to TRY to display something on it, and it will only be displayed IF I LET THEM. There’s no discussion here
And they will only send you that stream IF YOU LET THEM (display ads). That's the deal whether or not you like it. You don't get to substitute your own.
Nobody is “using the service in any way you like” at all. Preventing some certain pixels for being allowed to be displayed on a piece of my personal property has no connection, legal or otherwise, to usage of some freely emitted data stream someone else decided to send out freely to the world.
The person who sends it out to the world might write some things down or complain about what they want to control on my personal property, but it is just not relevant to anything. They are free to stop producing a freely available data stream if they don’t want to. Just like I am free to keep blocking certain infos they try to send me (ads).
We emphatically don't agree. I believe the user and spotify have the right to do whatever they like with their property. Spotify having the right to discontinue doing business doesn't indicate that the user didn't have the right to control their own property in the first place.
I believe it's safe to assume that (1) You sell a product or service for which people pay you, or (2) You derive an income working for someone else that sells a product or service for which people pay, or that (3) You receive financial support from someone who is within one of the above.
What happens to the food on your table when people take that product or service without giving you money for it?
Maybe Spotify and others could offer an option to serve untargeted ads, but hide it away under heaps of menus and technical jargon such that only the 0.1% of their users who are obsessed with this topic will bother with it
> To tell Spotify “I’d use your service if you added an option where the ads didn’t give 3rd parties the ability to run JS on my system” is different from “I picked your current ad-supported option and then prevented the ads from running”.
Is it really, when the solution I'm using to prevent ads from running is blocking a handful of 3rd party domains in my hosts file? I haven't taken away Spotify's capacity to run ads on my machine, only the 3rd party's capacity. Spotify could even test whether I'm interested in blocking first party ads by running their Spotify Premium ads this way.
On the whole, it seems like a more effective way to communicate blocking ads seems like a more effective way to communicate my distaste than abstaining from use of the service and contacting them (how?) to let them know I would use the service if get served ads directly. This way, they know exactly how much I use the service. That way, who's to say whether I'd actually use the service if they changed their ad serving model the way I say?
Spotify telling us, "you have to let us run unvetted third party software on your device to listen to music for free" is completely different from, "here is an ad-supported music streaming option."
They don't have to search your computer to figure that out in most adblocking implementations. If you're blocking the ad's network request but listening to the music, they can detect that server-side. If you're muting your volume while the ad is playing, they can detect that in the client with simple volume APIs.
You know people can just create another account, right?
Also, they can do other things, such as starting a consumer revolt against Spotify, and by giving them bad publicity, that may cause paying users to remember about their unused account and cancel it.
I don't know about other users, but I'm not canceling my Spotify account to stand in solidarity with the freeloaders. Ad blocking users are a net negative to Spotify, why shouldn't they ban them?
Ad blocking users are a net negative to Spotify, why shouldn't they ban them?
It's not unthinkable that ad blocking users are keeping money and attention away from Spotify's competitors, spreading enthusiasm about Spotify to more people who will become paying customers, and giving Spotify more ears and more user information to inform their decisions.
Ad blocking users cost, but only as much as a low-bitrate audio stream - and that should get cheaper every year. At some point, will it cross so they're not net-negatives?
The hard thing for platforms is that no one trusts the platform to not lie about delivery metrics. Thus the need for advertisers to run code to verify it ran and run alternative networks. No idea why advertisers trust the ad networks over say spotify. This was going the otherway then facebook's massive lies about video ad views tanked it.
Other services like twitch have done what you said and users are equally irate about ads they can't skip and are completely embedded.
Basically it sucks for all parties involved. But at the end of the day you have to monetize or die.
Also I feel a lot of users are voting that 2 coffees a month is too much for music. I'm an old so... but for most of my life music just came out of a box for free. Sure I didn't have much control over it. But when I use spotify I just or pandora or amazon I tend to just get a genre based station going and just let it roll. Just like radio. I don't have time to be futzing around with optimizing playlists and that, I literally just don't care about music very much. Hell one of my friends, when he wants to concentrate, just puts the same song on repeat all day long (8+ hours).
That used to cost: cost free, price of tape/cd ($16 / year way over priced), free(napster,piracy), free with ads (pandora)...
Hell I can't even stomach paying $12 / month to xm when I'm going to drive cross country with no coverage.
> The hard thing for platforms is that no one trusts the platform to not lie about delivery metrics. Thus the need for advertisers to run code to verify it ran and run alternative networks.
None of that is my problem as a user though. I'm not obligated to expose myself to malware so that Coca-Cola can accurately track how many people saw their ad.
Within current legal standards you are. Ideally the government is supposed to step in and regulate situations like these to remove bad actors and provide consumer protections, since in a monopoly/oligopoly consumers can be forced to go without a service to comply with onerous conditions for that service and the music industry loves their monopolies.
A website is currently absolutely within their rights to decline you service if you refuse to be tracked by Coca-Cola's spyware ridden malware. This is a consequence of living in a society dominated by false cries to adhere to incorrectly stated libertarian ideals - regulation isn't all bad, though anti-competitive regulation tends to be bad (there is a grey area with incidentally introducing barriers to market entries to fulfill a social need... like everything - it's complicated).
This is what is frustrating. I will agree that users are subject to civil law, but that is not a moral claim. I am seeing so many people on HN taking a strong, rebuking moral stance on a civil matter. They hand wave the morality of Spotify allowing RCE by third-parties but feel indignant for a person breaking a fucking TOS or EULA.
> They hand wave the morality of Spotify allowing RCE by third-parties but feel indignant for a person breaking a fucking TOS or EULA.
If Spotify wants to suspend accounts for using adblockers, fine. I don't actually object. But I'm seriously disturbed by the number of comments here which equate using adblocked Spotify with 'stealing music' or otherwise imply that ToS violations are criminal acts. This sort of framing, by people who ought to know better, is why tech companies are still showing up in court pretending ToS violations are felonies under the CFAA. (And, thankfully, getting slapped down by increasingly-annoyed judges who understand the distinction.)
Creating a new copy of something is not the same as stealing the original, blocking ads is not the same as obtaining unauthorized access, security precautions aren't interchangeable with other approaches to adblocking, and violating a EULA is a civil matter.
Also frustrating is being hit by a wave of down votes for even tangentially mentioning libretarianism in a negative light, there is a lot of appeal to libretarianism similar to socialism, and every other governmental or economic approach, refusing to discuss the pros and cons just further cements the partisan divide.
Just to be clear, libretarianism is not incompatible with regulation - I happen to think that a certain amount of regulation and government oversight is required to allow things to function, I am an optimist about human behavior, but the ideal anarchist world with no laws is absolutely unsustainable, IMO. So my barb (and it wasn't even a sharp one) was more about the false painting of libretarianism being incompatible with government regulation and the talking points that ensue, then any desire to allow a focus on individual freedoms.
For whatever it's worth, I think there's a difference between mentioning libertarianism in a negative light and holding it responsible for society's ills. I think libertarianism is worth debating, and the political Libertarianism practiced in America is often ridiculous and utterly biased against individuals. But I don't think that being refused access to a service if you reject risky and unethical advertising practices is a consequence of misinterpreted libertarian theory.
The highest-profile appeals to corporate interests are made by politicians who don't claim libertarian ideal. The ability to cut consumers off from non-essential, non-monopoly services for terms violations is standard throughout countries without any libertarian tradition, so the exotic element in the US is the legal protection for spyware creators and malware distributors, neither of which stem from libertarian theory. The spyware aspect is about the lack of a direct constitutional privacy protection, and the conservative/literalist readings which have steadily eroded the penumbra reasoning. The malware aspect is the result of repeated failures to hold companies responsible for allowing data breaches or serving exploits, which owes more to special interests pandering and gross technical ignorance among legislators than to even a pretense of libertarianism.
You're right to say that cutting off service access is legal, and you're right to say that the most influential form of libertarianism in the US is twisted and often counterproductive. But I suspect I'm not alone in finding the attribution of any business-related badness to libertarianism tiring and a bad basis for a productive conversation.
I agree, yes. Maybe it's a sort of corporate motive that takes hold in each of our countries and in the US it's become infective within the libretarian section. I could just as easily see a twisting of a socialist angled view being twisted in the same way, "Our advertising supports our service in a necessary manner and it'd be unconscionable to deprive any resident the access to our service."
As an aside, isn't it amusing that getting an American education one of the skills that seems to be valued above others is the ability to twist words to whatever B.S. you need them to mean at the time, it's like everyone in the US is an expert marketer and political fixer/spin-man.
I think you're dead-on about that corporate motive.
The US is incredibly thin on socialism, even nominal socialism, and we already see traces of this when public-interest arguments become convenient. The Net Neutrality fight is a hideously good example; once ISPs decided their monopolies were too blatant to use free market rationales, they went out and astroturfed a narrative where cheap and fair internet was an attack on minorities and the poor.
And yes, I can't deny that US libertarianism (the party and a lot of the individual voices) is weirdly pervaded by a willingness to abandon libertarian principles in deference to corporations. It wasn't that long ago that you could find conservatives complaining about excessive "civil libertarianism" in calls for social progress. Today, it's horribly easy to find people arguing that Wells Fargo should be allowed to stretch their forced arbitration clause to cover outright fraud, because apparently the bank's rights are the only ones which we need to protect.
Spotify's customers could get some anonymous Spotify accounts and verify they are getting the expected number of ads? Or pay someone to do that for them.
That's what the ad networks do, and why advertisers accept their numbers. They've been measuring advertising impact for decades and have clear processes that generally include transparency and 3rd party auditing.
Metallica doesn’t get a dime when their records played all night on college FM. The local hardware store on the radio ad also doesnt know anything about the personal lives of who might have heard their ad.
It is a different landscape now than just buying a primetime slot, advertising is much much more about gleaming any piece of potentially useful personal information about a user for an advertisers own furure use or for sale to the highest bidder. And personally identifiable information held by third parties will never be secure as it is a challenge and a prize for talented people to steal.
You don't even have to go that far. You could let ads still be html iframes with text/image/video/audio content. Just no javascript or cookies. (enforcable via csp sandbox)
And "acceptable ads" policies of blockers could require those properties. They wouldn't even need a fixed whitelist or cooperate with specific companies for that, all they have to do is allow iframes with appropriate CSP rules. I.e. it's a vendor-agnostic approach.
They would not get as much telemetry, they also want all the data, it's not just the showing of an ad, it'c collecting everything the internet knows about the user and their pc. The problem is the tracking, collecting and resale of personal data. NOT simply viewing an ad! Ya dig?
> They would not get as much telemetry, they also want all the data, it's not just the showing of an ad, it'c collecting everything the internet knows about the user and their pc. The problem is the tracking, collecting and resale of personal data. NOT simply viewing an ad! Ya dig?
As a user, I do not care one iota about advertisers who "want all the data." They can all die in an adblock-fueled fire and I won't shed a tear. Their position of "[we] want all [your] data" is a selfish unwillingness to compromise.
However, I'd be willing to compromise with advertisers who agree to live in a sandbox that blocks tracking (but only as long as the page doesn't get too ad-laden).
Unfortunately a compromise like that could only be reached through enforcement by a third party (probably the government) and in the current political climate that's not going to happen.
Why... not?... It's pretty clear market forces haven't been strong enough to enforce privacy rights in terms of sleazy advertisers? Granted, the internet is pretty new when you look at the scale of history, but I think the role of advertisers in our internet has stabilized at this point, overt malware brings repercussions, user tracking causes privacy advocates to speak out and... the hordes on facebook keep on facebooking.
Then you can't target the ads to those who most likely will buy, then each impression is worth less in most ad marketplaces. I don't think you will be able to suggest a solution if you ignore the true desires of the buyers and sellers of ads.
> Then you can't target the ads to those who most likely will buy, then each impression is worth less in most ad marketplaces. I don't think you will be able to suggest a solution if you ignore the true desires of the buyers and sellers of ads.
Their desires aren't the only factor in the equation here. If they want to satisfy their desire to have their ads seen at all, they're going to have to sacrifice some of their other desires. If they expect the user make all the sacrifices, then they shouldn't complain when users like me mercilessly block them, encourage others to do so, and do what I can to encourage regulation that would destroy them.
TV and newspaper only supported very granular targeting and the world didn't end despite that. You can still target based on context assuming the embedding site provides that information ahead of time.
The epidemic of JS heavy ads is there for 2 reasons: 1. fraud, 2. tracking
I myself is skeptical about advertisements having future as such. In the age of the Internet, ads are the least useful method to discover product info.
The analogy for Internet ads today is like if modern cars were propelled by horses - an unviable arrangement. I know many online only companies making good money and spending literally zero on ads. The industry will eventually follow that path.
I would like to see this argument based on data as opposed to your feelings. There are many years of argument about the effectivity of advertisment, with a ton of data. One can usually argue that ads are not worth the price... it's very hard to find data that they are completely ineffective. They may be less effective due to ab blocking tech but they are still able to influence people.
My parallel is that - horses are an ok way to propel a car - it works, but a gasoline engine is way, way better and convenient. Ads are the horses here
It is just about how you communicate with the buyer. For a mass market good, smarter people simply go to Alibaba.com and press ctrl+f these days, and about anything non-commodity people already know everything from subject matter websites.
Even on Alibaba itself, front page spots, and top line of search results are usually not human curated, and they cost surprisingly cheap.
Most traders there deject them outright. In consumer goods, they don't shy away to simply send few samples to paid reviewers (ones who do that openly) like Linus, NR, etc, and write honest, first hand articles about their own products in tech blogs.
I'm assuming you're using an ads-blocker. Just out of curiosity, if Spotify would serve ads via images only, without JavaScript, would you whitelist it in your ads-blocker?
If no, then the loading of JavaScript isn't really the issue, isn't it?
Man, I would delete my ad blockers right now and never use them again if everyone just served inert images, text, or even video without tracking affordances. I mainly block ads so I can cling to my last tiny shred of privacy and security
I add my take. I started blocking ads so many years ago that I lost the memory of it. It was not for fear of tracking and privacy intrusion. It was to improve the legibility of web pages. Ads pollute them so much more than they did to newspapers. Years after that, I started enjoying the implications of adblocking on privacy and tracking.
I also use uBlock Origin to hide many elements on several pages only to improve legibility, expecially on mobile (hello Medium hosted sites! and many other fixed positioned menus.)
Several companies have done this and the users still scream about it, sometimes more because now they can't block the ads.
The other hard thing for a company is internally, you see normal ad revenue going down and you have some users you can deliver to via some methods. You have to crank that method up to account for it.
Ads is also interesting with the "how much money is enough money" argument. When do you stop monetizing.
I started when x10 camera popups were the thing. Now, it's to control the javascript execution on my computer. It's stupid to allow JS to be run on your computer. (We do it because everything breaks if we don't. But it's still stupid).
Hypothetically there are three groups of people: Those who don't block ads, those who block distracting/dangerous ads and whitelist responsible ad delivery, and those who block everything.
In practice the second group is miniscule. There is zero incentive for companies to improve their practices and grow their market by targeting those people. Instead the only path to maximising profit is to increase the value they can get from people without ad blockers.
Do you really believe this is the main motivation behind people who are blocking Spotify ads? That they are sophisticated tech users who wish to express their distaste for intrusive script-based ads? Or is it simply because they want to use Spotify ad free without paying (in other words, engage in piracy to save some money)?
I find this rationale, while likely true for many readers on Hacker News, unlikely to generalize to overall population fo Spotify ad blockers.
It's not that it's impossible to deliver ads without referring to a thirds party site's code. It's that advertisers don't trust content sites to just tell them how many views they got.
1. It's not just 1 type of ad. In Little Snitch, I have permitted Spotify to connect to 281 different domain names, most of which are ad-related. That's a lot of companies being allowed to run JS in whatever webview Spotify uses to display ads. I don't listen much on my computer anymore.
2. They keep advertising deals to me - $0.99 for a month, or $9 for 3 months, that I can't subscribe to because they don't let people in Quebec sign up for them, (something related to the consumer protection laws here). These ads are audio, in-app visuals, and even E-mails. This leaves a horrible taste in my mouth, and I've let them know several times, but they never change it. That, combined with the fact that I feel like the $10/month subscription is a tad expensive, make me very reluctant to subscribe again, (I was a subscriber through my mobile phone plane for a long time). At $5/month I'd subscribe instantly. $7-8 I'd probably still do it. $9-10 I can buy 10-12 CDs per year that I own in perpetuity.
I feel like if they did the ads right, (in-house, with non-insulting geotargeting), or offered a subscription price closer to one latté per month, I would have a lot less animosity and be more supportive of this move.
This is good in other ways! One of the problems with Spotify is that the musicians don't really get paid a realistically useful amount. I say this as someone who has both a Spotify subscription and musician friends whose music is on Spotify.
That said, I personally find the subscription price surprisingly low for what I get, but I wouldn't try to tell you what to do with your money.
CDs don't send money to musicians either, unless they are self-publishing. But there's still a gap: I can't mix my paid-for (ripped) CDs and paid-for MP3s/AACs with streams in one app. This is the problem of letting the music distributer (Spotify) also control the player app.
I do this. It works, but there are some shortcomings.
You have to install the Spotify App on your PC. Adding new songs has been incredibly flaky for me (not recognizing that I've put new songs in the folder, Windows 10). The artists and albums don't show up in the "Artists" or "Albums" part of my Spotify library.
For now. Spotify has removed so many useful features from their desktop app over the years, I won't be surprised in the slightest when they remove the ability to listen to local files.
As a long time user on desktop, I haven't really seen much change or loss of features. The mobile app, on the other hand, tends to be flavor of the month. No longer defaulting to my library and instead the discovery home is probably the biggest annoyance
I'm surprised to see this. The integration of your personal library was totally ruined (for me) several years ago when they removed the ability to "unlink" songs. When you add your own files to Spotify, the files are scanned and sometimes matched against files in Spotify's own database. The trouble is that Spotify is pretty bad at identifying files correctly and will misidentify them and "link" them to a track on the service. Once this happens, you have no reasonable recourse.
To be fair, this is a pretty niche problem - tends to only be a problem when dealing with live music. So for example, if I have a concert recording, and make a playlist of those files for use in Spotify, Spotify will almost certainly replace at least one of those files with an album cut from the service. Now I'm left with a playlist of a live show that has had several tracks replaced with the _wrong_ version by Spotify.
The thing that initially drew me to Spotify was the fact that it made it pretty easy to integrate the music offered by the service with my personal library. I've always been disappointed that this feature was broken and left broken because the vast majority of people don't care about managing their own music libraries.
I've been a long time user on desktop as well. I was a fairly heavy user of Spotify plugins (and maybe "apps", but I didn't understand the difference). Plugins, of course, do not exist anymore. Looks like maybe about four years ago: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/No-Apps-plu...
I'm a little salty about them closing off third-party development, but it's cool, they can do what they want with their stuff. I saw the writing on the wall a while ago when they were pushing Facebook integration like crazy -- as they become more and more anti-consumer, I'll simply avail myself of their services less and less until they offer me no value.
> I can't mix my paid-for (ripped) CDs and paid-for MP3s/AACs with streams in one app
It's not an optimal solution, but iTunes can import songs from CDs, and you can add other mp3s to your library, but it doesn't cloud sync across devices.
Another solution is Google Play Music, which can import your iTunes library (and CDs indirectly from iTunes) and does do cloud sync.
I’m not sure it does, or if it does it doesn’t work very well. I have an apple music subscription. If I enable iCloud Music Library it only adds the songs to my other devices if they’re available on Apple Music.
There doesn’t seem to be a way for me to upload my own MP3s to the service like you can on Google Play Music.
iTunes has two options for cloud syncing your library: $10/month Apple Music (which includes downloading or streaming both music you uploaded and the whole Apple Music catalog) and $25/year iTunes Match (which lets you downloading or streaming music you uploaded, but not the whole Apple Music catalog)
There's 2 ways Apple handles music you've ripped. If the music's fingerprint matches that of something they already have in the iTunes Store, your iCloud Music Library will be populated with the iTunes Store version of the song, so you can download that on your other devices. Only the original uploading device retains the original file. This is usually a good thing as the iTunes Store version is frequently better-quality than whatever MP3 or AAC you had ripped.
The second way is if the file's fingerprint doesn't match any song in the iTunes Store catalog, then with iTunes Match, iTunes will actually upload the whole file and your other devices will then stream or download that exact file. There are some limits here; I think there's a limit on the song duration (not sure what it is but I'm pretty sure songs over 1 hour are past the limit), and there's a limit on total number of songs (at launch this was 25k; I think they've raised it higher but I don't know what the current limit is). Whatever the limits are, I do know my father's music collection (all manually ripped from a massive CD collection) is too large for iTunes Match, so he's stuck managing music the way we all used to do before Apple Music and iTunes Match came along.
As far as I'm aware, the Apple Music subscription supports the first mechanism but not the second, and the iTunes Match subscription is needed for the second option. That said, I'm not 100% positive.
Personally these days I just buy albums and individual songs from iTunes. I like to "own" my music. They key is to have a budget and try not to exceed it.
Google Music allows exactly this. You upload all the stuff you own and have ripped yourself. Then, you can listen to that without paying. If you subscribe, you can build playlists and what not that include any song either from your library or their global library. Pretty neat.
Apparently almost the entire musician-as-a-middle-class has been wiped out since the internet and streaming got big. Jaron Lanier talks about it fairy often: now, almost everything goes to the top earners.
This is a fair point. The one who is most vocal about Spotify does not make her living (entirely) from her music in the first place. It would be most accurate to say Spotify has had no effect.
> The actually popular artists make great money
Is this so? As I recall, Spotify pays tenths of a U.S. cent per stream. The gross payout for a million streams is a few thousand dollars.
There's a strong argument for "$10/month is amazing for unlimited access to this entire catalog!" But I wonder how many songs or artists I actually listen to. Is it really that much more than I would if I were buying CDs?
I do enjoy the personalized playlists a lot, though.
Personally it's the freedom that I enjoy more. For example I have 400 songs into my Christmas playlist. There's so many duplicate, like Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas is there 9 times, but it's fun to have the different versions. Sure it would be fine to have 2-3 albums of Christmas, but then I would have to choose and there would be less diversity.
It's also amazing to discover stuff and follow new paths. Sure you could try to buy a random new album during a month, but that would be your whole exploration for that month, I could explore many more albums in a day. Right now I listen to a lot of a cappella group because of a good Pentatonix song I heard a few days ago.
I also enjoy just being able to listen to any CD. When I heard about A star is born, I was curious and I just had to open Google Music to listen to it, without paying more.
Would 12 CD a year would be enough to entertain myself? Yeah I have no doubt, but it wouldn't allow me to discover to having that much freedom.
For me it's much more than "I could buy CDs". A sub to Apple Music for example lets me go on musical journeys.
I listened to the many versions Vivaldi's 4 seasons the other day and enjoyed hearing how different orchestras performed. I have taken a dives into 80s rap/hip hop, or hair bands, or whatever else strikes me.
Those types of exploration were not possible in the days on only buying CDs.
If you wanted to support the artist the answer is buying concert tickets and $40 tshirts. Physical and digital sales/streaming are a drop in the bucket for a music arists income; you really burn the label when you pirate content. Cue RIAA “you wouldnt download a car, think of the artist” propaganda.
This is genre specific, and artist's popularity specific. I listen to a lot of smaller bands whose tours are almost never less than 2-3 hours from me. Plus, I don't really care for concerts anymore.
And it's completely fine to not want to trade getting the ads for getting music. I think their point is that it's available for free in return for ads, or for a fairly reasonable cost. To decide neither is for you is just fine, but it's less reasonable to choose no money+no ads.
they do. I'm a paying user in the specific region mentioned. The thing they do not offer is the first month free. Quebec law forbids companies from "offering one month free" and then auto-billing you whether you consent or not at that point.
What companies frequently do instead is offer "pay N months, get N+1 months", such as getting 13 months for a yearly subscription. Spotify just never felt like modifying their offer for local laws, but I've nevertheless been a premium member for years now.
"Ad blocker" is #1 thing that should be installed first on every single browser, everywhere, to block third party ads. Then we browse. Heck, that browser Brendan Eich is working on comes pre-installed with one. So this isn't some fringe position I hold. It's basic web hygiene.
> When people aren't willing to pay for 1-2 coffees for a month of unlimited music streaming are you really surprised that companies have no choice to use an advertising revenue model?
No. But I get the sense you're trying to express moral indignation at such users, and I don't see the logic behind that. "I like $site_owner therefore I whitelist $arbirary_third_parties whose behavior cannot be controlled nor even really measured by $site_owner" isn't a workable/scalable lesson to try to teach users.
To be clear, I also don't see any reasonable argument to be morally indignant about Spotify blocking the blockers. This is the web as it currently exists.
> "Ad blocker" is #1 thing that should be installed first on every single browser, everywhere, to block third party ads.
Agreed. But I don't block ads just because ads are annoying. I don't even block ads because I don't like being tracked. My reason for blocking ads can be summed up in a single word.
Malvertising.
As soon as ad networks began trying to spread malware through ads was when ads moved from being a nuisance to a serious security concern.
I block ads simply because I don’t want to see them. If a software annoys me I don’t use it. If a website is annoying, I leave. If a website is ok but ads are annoying, I block them.
Can someone explain to me where these "malverts" come up? I use two chrome profiles, 1 with an adblocker and 1 without, and browse pretty often with both, and while the experience without is undeniably worse (slower, bloated, garbage on the page), I've never gotten malware.
I think it will all depend on how this plays out in practice. For now, this is only some fineprint in a ton of other legalese that might or might not be used in the future.
I mean, if they show you a notification that you should really sign-up for a paid subscription or disable your adblocker, this does not really seem a big deal for me and all right for Spotify. However, if they terminate your account because you happened to use Spotify for a while on a system with adblocking enabled (does being on a Pi-Hole network count?), I am wondering if they won't just drive a lot of potential customers to Apple Music & Co, which is the last thing they need right now... I mean, if they would terminate my account like this, I definitely would not come crouching back to them asking for mercy to be allowed to sign-up for a paid subscription. I mean, I do have some dignity left.
(I usually use Spotify using their apps, so without ad-blocking, but I cannot guarantee that I haven't been using their web player from time to time, too, and of course my browser has an enabled ad-blocker. I don't pay for Spotify because I buy my MP3s and use Spotify primarily to discover new songs.)
happened to use Spotify for a while on a system with adblocking enabled
drive a lot of potential customers
If they're not paying and blocking ads, they're not customers. And if they weren't willing to pay for Spotify, why would they suddenly be willing to pay for Apple Music?
being on a Pi-Hole network
The number of people setting up home filtering devices isn't even a rounding error to a service the size of Spotify. All of those people could disappear and they wouldn't even be noticed.
Ditto for the number of people who might just happen to end up on an ad-restricted network at a friend's house.
> If they're not paying and blocking ads, they're not customers. And if they weren't willing to pay for Spotify, why would they suddenly be willing to pay for Apple Music?
Well, because they have been terminated by Spotify, of course. I mean, it is pretty easy to imagine that your preferences are "free Spotify with blocked ads is better than Spotify / Apple Music / etc. for 10+$", but that after the "free with blocked ads" option disappears you will (grudgingly) end up paying.
And the right move by Spotify would be to support this transition in a way that does not drive this business to their competitors. If you end up moving these people to choose between "ok, now I have to contact customer support to get my account unblocked so that I can then start entering my credit card details" versus "ok, I can just use this big 'Start Free Trial' button here on Apple Music", I don't think that is a very difficult choice.
Also, while Pi-Hole might be quite niche, the point I was trying to make was more that many people use adblockers (about 20% in Europe[1], far bigger than a rounding error), but many of those probably don't do so specifically for Spotify, this is just a side-effect of running Spotify in the same browser. So they might be amenable to a warning that they should disable their adblockers on Spotify, while just terminating their accounts will just drive these users to competitors.
Their customer bases aren't distinct streams. They want existing users to upgrade to a premium version. They're not going to be helped by banning those that are already in their system and a click away from an upgrade. Or, like myself, someone who tested out other similar systems and then decided to upgrade again. Does trying to use my account on a system with an adblocker (that I may not know about) warrant a ban?
This is just the “exposure” argument. Not every client converts to being a paid user. The kind that use free service and then block ads may not convert at a high enough rate to justify providing the service. Especially since it also cannibalizes the other product (paid streaming). The marketing team can then decide they’re not worth it.
It's much deeper than exposure. It's closer to an "ecosystem" model. You're likely to create playlists in a service. You will find channels that you like. You will find that some artists are not available in other services. You will find that an interface is better. You might find their "you-might-also-like" algorithm is better. I tried Google's music system for about a year before switching back to Spotify (the irony being that Google Play Music didn't play well with Google's Assistant if you have more than one Google account).
If you get banned because of an adblocker you didn't know about, assuming you care enough to contact their customer service, I'm guessing they'd unban you.
The users disappearing might not be noticed, but the PR crapstorm that would arise would definitely be noticed, especially over a long enough timeline.
I think the main competition will be Amazon Music as I already have access to it due to my Prime account.
I have a Spotify subscription because Amazon Music didn't used to exist and now I am used to Spotify, but if I'm paying for Amazon Prime anyway then why not make the switch?
It's not "terrible." It's fine if you just basically want background playlists and don't want to pay for a premium service (from Apple, Google, Amazon, Spotify, etc.). But I agree that Amazon Prime Music isn't really a competitor to Spotify in the sense of using it to search for and play specific music.
$10 is obviously nuts, but I find this one surprising as I've seen it come up a couple times. I'm on Vancouver island in BC and I'd be hard pressed to find a non-drip coffee that's not from a fast food place and isn't almost $5 after taxes.
A coffee is cheap, most of the times it is less than a dollar, sometimes as low as 10 cents if you brew it yourself from cheap ground beans.
But you probably paid $5-$10 for a coffee on a few occasions too. Though TBH, you may have done it just to rent a seat at Starbucks.
So 1-2 coffees is probably something you correctly value at about $1. By associating it with coffee, they make you think their $10/month service costs you just $1, using the super expensive case as an excuse.
Using US prices, a black basic coffee is probably $2-3 at a coffee shop.
Any kind of specialty drinks, which most people I would believe get at Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, the local coffee shop, end up being $5-8, not even in a major city or metropolitan area.
This meme is staler than McDonald's coffee. The temperature of McDonalds coffee is comparable to the temperature of Starbucks coffee, and always has been.
>In 1994, a spokesman for the National Coffee Association said that the temperature of McDonald's coffee conformed to industry standards.[2] An "admittedly unscientific" survey by the LA Times that year found that coffee was served between 157 and 182 °F (69 and 83 °C), and that two coffee outlets tested, one Burger King and one Starbucks, served hotter coffee than McDonald's.[32]
>Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's policy today[when?] is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C),[33] relying on more sternly worded warnings on cups made of rigid foam to avoid future liability, though it continues to face lawsuits over hot coffee.[33][34] The Specialty Coffee Association of America supports improved packaging methods rather than lowering the temperature at which coffee is served. The association has successfully aided the defense of subsequent coffee burn cases.[35] Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C).
The temperature of the coffee in that case was not the real issue. The real issue was the flimsy cup design that was prone to collapsing in on itself (as well as a plaintiff who was easy to sympathize with and a defendant who was impossible to sympathize with.)
I'm not trying to bring up a lawsuit, just saying that the coffee is way too hot for me. I have the same problem at most places you can stop on at the road. I usually get my gas station coffee with a side of ice.
$0.99 any size at Cumberland Farms (Northeast US). And from the looks of the morning traffic, it's quite popular (even with a Dunkin' right across the street). Some people just don't way to pay extra for coffee.
In NYC, I would say the average at an upscale place is about $3 for a cup of coffee, more like $5 for a cappuccino or similar espresso drink. With tip, I often end up spending $4-$5 for an espresso, though it pains me to admit that.
I’m skeptical. I live and work in SF and frequent fancy coffee shops. I have never seen $10 plus prices for basic espresso-based drinks, although $4-6 isn’t uncommon. A $10 coffee must of had some other markup applied or been a specialty drink.
I’m not saying SF isn’t expensive. It’s not difficult to find cocktails in the $15-25 range, for instance.
It was during last year on the GDC on some weird place near the convention center. Didn't visit any normal starbucks during the trip. Just enjoyed the $14 or so alcoholic drinks.
I typically buy at least 1 coffee a day for $7 at starbucks. Without this, I cannot function. I still cannot justify paying for any media. Certainly not $10+/month for Spotify or Netflix. Sorry. I don't care this seems inconsistent, its consistent to my own beliefs.
They sell caffeine tabs- 200mg each. A bottle of 80 is $7 at CVS. I agree with you on the subscriptions though. I'd rather buy something for life- not have it buy me for life.
Those are the customer's options. What about Spotify's?
1. Offer the service as paid-only, no free with ads option.
2. Offer a paid version and a free version, but some people use ad blockers.
3. Offer a paid version and a free version, block ad blockers and expose your customers to malware.
The last is the only one that has "expose your customers to malware" in it, so maybe they should pick one of the other two. Because if all the customers chose either paying or not using, that's the same anyway, and if they didn't, they're actively harming the remainder.
If Spotify won't respect the users rights and take responsibility and assume liability when Spotify distribute malware, why should should the user respect Spotify rights? Society is built on shared respect and the current online advertisement operates on the opposite model.
The reason why every large service on the Internet is ad-supported is that it does not need to follow advertisement laws. They don't even need to follow computer crime laws. If society would start enforce such laws onto online services we would see a major shift away from ad-supported services.
It's funny because whenever the adblock discussion comes up the standard argument is always "why can't the site have a paid subscription option? I would gladly pay for it."
Now that a service is offering subscriptions, people still don't want to pay for it, and the goalposts are shifted further.
Years ago, a Windows virus slipped on to three family machines I'm the go-to-guy for, due to Spotify using IE to display ads, and not vetting its ads properly.
My answer was two-fold - never use Spotify, and always use an ad-blocker.
Ad blockers are mandatory on my parents computers. They can’t distinguish between what is or isn’t an ad (not speaking specifically of Spotify display ads.)
I feel like I hold an opinion no one else reading hacker news has, I believe website owners should be able to deliver ads and website visitors should be able to block them.
I'm with you. Spotify can serve ads if they want. Users can block the ads if they want. Spotify can block any users (unless they are paying, then it becomes another issue) if they want.
That being said I also think Spotify (and other sites) should be held liable if they serve malware through their ads.
I feel like websites should be able to run clearly labeled ads that are not trying to pretend to be anything but an ad.
I also feel like paid for articles should be clearly labeled as such and not hoping people will not notice the review/write up isn't just an ad in sheep's clothing.
I get it. A website needs to make money in order to stay in business delivering "free" content. Why does it have to be a game? Commercials/ads on television are not hidden. We accept that in order to bring broadcast television without a BBC style licensing fee, the broadcasters make money selling air time to advertisers. Sure, some product placement occurs in some of the programming, but that's up to the producers and not the broadcasters.
Thing is, I had that all set up! I'd deleted all the IE icons! Spotify did an end-run around all my precautions, because there was basically no way to remove IE from the OS, and any app that wanted to use it could.
I've pretty much always paid for Spotify, and from what I can remember when they first started all of their ads were "radio" ads. How were they using IE to display their ads? Did they introduce pop-ups?
> Premium Gross Margin was 27.3% in Q4, up from 26.1% in Q3, and up 200 bps Y/Y. Ad-Supported Gross Margin was 22.1% in Q4, up from 18.6% in Q3, and up 350 bps Y/Y.
Adblockers have been around for more than 20 years. It's only in the last few years that they've started seriously cutting into advertisers' business.
There's a reason for that. Most people don't care enough about ads to bother installing an adblocker. It's intrusive, disruptive ads that drive them to do that. It wouldn't have come to this if site owners had taken responsibility for the content of their advertising.
And, unfortunately, most people don't bother to change their adblocker's default settings (and raise holy hell if the default settings allow non-intrusive ads), so the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. Bad actors ruin the funding model for everyone.
How did we ever get to the point where letting anyone slap any ads they want over your content seemed like a good idea? Imagine a newspaper or a TV channel running porn ads and saying "sorry, we don't control the content of our ads." They'd be crucified.
For me it feels like death by a thousand paper cuts. $10 to spotify, $10 to neflix (or whatever they charge now), $10 to some other streaming service, etc.
"... are you surprised that companies have no choice to use an advertising revenue model."
I am surprised that they continue to believe that they should have any revenue "[W]hen people aren't willing to pay for 1-2 coffees for a month of unlimited music streaming."
It's like realising people do not want to pay for what you are selling and then, instead of owning up to the fact you therefore have no viable business, you turn around and vengefully sell those same people out, keeping them around by reducing price to 0. There is no business regarding that service. You find a new customer (advertisers) and sell something else (ads). Then you portray the original "service" as your business.
No matter how popular this has become, it is still a sham.
Selling ads is a different service with a different customer. It is not the same business.
There are probably some Internet service companies that do manage to sustain themselves on paid subscriptions. Perhaps they are few and far between.
Pretending that a successful ad sales business is the same thing as a successful Internet-based paid subscription service is disengenous.
Best I'm aware, radios offer unlimited music broadcasting all day long and are doing just fine without subscribers.
I've never used Spotify, but if its free, supported by ads option means serving web-based stuff, then it might want to look into getting rid of that and serving audio ads every few songs instead. Ad Blockers wouldn't be a problem in that scenario, and Podcasters have long shown that the what essentially amounts to radio ads are a perfectly valid way to monetize audio content.
> Best I'm aware, radios offer unlimited music broadcasting all day long and are doing just fine without subscribers.
Unlimited broadcasting of the same set of songs in rotation that they choose for you. That's supposed to be a huge selling point of the streaming services is to offer a larger selection than what corporate radio limits what's broadcast.
How would an ad blocker affect those ads? Why be obtuse? Ad blockers run in a browser to block ads from the visited website. Those ads have in the past and currently been known to deliver malicious code to the browser. Spotify is threatening to suspend the accounts of someone protecting their system from this attack vector.
> This thread is an object lesson in why basically every large service on the Internet is ad-supported. When people aren't willing to pay for 1-2 coffees for a month of unlimited music streaming are you really surprised that companies have no choice to use an advertising revenue model?
Note also that in the case of Spotify, Apple Music, etc., most people will only need to subscribe to one of those services to cover pretty much all of their music streaming needs.
With, say, newspapers and magazines they can try to make the argument that to meet their needs they would need to subscribe to a bunch of different papers and magazines and that would get prohibitively expensive very fast.
You can even try that argument somewhat with video streaming services. There are enough exclusive deals between movie producers and movie streaming services that picking one service only means you likely miss out on a lot of movies you want.
We don't blame the knife when someone stabs another. Spotify is just another player in this diseased game. They are part of the problem, not a symptom of it.
This is coming from someone who has followed and evangelized Spotify since the beginning, way back when Ludvig joined and it was still P2P.
I agree with your sentiment, but there's one piece of this whole thing I have a big problem with.
It's my device. I understand Spotify's motivation to want compensation for their great service, but shouldn't I be able to run my software, on my device, on my terms? I understand this argument doesn't solve anything, and puts Spotify in a bad situation.
But...how long until someone creates a solution to scrub the audio of ads in real-time? With a beginning delay for the listening buffer, of course. This isn't trivial, but it sure is repeatable.
I wish I had something better. I don't know; this quickly feels like digital [media] in the early 2000's all over again.
What you're witnessing is the inevitable backlash. It's your device. But Spotify also has the right to block your device.
> ...how long until someone creates a solution to scrub the audio of ads in real-time?
Let me tell you a little open secret. Ad-blocking in general can be circumvented right now. Even the most aggressive ad-blocking techniques can be brought to their knees, because they can be detected and the website can serve the content in such a way as to make ads impossible to block without ruining the content.
Not many publishers do it because publishers have chosen to not piss off the minority that has ad-blockers installed. But this minority has been growing and what you're seeing is them fighting back.
You ask how long will it take to block audio ads? It's irrelevant, because the publisher can deploy DRM in such a way as to make ad-blocking attempts illegal and easy to trace, since the streaming is done in real time from a central source.
And thus users can receive big fines as to stop everyone else from doing it.
That publishers don't do this yet, that's only because they preferred to play nice with ad-blockers. But threaten their bottom line long enough and they'll fight back.
And who can blame them? Here's Spotify with a pretty good subscription model and users are now up in arms for no longer being able to get their content for free without ads.
It's irrelevant, because the publisher can deploy DRM in such a way as to make ad-blocking attempts illegal and easy to trace
How can they detect me covering the screen, looking away, or just not listening? How can that be illegal?
It's a cat-and-mouse game, and the mice will always win. Ultimately you'll get to the "analog hole of adblocking" situation anyway (user simply takes the headphones off or closes eyes or looks away etc.)
I've been using the paid option for a long time and I'm considering canceling it because the android app is crap. Worked fine in the beginning but now it frequently takes forever to load, sometimes requires a restart, and sometimes when trying to play songs, it takes a minute or two until it actually starts the song. This usually happens only when I'm using it after I've used other apps in between but I see no reason why it would happen. Not one single other app on my phone does this.
It also very often does this if connection is bad which is super weird considering all the songs are supposed to be downloaded for offline consumption.
Are you storing a large amount of offline music on an SD card? I've had that cause issues for me in the past. Their guide to fixing issues[0] is generally worth giving a shot.
That's great, but you live in a country that have these things called laws and you have to follow them whether or not you personally think that breaking them "isn't so terrible" or not.
If enough people think the laws are terrible, then lobby your representative to have them changed. This is how the system works. Half the reason it doesn't work is admittedly our corrupt officials taking the big media money (RIAA and MPAA subsequently), but the other half the equation is you and me. Everyone just wants things to magically change and be the way they think they are suppose to be without putting any skin in the game.
>That's great, but you live in a country that have these things called laws and you have to follow them whether or not you personally think that breaking them "isn't so terrible" or not.
No. There are laws and breaking them may result in actions taken by a group that has claimed the right to infringe on my liberty. The action is right or wrong, independently of the law.
In this case the sole consequence is that a person has to create a new spotify account.
Actually, I don’t think I ‘have’ to follow any of those laws. It’s just that there may or may not be consequences for not doing so.
At the end of the day what I think is moral is a lot more relevant in daily life than what the law says (it just happens to overlap in a lot of places).
I'll listen to music everyday for a week then not at all again for the next 8 months. I would happily pay for it on demand, but monthly it'd end up costing me something like $10 per minute of music listened to per year.
And when people use cups of Starbucks coffee as their internal metric for cost and then use that as a value judgement for those who are not paying, it really drives home how out of touch techies are.
For the record, I pay $20 or so for Google Play Music for the family plan, despite being single. (Or at least I do until they shut it down, leaving me with no option for mostly streaming plus artists that aren't on any streaming service such as Tool or Neil Cicierega.)
There’s a 4th option that somewhat falls under your number 2. AdNauseum (https://adnauseam.io/) spoofs interaction with ads while simultaneously blocking them. I suppose both the service and consumer can reap mutual benefits from AdNauseum.
You seem to take sides with business, but never forget the old adage: the customer is always right.
I used to pay for spotify, but they kept changing the interface and fucking up in other ways.
Seriously, I would have continued to pay them, if I could have used the same software I originally got with it.
Of course I am also the sole user who ever paid for groveshark premium, and none of the current efforts are even a tiny bit remotely close to its interface, much less its music selection.
I wish there was an option to pay a per-day rate. I like Spotify for what it does (it would be nice if I could purchase the CD of the music I listen to - alas), but there are times when I go for days or weeks without listening to it.
I'm still debating on if I want to spend $10.00 a month on something I may not use often enough to justify it? For now, in the spirit of everything, and to not be blocked, I turned off my ad-blocker. I can deal with it for now.
One thing I think about that is analogous is the fact that every month I donate $5.00 to my local NPR station - but I haven't listened to it in months! But - those are tax deductible (or at least once were? I'm not sure how it works now this tax year), and I do like the station, but I can only take so much of it at a time.
Maybe if Spotify weren't a paid service, and instead were "listener supported" with tax deductible donations - I could more readily get behind it...?
Ten dollars a month isn't that much, sure - it's something I need to think about more (it would be nice if there were an easy way to track when you use Spotify and for how long; that could help me too).
$10/month really isn't much. Compare to buying music, that's less than two album downloads from Bandcamp at normal prices. For those $10 you get completely unlimited access to all the music in Spotify's library, generated playlists and radios based on your tastes and listening habits.
Honestly, 10$/month is bordering on suspiciously cheap for what you actually get.
It's the same sort of odd psychology when it comes to paying for apps compared to paying for dinner. $2 for an app seems expensive, but $50 for a dinner for two is generally not even questioned.
...and of course the user who works for Facebook is espousing the position that we must be forced to consume content. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19115460 for more context.)
I agree, I block every ad I possibly can but if I actually benefit from using a service and they provide a (reasonably priced) paid option I'll gladly subscribe. I want the ad-driven model to die but how is it possible if the alternatives don't manage to make as much money?
Yeah, Spotify's premium plan with family member access is $15/mo. It's worth a lot more to me than that. I can't imagine tolerating ad intrusions (or feeling justified in working around their free plan's ads) to save 50 cents a day.
1-2 coffees? it's 10 bucks. where are you that 1 coffee is 10 dollars?
10 dollars is not a trivial amount of money, and its WAY above most people's pre-spotify music budget. If you don't spend that money, you have an extra $120 bucks at the end of the year.
Your pre-spotify music budget was less than $10 per month? Pre-streaming music I was definitely buying more than one CD per month, to my recollection those were about $10-15.
Even if coffee doesn't cost $5, and it costs $2.50, that's 4 coffees.
Or even $1 coffee, that's 10 coffees.
Unlimited music streaming for a month is absolutely worth 10 coffees.
The coffee example is brought up because _most_ people that claim that $120/year is a lot for them, spend a lot more than that a year on coffee.
That's not to say $10/month is trivial. I'm sure it's not a trivial amount of money for some people. The parent isn't denying that. They're saying that they're happy that Spotify is banning people that are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They're blaming people that CAN afford 1,2,5,10 coffees a month, and still chose ads or worse, adblockers for a service they can easily pay for as the demise of the internet. Which I wholeheartedly agree with.
It's because they already get unlimited music streaming for free, from multiple sources. The value added by Spotify's premium plan is ad-free unshuffled playback and the offline option, so you have to see whether you have $10 in your monthly budget for just those features. I see the value there but it's also relevant to note that your phone can already do all that if you just buy music.
> Unlimited music streaming for a month is absolutely worth 10 coffees.
Depends on the person. Much of the music I want to listen to isn't on Spotify, so I'd have to supplement it anyway, and I rotate through artists slowly enough that it is about the same to buy CDs anyway.
Paying for the service is a red herring since Spotify is specifically targeting the free tier with this policy.
Thus, there really are only two options here when it comes to the free tier on Spotify: "Endure our ad experience or no 'free' service for you." However, there is a 3rd option here when it comes to the free tier: Spotify fixes the currently-terrible ad experience on its service.
I'd be 100% fine with ads on Spotify if they were bespoke like the ads I see from https://carbonads.net. Their ads are relevant, tasteful, and unobtrusive. Oddly, I end up paying more attention to Carbon ads than I've ever paid to a Spotify ad.
Sadly, Spotify is only offering consumers two options without any hint that they've even considered that they themselves could do something to address the issues underlying their customers' use of ad blockers.
> Why should spotify have any say on what software you use on your computer?
They don't, clearly, as there are people who are running software they would prefer people don't run.
What they do have a say on is whether you get to have a Spotify account, and they can base that on whether or not you're seeing the ads their software uses for revenue.
You of course have the option to pay for the service, which results in the ads being removed from the service.
I say all this as someone who doesn't use Spotify at all.
They don't, but you also do not have an inherent right to use their service. What about video game cheats? Should e.g. Blizzard have no recourse should you run software which allows you to cheat in their games? You may say "well fix your bugs!", but it seems simpler and better for the community to just ban the tiny percentage of people who are hell bent on cheating.
Spotify having to raise prices to pay for freeloaders would harm other people, too. This isn’t like copying software where the maker has no direct loss – everyone using Spotify costs them money in bandwidth, servers, and especially playback royalties. That might not be huge but it’s definitely more than zero.
>Why should spotify have any say on what software you use on your computer?
I agree that cheating is not on par with ad-blocking, but that's neither here nor there. If there are exceptions then the GP should clarify their position.
> Five dollars a month for the rest of my life is not "cheap".
It's not five dollars a month for the rest of your life though. It's five dollars a month for as long as you want to listen to music on Spotify without ads...
> Frugal people look at the total cost of a loan, not just the monthly payment.
Thank you. The entire reason we are subject to as many ads as we are is because people aren't willing to even pay $1 a month for a service that has become indispensable to their lifestyle.
It shameful that people mindlessly spend $1000 on the latest fashion, sorry, tech accessory but can't afford a few dollars a month to enjoy the creative output of others.
I am in this predicament, and every one of these people are making up a blatant lie that they can't afford it. What they really mean is they are stubborn. They don't see money logically and clearly, where if they could they would realise their hidden costs far exceed $10 a month... Things like coffee, gas. They don't realise it racks up $10 $15 and $20 dollars behind the scenes. But theyre happy to pay for that... why? Because they don't have to see it go. They don't have to think about it. That's why people dont like subscriptions. Spotify is extremely affordable, for literally everyone who can afford an internet connection. People are lying about why they don't want to pay for it; I'm young and poor and to tell you the truth even i can afford it, I'm just way too stubborn.
People don't want to pay for it because there are mechanisms in place that sustain these businesses outside of ads. Just think about how much VC money is dumped into these services that never or barely generate a profit and they're all free to use and have been for years. Twitter and Snapchat come to mind.
Blocking ad blockers is incredibly annoying and is just an excuse for ad spamming. Let me tell you watching Youtube without ads is a dream compared to seeing a 4 second ad on every video start and then 5 mid roll ads. It's insane.
Google Play on the other hand does 2 to 3 ads after several minutes of listening. And the ads are make 10 - 15 seconds long. That's proper ad play.
>People don't want to pay for it because there are mechanisms in place that sustain these businesses outside of ads. Just think about how much VC money is dumped into these services that never or barely generate a profit and they're all free to use and have been for years.
Please correct me if this is disingenuous, but I feel like you basically just said you're used to having VCs subsidize your entertainment platforms and that you've extrapolated that entitlement into a justification for never paying for any entertainment acquired over the Internet.
At the very least, it seems obvious that it's unsustainable and likely that creative artists will be the first squeezed. Also, I don't think this explanation combat's the parent's observations about spending habits at all.
Please correct me if this is disingenuous, but I feel like you basically just said you're used to having VCs subsidize your entertainment platforms and that you've extrapolated that entitlement into a justification for never paying for any entertainment acquired over the Internet.
It has worked for several years. So why not?
At the very least, it seems obvious that it's unsustainable and likely that creative artists will be the first squeezed.
It's unlikely this would ever happen. But mostly, I'd be fine with embedded ads if they were used responsibly. But, according to Wikipedia, Spotify was founded over 10 years ago. In 2017, it was reported that it was still not profitable despite its subscription models: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38930699. Last year it launched an IPO.
So somehow, Spotify magically became profitable enough to launch an IPO or it lasted over 10 years from what looks like VC funding without being profitable and is still not profitable.
That leaves only one question, how does such a business survive so long without profit and did VC's really care considering how popular the platform is.
> Spotify is extremely affordable, for literally everyone who can afford an internet connection.
Maybe everyone in the first world, but certainly not everyone who can afford an internet connection. Smart phone internet connectivity is still pretty ubiquitous in many areas where the typical smart phone is <$100 and the average income is an order of magnitude lower than the developed world.
A large pumpkin spice latte at the starbucks down the street from me is $5.15. So two of them are over $10 and there are a lot of people who buy those. Average price of other things on the menu is around $4.
Yeah I wanna know what kind of coffee this dude is drinking. Even at the most expensive places US side it's <3.50. I know this is semantics, but that's super deceptive. The only thing of value to me from Spotify is their quantification of my musical tastes.
That said, full disclosure I'm a notorious pirate on the dread sea qbittorrent with little qualms about denying others profit; so take anything with a massive grain of salt.
No, paying for service doesn't guarantee ad-free and tracking-free experience at all, especially for VC backed companies. They probably already inject tons of tracking for paying users. And those users are still just users, not customers. The only real customers of spotify are advertisers and sooner or later paying users are going to be sold to advertisers, there is just more money there and they can't ignore that.
It sounds like they're only suspending free accounts for adblockers. At the same time, I don't mind spotify tracking how I use the application. It generates valuable data for their product managers to improve the overall experience. If there's evidence spotify is using this data to track users across the internet, then there's problem.
Spotify is not a public service, it is a company. They can pay for user testing in order to improve their product or they can use completely anonymous data. Your privacy is not a necessary sacrifice for products to improve nor should it be.
That being said, I find it OK for them to block users who try to get a paid service, for free. What isn't OK is the advertisement model. A better model in my eyes would be for limiting the free element of the service more and/or running unintrusive ads for the service itself. That way you could still push for more paying customers, without sacrificing the users who can't afford the product.
I do think their is a nuance between tracking how you use the app and letting third party systems track what you do, where you are, etc. Still, they are just a company, not a basic human need.
Ads only make up ~10% of Spotify's revenue. If they start putting ads on the paid version everyone will just leave for one of the competing ad-free services (Amazon, Apple, Google). I'm sure you're right about the tracking though.
Ads and Tracking are two different things. Just because you don't see ads related to the tracked data in spotify does not mean that information is not used by the third party elsewhere.
If pay spotify and you listen to metallica, you might not get ads on spotify, but you might get a link to Metallica merchandise on another website.
The overwhelming bulk of Spotify's revenue comes from paying customers, not advertisers. And for those who are too cheap to simply subscribe, the majority of "ads" are pleas to subscribe (because selling advertising is not the business they want to be in).
The GP's claims are nonsense, discounted by the most cursory investigation. Trotting out some tired rhetoric about advertisers being the real customer to explain away an unwillingness to pay the most trivial of amounts is just embarrassing for everyone. It's especially ironic given that so many are both trying to justify not paying for a worthwhile service while also trying to justify ripping off the same service because...ads, or something.
I am a paying customer for multiple streaming service. I pay more for ad-free experience on Hulu.
My problem is not with Ads, my problem is with Tracking, which is not the same. That is what I was saying, not endorsing ad blockers.
shrug youtube-dl -x --embed-thumbnail ${url}. Run a normalizer across it. Dump into iTunes. Get on with my life.
Ad agencies are bad actors. Not intentionally but because they have zero incentive to really police what garbage goes out across their systems. I block them on the client. I block them at the DNS level. I block them at the firewall.
I've dealt with the worst case scenario, no thanks. Previously I'd sub to spotify for a month when I was traveling and just deal with the ads that got though my standard setup when I wasn't. Now I just won't bother.
This is like saying you cannot mute your TV when a commercial comes on. Actually it’s worse. It’s saying you cannot even look away.
It’s my TV / my phone / my screen. Me. MINE. If someone else emits some information they make freely available, that in no way entails they have any say whatsoever about what I permit to be visible on MY screen.
Just like you can decide what is shown on your screen, they can decide to not let freeloaders use their service. You always have the option of paying for a subscription if having full control over what is shown on your screen is that important to you.
What do you mean freeloader? They chose to distribute the content for free, not me.
If they mistakenly thought this would allow them to guarantee certain things to appear on some private citizen’s personal property, it sounds like a very foolish decision on their part. It might mean they have to shut down the free version of their content or something.
If they try to circumvent my ability to control what is shown on the screen that I own though, it will fail comically, as there will just be an arms race of new technology I can use to ensure my freedom to control what shows up on my screen, to such a degree they would bankrupt themselves trying to control what goes on my screen.. seems a stupid waste on their part, wishing to control someone’s private property like that.
Wait! You're telling me that for the price of two coffees a month, I can have unlimited streaming on the go!?
How about if marketers want me looking at their ads, they can stop pouring millions of dollars into research about how to spy on me through those ads against my will.
The "cup of coffee" unit of measurement is becoming increasingly popular when comparing digital subscriptions. Generally these things are incredibly cheap. For some reason people are ok spending 5 bucks on a latte for 30 days a month ($150) versus an order of magnitude less for Spotify, Netflix, etc...
You cannot pay for the service, the service is free. You pay for not being forced to watch ads. Not forcing people to watch ads is what decent people simply do, nobody deserves to get paid for that.
They allow advertisers to run JS on your device, and ads are a trendy way to deliver malware. People are using ad blockers not just to hide annoyances and to improve performance, but to protect themselves from bad actors.
> JavaScript or iFrame Tags: All third-party tags and tracking URLs need to be in https format.
I was on the fence about this because there is a legitimate need to bring in revenue from free users, but they should stick to audio, video and image ads.
Between the dwindling Netflix catalog and increasingly hostile subscription service experience on Spotify, I have found myself flying the black flag again. I still have subscriptions to both, but I will be cancelling them this year. I don't want their shitty analytics payloads, I don't want their shitty anti-adblocker tech. I don't want their shitty tactics of deleting random songs off my playlists. I just want the content I paid for.
It's not because I don't want to pay for the content, I'd happily pay 2-3x under the right circumstances. It's because no one wants to take my money and provide the content I want without bundling it with drm, ads, dark patterns, insane region segmentation, and manipulative cross-sell tactics.
Whatever arguments were made about piracy detracting from sales are laughable now. The copyright and ad lobbies are detracting from those sales, piracy is just a symptom of the cancer that they are.
Sonarr + Couchpotato + Plex + Subsonic is somehow a more consumer-friendly experience than their 'legitimate' counterparts. The fact that the premium subscription cost for those services is more than netflix+spotify, and yet people are willing to pay that much for their piracy, that should be pretty telling to any industry analyst.
> It's not because I don't want to pay for the content, I'd happily pay 2-3x under the right circumstances. It's because no one wants to take my money and provide the content I want without bundling it with drm, ads, dark patterns, insane region segmentation.
Can't help you with movies/Netflix, but in the case of Spotify, you could go back to buying mp3's. Google Play, Amazon, iTunes (aac format), etc will all sell you DRM Free tracks at $1.30 a piece, and the ad-free songs become yours forever to listen to however you wish.
Bandcamp is another option. They have multiple download formats, including FLAC. Lately I've been seeing more albums from artists on ("major" indie) labels, not just self-released.
Netflix offers too much value for a small amount plus the size of movies makes downloading/previewing the throwaway type of netflix shows make it hard to justify the effort to pirate.
Spotify always seems less useful compared to winamp if you knew what music you liked or like to download everything from one band who's best days are behind them. A hassle for new stuff but if you want the all of the 'yes' albums the rare shows, interviews spotify just doesn't cut it.
A happy medium for me is google play music. Basically the same song selection and features as spotify, plus the ability to upload your own mp3s that aren't available on the platform (I actually haven't used this feature in a while, but it seems like it still works). And you get ad-free youtube as well.
I am all about Youtube premium. Replaced my spotify with it and I love it. Ad free youtube, my own mp3s along with the google music catalog is great. They even grandfather people in on the original price that they subbed for when the service price increased.
They changed that last year though. An All Access subscription now only includes YouTube Music Premium, which does not remove ads. That requires a YouTube Premium subscription. Plus I hear there are plans to ditch Play Music for YouTube Music this year...
For me it's the opposite way around. Netflix's UK catalogue is tiny compared to the US, but Spotify always has the music I want. I pay for Spotify, but not Netflix.
A bit of a tangent, but the production quality and writing of shows on BBC iPlayer is high compared to Netflix. Netflix shows increasingly feel like they're written for a generic audience, with a lot of mediocre writing and, I hate to say it, a little dose of virtue signaling as well.
That might have been true a while back, but Netflix' US catalogue seems seriously small these days due to the fragmentation of video streaming in the US, and them focussing on their own original material (at least some of it is good).
Assuming you have Netflix and Prime Video, these days I'm finding more and more occasions when the selection in the UK is bigger (!).
Not to neglect that traditional media for music can be found cheaply. I got something like 200 cds of great classical music from the relatives of a passed neighbor. Garage sales and such are great, too. They’re not great for newer music, but there are options.
Have you pirated in a while? Things like popcorntime make it trivial for even elderly people like my folks to check out new movies and shows. No longer are the days where you have to download the entire movie and hope it was a good copy you just click play and they start a progressive download from the beginnin and you can stream it within seconds. If it is a bad copy stop it and move on. I keep thinking about joining these services because it is nice to pay I believe people should get paid, but what Spotify is now doing is user hostile and now I am no longer considering joining. I use Adblock. I can not see how this will work for them. People surely will backlash.
ok well I bundle my media consumption with my phone service so on that hand it's not that problematic for me, but on the other hand I have netflix, paramount, cmore, viaplay, HBO nordic bundled as well as some cable channels and I would still have to pay another 30 dollars or so per month to get what I don't have now that I want
mp3s are compressed and lossy. Makes them unsuitable for buying. There are a few sites like bandcamp that sell flacs. Not sure why the big players don't let you buy flacs. It's not like there's an engineering issue. Maybe they get the rights only for lossy files.
Edit: Since some will invariably point out that you can't hear flacs, here's a better argument. Even if you prefer lossy music, there are and will be better codecs than mp3. So the choice of encoding should be up to you so that you can choose a better codec in the future if you wish. And mp3 wasn't even free until last year. So until 2018, it was illegal to play mp3s on a free system.
Yep.
At this point now there's so much paid music available in high quality than anyone who says that it's still not good enough is looking for reasons to feel better about themselves for not paying.
Video is something of a shitshow and I'm somewhat sympathetic to people who don't want to buy a DVD just because Netflix has driven all the local rental places out of business, their own catalog is rotting, and it's not available for even a la carte streaming. Or you have to subscribe to yet another streaming service just to watch one show.
But music? There may be corner cases but pretty much any of the big streaming services plus judicious a la carte purchases have you pretty well covered. Personally I do like owning music but then I started from a pretty large collection of physical media.
Anyone offering the complete collection of any artist including bootlags, unreleased tracks, artwork and in some cases images of used tickets of the shows?
If bootlegs and unreleased tracks were officially released, they would become official and released tracks.
If there's a specific unreleased track you want, fine, pirate that. I don't think there's anything wrong with pirating content that's not available for sale (as long as you buy it if/when it does become available for sale). However, the existence of some unreleased tracks do not give you license to pirate tracks which are released.
Outside of specific, exceptional circumstances, I have zero sympathy for anyone pirating music in 2018. Music is finally being distributed in the DRM Free, affordable, and unencumbered formats consumers have been asking for.
The problem is that if your tastes are not very conventional, the "exceptions" are half the cases, and you start to wonder why you bother.
A good example is Morphine's The Night. We're not talking about a bootleg record, it's a proper studio album owned by UMG. Yet it's not available on Spotify, Google Music or Amazon Music. It's on iTunes, but that requires installing a native app, which doesn't run on any of my devices, including the most popular OS in the world (Android). Alternatively I can buy a CD, which will cost me something like $50 with shipping, and rip it myself - and that's only because I still happen to own a desktop with a CD drive.
c’mon, ur on haxxor news and u cant run a windows vm? there’s a free image on microsoft’s homepage, and I bet you’ll manage to get itunes working and transfer the music within the free trial period.
Sure, but don't you see the absurdity? I have to download and install VirtualBox, download a full Windows VM image, download and install iTunes on it, create an account, create a virtual credit card, register it on the account, purchase the album, and then copy the files out of the VM.
All so that the artists get about $1 from my $10.
Or I can download a torrent and give those $10 to Vapors of Morphine on their Bandcamp page, which is much easier for me and will net them about $8 instead.
It's important to keep the piracy channel alive. Right now you may feel you have choices and options but there are a handful of players who can sell you everything. 2020 may not be as great.
If the media we purchase today is DRM Free, it will be easy to distribute when and if the legal channels disappear.
Having easy-accessible piracy channels now works against that goal by incentivizing content providers to invest in more stringent DRM schemes. DRM can rarely prevent piracy completely, of course, but it can make piracy more difficult and less accessible.
DRM never stopped piracy and DRM affected paying customers and drove them toward piracy makincg it more accissible (more people sharing bigger hive). The effect is not the cause in this case.
a well-encoded mp3, ogg, or aac file will be audibly transparent to almost every end user, even on extremely high-end equipment. mp3 does have the side benefit of being supported on damn near everything.
For me it's not about lossless sounding better. Storage is so cheap nowadays that it's silly not to have a full lossless encode for an archive/backup. I can transcode that lossless file into any other lossy format but transcoding a lossy file to another format destroys the quality.
It feels, for some-odd reason that us audio people have to justify our purchasing decisions and desire for quality and fidelity way more than people who spend hundreds of dollars on 21 inch 144hz monitors and care about things like frame rate and texture resolution do.
Enthusiasts complain about the crappy latency and refresh rates of modern LCD televisions all the time, against people saying "just turn on motion smoothing and most people won't notice." I'm not justifying one or the other, but it happens in both domains.
As for iTunes, don’t they sell in high bitrate AAC? It is very hard to hear a difference in the vast majority of music between a high bitrate AAC and an uncompressed file.
For recent releases they tend to be available, but you might have to look through many channels: next to Bandcamp Beatport, Qobuz, Juno Download, Bleep, Boomkat are stores I check.
> hostile subscription service experience on Spotify
???
I pay $14.99 a mo and my wife and I enjoy as much music as we can stomach. It's the one subscription I never even think about. Their service never goes down and they are constantly trying to improve the product.
> Sonarr + Couchpotato + Plex + Subsonic is somehow a more consumer-friendly experience than their 'legitimate' counterparts.
???
If you have the time to configure all of that stuff (and support it, and find pirated content) you need to seriously up your billable rate and reconsider the value of your time.
Then again if you just enjoy doing it yourself and running your own gear, that is fine too, but admit it. I don't think this has anything to do with the market being hostile.
Spotify is a great way to discover and browse music; but it kind of goes with the nature of streaming services that your access to their content is neither as reliable or as anonymous as playing files you’ve downloaded. Then again, major labels now provide lossless DRM free files through Qobuz, Juno Download, Beatport etc (although some region localisation still exists, but once you’ve bought the file that no longer affects you). Smaller labels operate through these platforms as well, and through Bandcamp (which is my favourite platform for buying music). So I do think the situation when it comes to legal access to digital music is much better than it ever was.
Bandcamp is definitely my favourite platform for buying music. No DRM, flac format available if that's your thing. Artists can put up both digital and physical merch.
Wish they had a more fully-featured experience for streaming music on PC. Downloading to play in foobar is a bit of a faff sometimes!
The selling point of BC for me is the sense of community. You can see reviews of releases from other fans, and you cannot post a review unless you've paid up, which eliminates 99% of trolls/shit-stirrers.
It definitely helps that BC is focused on independent artists and doesn't seem interested in pushing grand visions of a global musical monoculture in the way Spotify does (those pretentious Year in Music retrospectives, Drake, "chill beats playlist", Lana del Rey etc).
Must agree with you here (even though I do like me some Lana del Rey). Majority of Bandcamp music in my collection is retro/synth/new wave, and some "drone" which is nice to have on as white noise while working.
Nothing wrong w/ LDR at all, I was taking issue with Spotify's nudging behaviour like "Hey, millions are listening to these artists, why aren't you?", when my listening history would clearly indicate that I'm not interested in those artists.
Old-school sites like last.fm used user-submitted tags to link my listening history to new artists I'd probably enjoy. You don't need any fancy machine learning for this kind of basic pattern recognition. Spotify could obviously do this, but like Netflix, Amazon etc, they choose to push artists that make them the most money.
You can use Bandcamp Downloader [https://github.com/Otiel/BandcampDownloader] to download the artist's music – including any or all albums and any of the songs – just by entering the addresses of the pages.
Might make getting the audio easier, considering you've already paid.
That app doesn't even do anything special. The link to the mp3 is right in the page source code, which Bandcamp intentionally doesn't obfuscate. They justify this by asserting that if somebody really wants to pirate, they'll do so with or without Bandcamp; ergo, it's better to keep them on-platform.
I also like that this fits in with their general marketing of lossless files - sure, you can download the 128kbps mp3s. Go ahead. They're inferior - just previews.
BC lets users stream every track at least a couple of times before asking you to pay. This 'free plays limit' resets after a few days, so theoretically, you wouldn't have to pay to hear it ever. I like the reminder because I'm more willing to support independent artists, and if I get the prompt for a song I like, why not pay $5-8 or whatever to have it in my collection?
Just wanted to mention that any limitation in listening to a track is set by the artist, not Bandcamp. With an artist profile, you can set the number of times people can listen/stream your music before being prompted to buy (I have such a profile).
>> I have found myself flying the black flag again
I'm in the same boat(no pun intended), and also still pay for the subscriptions. I thought that more streaming services and more maturity(time passed) meant this situation would be improving - not degrading.
When the business model is to float a huge amount of capital to purchase unsustainable licensing agreements while you become a record label or movie studio — then it makes sense why we are here.
Physical media still exists for a lot of music, but I know first-hand that some music, collections/anthologies/compilations and playlists containing some original content are becoming increasingly digital-only. Check for an artist's profile on a music service that allows you to purchase and download the content. Bandcamp (no affiliation) is one such service. Then you can make your own physical or digital backups external to the service.
The Sony/BMG rootkits only worked on Windows. I never had any trouble playing them on Linux. I stopped buying all Sony products when I found out what they were trying to do. And that's after half a lifetime of recommending Sony. Idiots.
So... I had a Spotify family subscription for me and my wife (2 persons... of course living under the same roof). Suddenly my wife lost her spotify premium functionality and asked me if I had cancelled.
Turns out Spotify invalidated her as part of my family plan and asked me to add her again. Cool.... I go to the config to add her and Spotify asks for her address and does not let me add her when putting her/my address... I don't remember what address did I enter when I opened spotify more than 5 years ago, and the stupid thing does not let you see your address (like, 1 field in a database, how hard is that?)
There is so much good CC music out there, I don't feel the need to pay for a music service. Amongst Soundcloud, the Free Music Archive, Bandcamp, and Jamendo there are lifetimes of new music available for enjoyment out in the Creative Commons. When I find artists I truly enjoy, I prefer to support them directly.
> I canceled Netflix a few months ago. Their catalog is really garbage now.
I keep reading this and wonder how much TV watching do people do daily? Netflix already has more content than I will ever get to with just the back catalog of TV shows and originals. It does not even count movies.
The trick I use for AM is they have a single user deal $99/12 months. You can almost always find $100 iTunes gift cards for $80-$85 making your effective price $6-$7/month.
You just have to keep an eye out. My sub renews over Christmas and I got one from PayPal for $80. I think last year Amazon had a lightening deal for $80 (may have been 2 $50 cards for $40 each). $85 is pretty easy to find though. I think PayPal just had a deal earlier this week.
> It's because no one wants to take my money and provide the content I want without bundling it with drm, ads, dark patterns, insane region segmentation, and manipulative cross-sell tactics.
I'm not sure if they'd satisfy these requirements, but I generally open paid Hulu more than I do Netflix. Google Play Music seems to cover everything Spotify does and there is no free option (so there are never ads), but it's Google, so it could go the way of Reader at any point.
I mean, they're pushing things to your device at your request, because you logged on to use their free service. If you don't want them to push ads to your device, they were kind enough to offer you a paid option where they won't do that.
The attitude you describe can easily hurt their business. They may be future paying customers that are exploring your service, or don't have the money yet to subscribe. And even in the latter group there is an opportunity for building brand loyalty.
But to see these opportunities, the first step is to not have a hostile attitude towards your users.
No, that was just "pay me for this service/good". Most businesses who ventured into "fuck you" territory would soon be out of business because disgruntled customers opens up opportunities for competition to rise.
Sadly, you don't have that anymore with today's economy-of-scale effects.
I've been trashing Windows for ages too, but there's a big difference here: people who really want to run some particular (usually proprietary) software generally have to use Windows to do that, and Windows has a lock on non-Apple computers for that and for many other reasons.
Spotify doesn't have any kind of lock on music. The Apple fans are all using Apple Music, after all, and there's lot of other choices out there. Ditching Spotify isn't going to affect your life or digital device using in any significant way.
Well it worked on me and I'm usually wary of consumer-facing subscription services.
I heard about Spotify through a musically-minded, but not technical, friend. I joined because of their insistence that it was a good service 3+ years ago.
Today, they complain about the desktop client and ads. I no longer use Spotify.
A non-paying customer who doesn't listen to ads has absolutely zero value to Spotify.
I'd challenge this because they can convert to paid users or advertise the service via word of mouth, or probably provide other value as well (user data, listening habits, etc.).
However, even if these users have zero value to Spotify, then why terminate them? Spotify is getting some negative press over it, so it seems like a net loss for them...
Mostly a privacy and ownership issue: Spotify doesn't own the device receiving their service nor are they paying for the bandwidth used for the ad payload, and it's none of their concern how these are used. In the end it all boils down to whether Spotify's right to run a business supersedes a person's rights of ownership.
But without some incentive to do so, they won't. If they're already getting around basically one of the biggest dealbreakers for the Free tier (the ads), then there isn't really incentive to pay 9.99 a month when they're already getting essentially the same service for free.
> People are using ad blockers not just to hide annoyances and to improve performance, but to protect themselves from bad actors.
This is why I started blocking ads at the network level last year, after resisting blocking them at all for so long before that. A number of popular sites (imgur.com being the worst offender, but certainly not the only one) hosting adverts that attempted drive-by downloads, tried to access cameras or microphones (luckily caught by permissions blocks elsewhere), played obnoxious loud audio, played high-res bandwidth chewing video, opened pop-ups or pop-unders, and so forth.
Serve the adverts from your own domains and agree to take responsibility for any damage done by code/other served from your domains, and we can talk. Otherwise: no ads. Ban me from your site or application for that if you wish.
I can just about understand this attitude with services that do not have an ad-free subscription option, but Spotify does! How do you reconcile that you deserve to be able to use Spotify both without paying them money and without them monetising you via ads?
Why not? Spotify is not entitled to forcing you to display their ads either, and there are plenty of other free services on the Net that don't require you to watch ads.
Because they offer it? They are giving public access to music and ads, choosing to only accept their offer of downloading the music (given that the ads are annoying and may contain malware) is only making use of part of what they offer. Their business model is their own business. Mine is making sure my computer stays secure and that I'm not bothered by annoying interruptions.
Not that I have ever used Spotify, but that would be how I would defend it. If I did, I would just move on since my account would soon be suspended.
So how does Spotify defend running potentially malicious ads from 3rd party providers on end-user systems? Do they even vet those ads? Are they even aware of what code will be running on users computers that they are serving via the ad frameworks?
I skimmed the legalese in the article and did not see them differentiating between account types. Seems like a general statement that may also apply to premium accounts.
Exactly. I use an ad blocker (usually I disable it when a site asks nicely, but I turn it right back on if their ads are intrusive) but I don't get the sense of entitlement that seems to come with ad blocking for some people. If I want to use an ad blocker, that's my right; if a service wants to block me for it, that's theirs.
> They allow advertisers to run JS on your device, and ads are a trendy way to deliver malware.
I wonder if the ad industry is onboard with HTTPS yet? In 2013 when I was last looking at ads as an attack vector, none did, and many executed JS, or gave privileged access to system APIs on device via JS, which meant that it was fairly trivial to intercept ad delivery, return malicious JS, open a "reverse JS shell" and poke about the filesystem in the app, open new screens, etc, all remotely.
I reported this as a vulnerability in several apps, telling them that HTTPS was an important aspect of preventing this, and was told that ad networks were against HTTPS and therefore they had to find alternative mitigations.
iOS/MacOS block HTTP requests by default unless you request (and for apps on the App Store, are granted) an exception. So, I’d think that in-app advertisers on iOS would want to support HTTPS.
Today I could easily afford that. But thinking back a few decades when I was young and didn't have much money at my disposal I would say using stuff for free isn't that bad.
Especially when piracy is so much easier than getting your account suspended for using an adblocker.
woah woah woah, you can't go expecting a company to take responsibility for what their service does. I think there's a constitutional amendment about that.
It's fascinating how we, humans, are lazy. We're lazy to the point where we'd gladly allow services like Spotify to control our computers just so they can make sure their ad was delivered. We'll even justify it by "well, I really listen to a lot of music". All I want is to push a button and get some bearable-noise during my 8 hours at work.
I don't know about the rest, but I really hate when someone makes a fool out of me. I'm a lazy person too, if a service that I like asked me bluntly "hey dude, wanna give us all your info and let us sniff your traffic so we can stick ads in, we're even gonna sell it" - I'd say - sure, you were honest enough, screw it - go ahead, I didn't have to navigate through a wall of text critting me for 9000000 to get that piece of info.
But no. No one behaves like that. Long user agreements, service agreements, catchy call-to-actions on websites that promise wonderland filled with unicorns shitting M&M's and what not just so they get those few bucks out of me...
Oh well, hello foobar2000 my old friend, seems like I'll un-lazy myself just to spite these prying assholes.
It's not just about justification of freeloading. It's about a company being able to push arbitrary stuff to your device masked as adverts. Yeah fine I listen to music for free on your service. Does that mean that everyone should be able to spy on me? Nobody is complaining about voice or image or video-based ads. But running JS and iframes is just arrogant.
Also I'm very pissed off with people who say freeloading. It's not freeloading. I pay with my time to watch or listen to your stupid ad. I should not also pay with my personal data. An ad is just an ad it should not have evolved to the monstrosity of tracking you.
It has evolved in the same way copyright has until we find a way to kill both of them as they are not needed in our world.
> I pay with my time to watch or listen to your stupid ad.
Not if you're using an ad-blocker.
Perhaps the reason you're using an ad-blocker is because you don't want to be tracked, and the only way to do that is to block ads completely. I get it. But you're also using up Spotify's bandwidth and licensing fees (which in turn allow music to be created in the first place), without providing anything in return.
This is only possible because paying and ad-watching customers are subsidizing your behavior. It is the definition of freeloading.
Advertising can be done without arbitrary code execution. Magazines, broadcast TV, radio, podcasts, movie theaters, billboards, news papers, etc. all manage to do it without that. Spotify already has a way to deliver audio and video to the machine, nothing else is required, and if they used that existing avenue, blockers couldn't stop it.
Audio and video ads are super annoying and I'm reminded of that every time I listen to radio or watch TV, which is why I gave up on both.
No thanks.
The issue isn't one of arbitrary code execution. Lets not be hypocrites.
AdBlock Plus has over 200 million installs on the desktop alone. Are you going to tell me that those 200+ million users of AdBlock Plus are concerned with arbitrary code execution? What percentage of those users do even know what that even means?
Between 10% and 20% of Internet users are using ad-blockers. Lets do an imagination exercise and say that Spotify would only serve images for ads. How many of those 10 to 20% of Internet users would whitelist Spotify?
Whitelisting won't even be a factor because ad blockers won't work against ads delivered along with the main content. At least not without way more processing power, much more complex software, and a lot more volunteers creating filters manually. The current ad delivery methods are what makes the ads so easy to block. So, being unable to block ads, users will either deal with it, pay for ad-free, or leave, and then the real value of the service will be revealed.
>>Perhaps the reason you're using an ad-blocker is because you don't want to be tracked
I use adblockers to protect myself against malicious content masquerading as ads, which both the ad delivery networks and content platforms have proven unwilling or unable to address to an acceptable extent.
I honestly don't consider this particularly relevant, especially in the case of Spotify which has a paid ad-free option (as opposed to something like cnn.com, where you don't have a choice).
If you want to boycott Spotify for endangering people's computers, go ahead. Heck, if you want to attempt to use Spotify with an ad-blocker, go ahead. I don't feel morally comfortable using ad-blockers, but I won't fault others for using them.
You do not get to use Spotify's free tier, block their only potential revenue stream for that tier, and then turn around and cry fowl when Spotify notices and bans you.
Completely agree. Spotify offers two options: free with ads, or paid with no ads. Completely up to you which one to go with. If you don't like ads they have and option for you. I don't like ads either, and I use an adblocker to block tracking and protect against malware. I also want to use Spotify. So I pay for it. How self righteous do you have to be to complain about this? If you don't like Spotify's model, don't use the service. It's a perfectly valid option, and there are plenty of alternatives.
I don't use Spotify personally. I have Apple Music, my problem is more with the fact they are now forcing you to run arbitrary 3rd party code to have access to their catalog. Just keep the ads as images and videos and sound and I'll be pretty happy.
I have this problem with websites, apps, social networks, etc. as well. I don't want to be tracked, retargeted and so on. Not because I think ads will influence me or anything but its about my trust in those companies and how they protect my data. When my data gets leaked because they are inadequate at security I don't get money back. I get a message saying "We take your privacy seriously"... And that data can then be used in various other ways to harm me.
What’s fascinating to me is the length people go to in order to justify freeloading.
Fuck the money, I’m not letting a site run arbitrary code on my machine, especially when they have a track record of spying and installing malware. They have a right to make a living, I have a right to own my property without having it damaged by casual greed.
Or don't. I've pirated music and movies. I just don't get too mad about it.
My point, put another way: I respect the desire to block JS ads, AND I respect the will a non-critical app in a competitive market to make stupid decisions with their ad policy. AND people who don't like that policy can move to Amazon/Google/Apple/other music platforms, or pay Spotify Premium.
Pardon my language, but it's a fucked up point to say pay a service money if you don't want their software to conduct clandestine operations on a device that probably contains all sorts of sensitive and private data that NOBODY has claim to but you, and the people you've expressly desired to share it with.
That's the point it would seem to me reading these comments; I realize paying gets rid of the ads, but it's pretty messed up to sit back and think that you're ostensibly paying for "good behavior" from Spotify w/rt to ad tech and what that technology enables on our devices.
It's easy to say pay or don't use the service, why isn't as easy to say "Spotify, don't be dicks with your ad technology on MY phone"?
If I pay a kid $.25 for lemonade, I'm paying for lemonade. If he says "hey, enjoy a free sample of my lemonade while I tell you how I made it", that's a fair trade-off. It is NOT a fair trade-off for his dad to spike my lemonade with a sedative so I'll want to sit down and give his kid an opening to blabber about his recipe while winking and saying "should paid us that quarter, chump".
You aren't paying to get rid of ads, you're paying to get music. Ads pay for the music, or money can. It's only paying to get rid of ads if you view the music as an inevitable outcome, and this change is Spotify asserting that's not the case.
Emotionally manipulating people for profit, harming them not just by annoying them but also by impairing their ability to make rational decisions, is always wrong. And that's what advertising is.
If you sell yourself into slavery, you don't become a slave. If you use a product "in exchange for ads", you don't lose your right to protect yourself from them.
It's more like the kid giving you 2 options:
- Unspiked lemonade for $.25 - Spiked lemonade for free
Companies are free to sell what they want, for the amount they want. At least there's more than one option here.
Thst kid would be arrested, because it’s plain to see from a legal and moral perspective that it’s wrong. Besides, it’s not like that at all.
What it is like is a radio station threatening to cut off service to people who switch channels or turn down volume during ads. This is a problem with the business model, and using TOS tricks to try and twist people’s arm. If they want to be sub only then by all means, but if they want to use an ad model as well then they incur some risks with that. I’m also not clear that it stops with the “free” service only.
Personally I don’t use Spotify, because I like to own my music, and I trust in their business model’s longevity about as much as I believe in fairies. When companies have to threaten their customers to make a business model work, the model is already fucked beyond repair. Advertising on the internet isn’t compatible with the existence and proliferation of ad blockers, and I bristle when a company makes a move to try and undermine autonomy to shore that model up. Moreover if Spotify does it as people accept it, other companies will try to follow suit.
So if a company X is offering something I would like but on different terms, you think it would be entitled and selfish of me to make it known publicly that I would prefer different terms?
The presumption is that they were using the product against the stipulated terms. Nobody is arguing against free speech and if you think Spotify are awful for serving bad ads you can say so.
But this article is specifically about people using a product against the stipulated terms. Criticizing bad ads is valid in general, but people expect topical discussions to stick to the context. Either clarify you are speaking from a different context or you will get misinterpreted.
I didn't use the term "allowed" to imply there is a free speech argument, but to imply that there is an unreasonable expectation on people's behavior. Expecting that customers should "just" stop using service without complaining about the fact that they are doing so is not a reasonable expectation. People should air their grievances in addition to voting with their feet.
You don't need to run arbitrary third-party software to run ads, period. I'm perfectly fine with ads in an ad-sponsored ads but I'd appreciate if it didn't open my computer to malware infestations.
Capability + intent is what counts in this case. They intend to deploy countermeasures targeting a minuscule percentage of people, but every user will probably feel the consequences. This, plus the fact that they are willing to serve JS from third parties, is a dangerous mix. It's not what you would expect from a music player app.
The technical challenge of getting something for free, without restriction, without digital restrictions management, able to be shared, in an archival form that will last decades is worth 100x the cost for whatever trash Big Media will sell you.
I have no problem with advertisement if they agree to take full liability if any contains malware or breaks the law.
If that requirement is freeloading then I disagree with that definition of the word. They enjoy the benefit of behavior which if it was offline would be illegal, and out competes those service which operate more ethically. Since society currently expect the users to be responsible if their machine get infected by malware, it is fully ethical if they use software like ad-blocks to protect themselves.
> What's fascinating to me is the length people go to in order to justify freeloading.
I agree. For the past two decades, companies have privatized immense swaths of the digital commons and paid nothing for it, freeloading on the work of the countless public institutions and hobbyists who both created it, and created the culture which attracted billions of "users" to it.
With Spotify it is even worse. They have taken music, a prehistoric participatory artform and characteristic behavior of our species, and are trying to gamify it into a product that is no longer just music and which they own.
For the record I am a musician, and I'm pleasantly well-off so I have a paid Spotify subscription though I rarely use it. I held out until mid-2018, and didn't listen to even a single track on the service before then. Not that there is the slightest moral issue with using an adblocker while consuming broadcasts that contain ads, which I also do.
I'm not a "freeloader" as I pay for the premium service, but this news is the last straw. I'm unsubscribing and uninstalling, as soon as I figure out how to download my playlists.
I know this news doesn't affect me, but the principle is the important thing.
There is absolutely nothing to justify here. Running ad-blockers is perfectly fine in any context whatsoever.
Everybody has the right to control what is displayed on their computer when they browse the Net, and Spotify has the right to cancel free accounts for whatever reason they want to. There is nothing wrong with running adblockers and anti-anti-adblocking scripts, etc., and there is nothing wrong with canceling free Spotify accounts. There is also no cognitive dissonance with running and ad-blocker and being angry when Spotify cancels your free account because of it, it's a perfectly reasonable and consistent attitude.
Clicking on magnet links is just as difficult as clicking on a song in spotify, maybe the websites arent as nicely dressed though.
In the U.S., its $10 a month for your entire life. If you live another 100 years, thats $12k that could have bought top top top of the line speakers or enough cds to fill multiple bookcases. We have so many services like this now that are packaged monthly to hide the real cost of long term use. Its like rent to own all over again, except when you stop renting you do not own.
Then don't use their service. Why is this made out to be difficult. If you want to take/consume their service then pay, for it via ads or subscription.
If you don't like that they have an ad based model, and personally want to boycott their subscription service because of it then do so and buy your own music.
It's not complicated. 'Not rewarding their behavior' is simple - don't use Spotify. Anything else is very transparent, after-the-fact justification of your desire for theft.
"Hey I really like this bike share service, but I don't think it's safe, so I'm gonna steal the bike, improve the safety and then ride it whenever I want. I don't want to reward their behavior of renting bikes I feel aren't safe."
It's totally unclear to me why you think this should be considered bad behavior.
Imagine a grocery store has a promotion - you can get a loaf of bread for free if you listen to a twenty minute advertising presentation. Does this justify not going to the presentation, and just stealing the bread?
You go to the presentation and someone demands you empty your pockets into a bowl that they will take into another room while you watch the presentation, wallet, phone, keys, etc.... You decline and leave, but you already ate the bread! Did you steal it?
I'd say it's more akin to using Spotify with an ad blocker before this change. If Spotify wants to switch to only handing out bread after the presentation obviously that's fine too, but it doesn't make the whole proposition any less shady.
Well this would have to be a special kind of bread where the inventory amount does not change when a loaf is consumed.
Bear in mind, this loaf can also only be eaten inside of the grocery store. You cannot leave the store with the bread, because it is welded to the infrastructure of the grocery.
Not paying for a gym membership would be a better example. You're using up available capacity without giving the gym a way to monetize your presence there.
A better analogy is a protection racket: pay up or we'll serve ads that might contain malware to your device. If Spotify took responsibility for fixing my computer when it gets a worm from an ad, we'd have a deal that is much more fair.
Absolutely, not using Spotify is better option. My original comment was arguing against "just pay for it" being a good outcome, as it relates to Spotify's future incentives.
> What’s fascinating to me is the length people go to in order to justify freeloading.
I can tell you didn't read carefully what I wrote, but that's fine.
Here's what Spotify tells me: "Spotify gives you instant access to millions of songs – from old favorites to the latest hits. Just hit play to stream anything you like."
Where's "but we'll also monitor you and inject whatever code we can, we might allow our customers to do so too, we don't know what it might be but since we wasted $0.003 to acquire you, we need to make at least $5 off of you and we don't really care what happens to your device or if someone breaches our customer and does bad shit to you."
I believe in reciprocity - and the odds are worse at my side if I "freeload" :)
What you described is more or less covered in the T&C's checkbox you ticked when you created your account.
And even if Spotify had appended their marketing language with the "but we track you, never forget that", would that have somehow made you turn off the adblocker?
To counter this, I got an email from Spotify a few days ago telling me about their terms of use update, and they were very upfront about the ad-blocker crackdown right in the email. I don't think they were hiding anything behind their ToS at all.
Are people lazy, or do they have much more important things to concern themselves with? I'd rather get work done and spend time with my family than spend time looking for the "ideal" way to listen to music.
It isn't lazy to want to listen to unlimited music from an app on your phone. Its an efficient and a very useful service. There are other options (like buying albums), but Spotify makes it easier.
Long time premium spotify user, but it seems they are more interested in their ad-tech than anything else. They introduce 0 new features or improvements and in fact actually remove things over time. It's amazing to see a product continue to get worse.
Before you could send your friends a message within Spotify to send a song for them to listen while in the application and could even carry on a discussion. It was slick. It was amazing and worked very well. They totally gutted it and made no indication of bringing it back. Now we're stuck with this ridiculous arcane method of sending a link through a text message that now opens up in a browser (sometimes?) instead of the application itself.
Too much work to maintain this beloved feature, better fire all the engineers working on it and hire people to prevent ad-blocking for the non-paying customers.
Remember when subscribing to artists would give you alerts for when they released new content? It was a fantastic way of keeping up with new music. For me it was a killer feature. They replaced it with the terrible "Release Radar" playlist that shows a small sample of whatever this week's ML algo recommends. It's garbage.
Following an artist works fine for me. Perhaps check your communication preferences? Maybe you've disabled emails or notifications about new releases from artists you follow.
similar for me, very long time premium subscriber and it is extremely annoying how seemingly all the "improvements" over the years have been nothing I cared about while features I actually found useful have been removed
I stay a subscriber because of (1) the size of the catalog and (2) the 'discover weekly' constantly delivers me new songs/bands that I thoroughly enjoy and would never have discovered on my own
Same here. I'm contemplating unsubing and my first thought was to look if there is a tool to download my discover weekly archive. I have an IFTT applet that adds the weekly playlist to an archive so I can listen to it later. Over 900 songs that I still haven't checked/catalogued.
Unfortunately, Spotify has reached a point where there's a potential (possibly even real, but I'm not in any position to know) higher return in monetizing existing users over improving the experience in order to gain new users or make sure they keep whatever miniscule number of users who'd otherwise leave over a lack of updates and improvements (or even a gradual loss of 'minor' features). Spotify is good enough for a vast majority, such that they just won't leave. Then there are other factors like network effects and the power of the default that are far more effective (if your friends are on it, you're much more likely to stay) in keeping users captured to their platform.
They lose more money and more if you actually use the service. Since they’re a publicly traded company now, they’re probably being pressured to keep earning more and more money each year.
That's true. They have a perverse incentive to reduce music played time or interaction with their service while still preserving one as a customer. I hadn't thought of that.
I tend to agree. Take their lyrics feature for example—imagine if Netflix showed subtitles, but then obscured them with “interesting facts” at random times, and that they were missing altogether from most of their selection.
Most of the discussion here is making this far too one-sided.
I reserve the right to control how content is delivered to my devices by blocking ads, and spotify reserves the right to block my account for doing so. Both of those practices are completely fair in my opinion. I have no problem with this (also I pay for spotify)
Spotify delivers so much value that I couldn’t imagine not paying for it (or enduring ads). I listened to something like 25 straight days of music last year.
I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find someone talking any sense. Is it really the case that most of HN are listening to Spotify all day every day and blocking the ads?
Personally, I am not paying for it because it's not officially available in my country for whatever reason. I realize there's rights issues etc., but if someone won't take my money, I feel no guilt whatsoever doing whatever I want with their product.
I wondered the same thing when that New York Times article came up about people paying for News. They acted like the media can support themselves for free, just like artists. One way I differ from some HNers is that I like support good journalism and I like to support the my favorite music artists as well. I know music quality has gone down over the years since artists know they’re much less likely to strike it rich. I met some kids still in highschool and heck even they were listening to music from the early 2000s, 90s and 80s instead, surprisingly.
This is the real issue here. If you can afford to be on hackernews, you can afford $10 a month. People just have cheapness deeply ingrained into their psyche as a pleasure response.
I agree, and I think maybe music has different places in different people's lives.
Personally, I pay for Spotify and use it constantly to listen to everything from game and movie soundtracks (and covers), rock and metal bands, EDM, indie, pop, and more obscure instrumental music.
I understand if you mostly listen to a few bands from the era you grew up in, or don't listen to music too often at all, it might make more sense to keep a paid music collection and use Spotify less frequently (and justify using the free version), but if I paid for all of the music I listen to individually, it would easily rack up to something like 10 times (or more) the amount my yearly Spotify does. IMO, if you aren't a "power user," use a different streaming service or buy your music individually.
no kidding, not only does it deliver a ton of value but a large portion of their revenue goes to artists. people are able to listen to nearly any band on any device at the push of a button and literally don't want to pay a penny.
(I think I had about 1500+ hours of listening last year ... 60 days or so)
Wow. I ... I couldn't tell you who was in the top 10 in any genre right now. I may have listened to 25 minutes of music last year. I came here just because the title drew me in.
Considering how services like Spotify and Apple Music incourage extra data usage, and randomally delete music as they see fit, I'm finding myself thinking more and more of these services as discovery tools (akin to radio) and less like media players (they aren't).
One day very soon I'll be playing all my music in something else entirely again. While it's impossible to brush off the value of streaming services like Spotify, it's a huge step backwards on many levels.
It feels weird to say but the zune marketplace was the best music platform so far. Who knows if it would have stayed that way if it ever got a decent market share though.
Bandcamp has a lot of great music but draws independent artists and small labels by a large margin. Their app and website sort of totally suck, but it's not a subscription model, they promote the buying and downloading of albums.
You can make songs available offline, meaning they're saved on your device. Not sure what else you could ask for, unless your problem is actually with DRM, not data usage.
Yes; with pinning music offline it's still encrypted & within the Spotify app. The app needs to be connected to the internet at least every 30 days to ensure that your subscription is still current (and, presumably, that all those tracks are still permitted to be on your device).
I've suffered the same, as content agreements have changed, tracks have been made unavailable in playlists.
There's a setting in Spotify to see this; you can disable "hide unplayable tracks in playlists". You'll then see all the affected songs return, but greyed out.
It's less than $10/month, what are you expecting? Getting all the music in the world and have the ability to keep it for yourself? They own the music, you are renting a service. All the same music is available for purchase if you want to own it.
You can download all of your playlists easily and make them available offline in Spotify. You can even set them to be high fidelity and only download over WiFi.
Now with Apple Music you don’t have the option to choose between WiFi/Cellular for downloaded music but Spotify doesn’t have that problem.
Better already exists, you can buy the mp3/ogg/flac, or you can hoist the Jolly Roger. Either option is better than Spotify in the long run, because your copies can’t be removed at a whim, and there are no TOS.
At least now, Spotify can only be downloaded in the Windows store (they discontinued use of the desktop application on Windows 10). As I understand it, W store apps are sandboxed, so something like this reasonably isn't possible anymore (at least without an escape exploit)?
It may be a malware vector, but if it's tied to the service, you should not use the service and demand the ads be fixed before you will remove the ad blocker.
In other words you use the service when you are satisfied with it's cost, instead of using the service and then negotiating the transaction posthoc.
interesting, seems like it was patched quite quickly. what proportion of ad-blocking users are security-conscious engineers vs people who are simply trying to avoid ads?
Does it matter? What is important is that users are not getting their PC's ransomwared. If a desire to not look at ads also results in less ransomwared PCs, Win Win!
Neglegible marginal impact. Nevermind that most of this manpower seems to be wasted on adtech and bullshit redesigns. Their service sure hasn't improved recently.
> resources
This was completely self-inflicted. They used to run a p2p network, they chose to shut that down. That's fine, but they can't blame that on their users.
> licensing
Spotify's licensing budget is a fixed percentage of their revenue. A user that doesn't bring in any revenue won't increase their licensing costs.
I guess artists could opt out if they thought their licensing slice was too small, but that's effectively career suicide. Just look at Prince.
> What do you mean? Prince only took his music off spotify for about a year before he died.
Prince took a pretty hard stance against online music, in all of its forms, from the beginning.
> Was there a very obvious effect on his career in this time?
I have never listened to any of his songs, accidentally or intentionally. I have never heard anyone talk about his songs. The only time I have ever seen him mentioned online was when he died.
Anecdotal of course, but that's pretty impressive for a supposed superstar.
Unfortunately their web player has issues with recognizing some paid accounts.
I have a grandfathered $5/mo no ads account. My corporate firewall settings prevent me from using the desktop Spotify client. The web player still plays ads for me when I'm signed in to my account.
When I raised this issue with Spotify support, they were friendly and professional but the answer boiled down to "use the desktop client, the frontend sees your legacy paid account as a free one and we're not going to update our code to handle it."
I use an adblocker on Spotify to get the ads-free experience I pay the company for.
This is a good move. Even though ads are annoying and frustrating at most times it is not anybody's birth-right to use a product/service for free and block their sources of revenue. If they have a pay-to-remove-ads option, use it.
While I'm sure I'm in the minority, I absolutely do have the birthright to control what content appears on my device. If they want to prevent ads from being blocked, blocking me from using their service is 100% fine by me.
But that's not the same. You have the right to control your content, but that's not what's happening here. Presumably in this example you want to use Spotify (otherwise the whole conversation is moot) but they don't want to you circumvent how their service works. You're not the one controlling this situation, Spotify is.
Your statement sounds very akin to "fine, kick me out of this party I was clearly enjoying, I don't want to associate with these kind of people anyway..." which feels disingenuous.
I think you really just don't care that much about using spotify, which is a perfectly cromulent opinion.
The analogy doesn't seem right. It's more like you are at a party and the clown they hired goes on your face to yell something. You have the right to move away and enjoy the party elsewhere. And now they'll kick you out of the party if you don't allow the clown to yell at you, ok, I'll leave the party myself in that case.
more like they threw a party where you could pay a cover charge to get into the room with no clown or you could get in for free and know you had to deal with a clown. you decide to go in for free and just duck tap the clown's mouth shut because you felt you deserved to be at the party without paying and without having to deal with a clown.
Except the clown paid to host the party with the caveat that they get to yell at people. It's their party that you're getting to enjoy for free. You tried to get the benefit without any cost despite he terms being known and now the clown is kicking you out as a result.
Not the person you're responding to. That's between the clown and whoever is hosting the party. Not my problem. I'm just avoiding having the clown yell in my face, given that I also know that the clown is malicious and pulls pranks on people sometimes. Sure, I have the option of buying a card that I can show the clown that will make him go away, but I'd rather just leave instead. There are plenty of other parties out there.
Should TV networks try to block you if you don't look at the TV while ads are running? Or if you turn it off/switch channel/mute it? Same goes for newspapers and magazines - do you have a right to skip pages filled with ads and not look at them?
Not necessarily. There are free TV channels and free newspapers as well. Spotify is trying to prevent people from choosing which data packets will their devices process or not. Which is exactly the same as a publisher trying to prevent you from not looking at a page with ads, or cutting it out. In my opinion, users have a right of modifying anything they get - whether free or paid, which includes processing and filtering data that comes to their devices.
The only difference between turning off the audio and ad blocking is at which point the data gets blocked. Turning off the audio means that it gets filtered by your phone's audio processing system. Ad blocking means it gets blocked on the network level.
If you install software into your TV that blocks the ads, then they should be able to boot you off. You have a right to not listen or pay attention to ads. However, you bring up a good point with the magazines example. That opens up a whole new can of worms.
Absolutely, they have right not to serve any customer they don't want to serve. But do they have a right of tracking your actions? How would you react if there was an employee of any broadcast TV station peeking through your window to see if you're avoiding ads on their channel, and if they determine you avoid the ads, install a broadcast signal jammer near your house?
I don't like the increasingly intrusive behaviors from big tech companies, and this case with free Spotify is a good example. If they can't provide a free service without privacy intrusions, they shouldn't offer it. Radios and broadcast TV survive on ad-based model without privacy intrusions.
I have no beef with ads in general. But I do have a concern for user tracking. If the ads are just ads - then that is all fine and well. However, most if not all of these so called ads are tracking users across services and devices. Then 'enriching' that data with more data from other sources and selling that information about me to whoever wants it.
I think privacy is what the majority of people who use these blockers are trying to get. I know that is the reason I use ad blockers at least. I do have a right to privacy, and the amount of information advertisers can learn about me though meta data is a serious violation of that privacy. Unfortunately with targeted advertising, then line between ads and tracking has disappeared, they are one and the same. And yes, I am aware that a lot of advertisers allow you to disable targeted ads- however they still collect the same amount of information, they just claim not to use it for their ad choices.
The amount of people here outraged that Spotify is preventing them from blocking ads on the free tier is astounding. Pay for the service if you don't want ads.
+1 spotify literally costs (per month) < 2 venti lattes from your favorite cafe, and less than a beer at most bars in NYC and 1/2 of this thread is complaining
I'm one of those that are complaining, but at the same time I pay for Spotify, Netflix and HBO GO, and I didn't pirate almost anything for years. It's not about the cost, it's about their obsession with control. If they can't provide free service without privacy intrusion (monitoring what you do with the data they send to your network) they shouldn't provide a free service at all.
I think the outrage is more so that Spotify thinks it can tell you how your computer is operating. Other companies have found ways to circumvent adblockers, which is the route they should be taking here... Not telling users that their computers have to conform to some set of standards so that they can inject ads into your experience.
You can buy (rent, access, whatever) their product with one of two forms of payment: money or ads. If you don't like how their ads are delivered (admittedly fair) then pay, if you don't find either of those acceptable then you don't get their product. Disabling ads is requesting a completely free third option, which isn't something they choose to allow.
I don't understand the entitlement you seem to feel to demand that third option.
I think that you are mistaking me explaining other people's opinion on the situation as me saying what is right and what is wrong. The two can be (and are) two independent things. Being able to comprehend multiple sides of the argument doesn't mean that I am entitled, it just means that I don't think it's as black and white as you seem to.
The only reason I use an ad-blocker with Spotify in the first place is that they have an abundance of NSFW ads that play. I'm not really comfortable with Trojan advertisements while I'm sitting in the office plugging away. It's definitely their right to deny service if people are freeloading... but there could be other people like me who wouldn't use an ad blocker in the first place (on Spotify, at least) if the ads weren't such garbage.
So the reason for that has more to do with my corporate firewall than anything. I do pay for subscription services that I enjoy more than Spotify (currently, Google Play Music and Tidal). However, I cannot have a phone at work, so I can't log into GPM (2FA requires the phone), and Tidal is blocked for other reasons. So that basically just leaves Spotify. I don't want to pay for a third subscription service that I only use for a few hours per day tops.
That's the thing.. I'm already paying for two music streaming services that I use far more often than Spotify. And my wording isn't clear, but I don't listen to it 'a few hours per day every day.' It's more like 'a few hours when I do listen to music at work, which I don't usually do.' I'd guess that it's less than 10 hours per month that I'm listening to Spotify.
The simple answer is that I don't like Spotify as much as I like GPM and Tidal. Tidal is my go-to for high-quality music when I'm listening at home on my nice speakers. I've found that Tidal has the best radio experience, at least for the type of music I listen to (Spotify and GPM have a bad habit of playing the same exact songs / artists when I do a radio for a particular artist/album/song, Tidal varies it more).
Google play music is simply extremely convenient considering how nicely it works with Google Assistant. Additionally, I have tens of thousands of my own music collection uploaded to GPM that I'm free to download whenever I want without restriction. Spotify lets you play music offline, but it's basically cached and still tied to your premium Spotify subscription.
I should have phrased it differently, but there's a strong emphasis on the word 'tops' there. I'd say that most of the time at work, I don't listen to music at all, and when I do listen to music, it's never for more than two hours per day.
Google's 2FA doesn't require a phone. Use a USB token, use a secondary email, or use a single recovery code and leave the account logged in in a separate browser used only for GPM.
Only one of those is sort of an option for me. USB tokens = disallowed. Accessing personal email at work = disallowed. Using a single recovery code is a possibility, but I would have to rotate through them constantly (see other comments in this thread).
Does Google 2FA still have the option to telephone the code through to a phone? If you have a direct-dial number to your desk phone would that not work?
Or any service that lets you read your text messages remotely; Pushbullet or anything offering the same functionality?
I had no idea that was an option in the first place. I'll have to look into this more.
All of the services that I know of that let you read texts remotely are also blocked at work. Basically anything that falls under the category of messaging or email.
I could be mistaken, but it was my understanding that those backup codes are one-time-use only, and that using one basically burns it forever. My cookies get cleared every single time I close my browser, so I would have to continually log back in and keep burning more codes. If I'm wrong about this... that would be excellent.
You can keep a sheet of about 5-10 of them, and generate more when needed.
It's inconvenient, but if your in an environment that disallows phones or other portable electronics (like 2FA Fobs/USB sticks), it may be the only reasonable way.
GP would need to remember to generate codes in advance and write them down and bring them to work, on a regular basis. And keep track of which codes were used. Can't speak for others, but this would be way too much effort for me to even entertain.
This is why I really dislike forced two factor authentication. It might make sense in a lot of circumstances, but not for everyone.
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Edit: Although, if we're talking about Google Play Music, I'm a bit confused, since you can turn two factor off for Google accounts. If you feel you need two factor on your main Google account but not Google Play Music (seems reasonable!), make a separate account for Google Play Music.
That's not a great scenario for me, either. I'm currently paying $7.99/mo for GPM because I've been a subscriber since the beta. If I switch to another google account just for GPM, I will end up paying $2/mo more.
I wonder if there's a way to programmatically re-generate the one-time-use codes. It might be a fun project to set something up that emails a one-time-use code to my work email and then regenerates one.
There's a massive amount of websites that are blocked, so it's not really what I would call 'unfettered.' The reason that phones aren't allowed is related to the fact that they have cameras / microphones. They don't want someone's infected phone spilling company secrets.
I really like google’s music offering, but I the only reason I don’t subscribe is because I listen to music on my work box, and I refuse to sign into Google on it with my personal account
Premium doesn't have any of those ads. And if you're blocking their ads you're not paying with time and attention. Spotify seems pretty reasonable to me, it's free with ads or you can pay for a better product with no ads.
Sure it's adfree but the parent said "because it brings you value". Well so do I when listening to the ads. My problem is the fact they allow for JS and iframes.
For me personally 100% true, is it for everyone else is another question. If you are in a 3rd world country then it might be more cost effective to listen to ads.
My wife is an avid Pandora user, recently there's been ads from Adam & Eve on the service. It's been fantastic to sit down and eat dinner as a family, then hear an ad for a sex shop play after a couple of songs.
It's not like I'm offended at there being an ad for an adult store or anything, but it's just really offputting? I guess? to hear about some buy one get one on adult toys or whatever while I'm eating.
> It's not like I'm offended at there being an ad for an adult store or anything, but it's just really offputting? I guess? to hear about some buy one get one on adult toys or whatever while I'm eating.
It sounds like you are offended. How else would you characterize being "offput" by something? We also use Spotify in our household and I vaguely recall hearing A&E ads as well, but they just jumble together in my subconscious with all the other ads.
I know that the value we place on things varies, but it amazes me that people are willing to have ads play during a family dinner rather than pay $5/month. That single dinner probably cost two to three times that amount.
I pay for an Apple Music Family subscription, my wife still uses Pandora on occasion however. She trialed Pandora Premium and a couple months ago noticed her stations suddenly started playing very different music selections, so she decided to not upgrade.
I’m not sure how much targeting they do on their ads but they are also targeted terribly.
I don’t listen to Spanish music, and I don’t speak Spanish. Multiple times when I had my free Spotify it would randomly decide that I would get all of my ads in Spanish that week. No idea why. My first thought was that my account had been hacked and someone changed my language - but nope, Spotify just doesn’t know my demographic.
Meanwhile, all the ads I get are for Spotify Premium! The same ones over and over again. I wouldn't mind some variety. My Spotify account is even linked to my Facebook with all the ad targeting opportunities that entails.
I definitely won't get the only product they advertise to me. I already have Google Play Music, and just use(d) Spotify occasionally for discovery and when people link to playlists.
I suppose nobody is advertising to Australia then.
What about the Brave browser[1], which works at the application level? Or Blokada[2], which works at the OS level? Or Pi-Hole[3], which works at the network level?
As someone mentioned in another comment, I don't think they will care about how the ads are being blocked. As long as you are bypassing ads, you are in breach of their TOS.
Yea, but there is no way to distinct why ads don't reach the target, and as it's worded, they can't block service for technical difficulties but for intentional behaviour.
I haven't seen even if they specified whether it must be the account user or not. E.g. your network host or isp can do it.
So that seems interesting, unless they can do it on a whim anyways and dont have to prove anything. Though they could just say, "no free service if we cant serve ads".
I dont get why people use spotify instead of listening to free online radios from anywhere in the world. As a bonus, its like travelling. There are ads, but they target other people than you so its not even annoying (you will not be influenced to buy a car at a dealership in another country). Note that if you are the kind who likes targeted ads, this does not apply to you.
Radio doesn't play music I like, doesn't let me choose the song I want, doesn't let me pay for a subscription to remove adverts, doesn't let me use playlists, doesn't let me play part of a song or rewind a song or skip a song. I understand the appeal of something like live radio, but it definitely doesn't fall into the category of replacement for a music library or streaming.
I use Spotify because I like their discovery service, large library, and the fact that they are simply the best client I've found for multi-device listening (going from office to car to headphone to home stereo seamlessly). I pay for Spotify because their service offers great value and ad ad-free, skip-free experience.
I hate the Spotify client overall, but the multi-device integration stuff is done so well
If I'm listening to music, I don't have to think what device I am doing it from, I can just grab my phone, laptop or tablet to navigate/change songs and it works just like magic
Radio stations at least around the midwest here in the US only seem to play ~20 different songs, and it gets really repetitive, really fast, just ask anybody working retail.
Plus the genre's are rather limited, it's usually one or two pop stations (with 90% song overlap), one or two country, maybe NPR or something in a podcast format, etc. Meanwhile all of the ads.
Personally I'm on the student plan, and for what I like the listen to it's a steal for 5$ (and free hulu?) Any of the alternatives, deezer, apple music, etc would likely work too, but I can't imagine only using fm radio stations.
I find novelty to be it’s own reward. However, that’s literally just 1 of ~100,000 radio stations out there. Spotify is decent, but if you want to try something else their really are great options.
That seems rather disingenuous. You don't know why people like to customize their music experience instead of listening to radio which they have no control over which songs play? Really?
Any kind of ads are annoying to me and well worth the couple of $/month alone, but I also like being able to skip songs I don't like and having in general a better set of songs that I actually enjoy
> All types of ad blockers, bots and fraudulent streaming activities are not permitted.
I feel like the bigger issue here is Spotify's conflating the use of "ad blockers" with other (clearly illegal) activities like "fraudulent streaming". If you don't allow ad blockers on your service, fine. But lumping them in the same sentence with criminal activities...seems like a very slippery slope.
Hey Spotify: Instead of just throwing gasoline on the fire, why don't you spend some of that venture capital to address the underlying issues here, namely: Why are people running ad blockers in the first place? Are they concerned about privacy or malvertising? Are your ads obnoxious? The only reason we're in this boat is because the modern internet is pretty darn unusable without an ad blocker - consumers are sending a clear message with their use of ad blockers. Wake up and do something to help fix the problem.
As it stands, all you've done is throw down the gauntlet. Now, ad blockers will probably just get more sophisticated to work around your detection systems, and round and round we'll go.
As for me, I'm done. I've deleted my Spotify account and will spend my time/money supporting other services that are trying to improve the advertising situation on the internet instead of telling users to suck it up, turn off their ad blocker, and support a crappy ad ecosystem that's especially predatory toward our less-technical friends and family members.
And hey - if you want to see an example of how to do internet advertising right, check out https://carbonads.net. There's no reason Spotify couldn't pioneer the audio equivalent of what the awesome folks at Carbon have done. Props (and a whitelist in my ad blocker) to them.
This is your friendly reminder to make backups of things you don't want to lose. This happened to me when Grooveshark quit, so now I have a small script that pulls all song metadata from my Spotify account. I can always still buy music, switch services, etc., but I can't get my collection back if they see my account mistakenly as blocking ads (I'm a paying customer but you never know).
Same with Telegram (or your favorite chat service) by the way. Almost nobody backs that up. Especially if you're not paying and they can read your plaintexts (and find something potentially unwanted in there), be sure to make regular backups.
I pay for Spotify, and I’m about ready to drop it.
Offline play is the primary feature I pay for, and it’s SUCKS!!!
They simply DONT allow you to search an index of the songs that are saved to the device.
The major bug is, a song is generally only found via the index you saved it in.
Ie: if you save a song in a playlist, you can’t find it by searching for the artist.
If you save 3 albums by an artist, but not the artist, you try and view the artist, nothing appears.
On top of that, Spotify is the slowest flakiest app regarding internet connection. It regularly says “offline” or “can’t connect” when every other app works just fine.
On top of that, twice while upgrading the app it has deleted my ENTIRE saved library.
I assume paid subscribers aren't affected by that rule? I have a pretty comprehensive /etc/hosts file that blocks a lot of ad networks (particularly ones known to traffic particularly onerous ads and/or malicious code). There's no way I'm nuking that because Spotify has this new rule. But I don't see ads in Spotify anyways due to having a paid subscription. I assume this new "rule" will never affect me. Guess I better make a local backup of my library/playlists just in case? :P
But.. to be honest, can we just have Rdio back? It was vastly superior and when it went under, Spotify was literally not even capable of importing my Rdio library (because Spotify actually limits how many songs you can add to your library, with a ridiculously low limit of _10,000_ songs). Users have been requesting an increase to this since 2014 or earlier, with of course zero changes to this amount. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Your-Music-Incre... (notice it has _451 pages_ of comments)
It's what you get when you smush internet radio and a virtual globe together. I really enjoy exploring different parts of the world and listening to their music.
https://SomaFM.com was founded 19 years ago and is still going strong. They have a few dozen streams, most of which are electronic, but they also have quite enjoyable indie, jazz, folk, etc. options. Not to mention refreshingly unique seasonal streams around Christmastime.
Who owns the consumption platform (device/OS/Browser)?
If the user owns the platform, it's the responsibility of the service provider to deliver HTML. Nothing more. The user may display the content in any way he/she like. Store it for later consumption. Extract information, etc. This is how the web was initially envisaged. Browser extensions which allow you to inject JS/CSS are still a relict of this era.
If the service provider owns the platform, all the user may do is consume the content in its provided form (inc. Ads) or leave it.
This is where the web is currently headed. With company controlled mobile platforms (iOS) the control over the platform is already completely out of the hand of the user. Consolidation of the Browser technology is another step in this direction.
If the regulator does not step in, this paradigm shift will go on, and we will see more and more lock-down of the web.
That's really not enough. There should be some kill signal, so that the operator on the other end is electrocuted, and/or their equipment is destroyed if they violate the Terms and Conditions. For example:
. Ad blocker usage
. Preventing telemetry / data funneling by using DNS blackholing or port blocking
. Anything else specified in the Terms and Conditions*
* - Which the user clicked Yes / OK / The Checkbox willingly, entering into a contract. They didn't have to, right?
Up to, and including physical harm and death. How are companies supposed to make any money? Doesn't everyone know the entire Internet would be non-existent without the ad-supported model? Don't be selfish. Submit!
I still miss Rdio :( Apple Music's playlists are great though! But iTunes is such a hot mess. I love how if you double click a song name in the right place, it gives you an interface to change the name of the song, album and artist.
Their suggestions AI is quite a bit behind Spotify's unfortunately. Dunno if that's by a lack of design or because of Apple's privacy stance -- probably the former.
I got this email notice today and my first thought was "why do I still have a Spotify account?" then I remembered I was unable to get rid of it when I tried a few years ago. I found you can delete it here[1]: Account -> I want to close my account permanently. Then there are a bunch of confirmations, including an email.
"on the free version of Spotify"
I block ads on everything, and everyway I can, but I do pay for my subscription.
It makes sense to block freeloaders, especially when they need to PAY some for the song one listened. It is reasonable that they get some revenue in one form or another.
On this one, I believe people should be protesting over the nature of format of ads, not the existence of ads altogether.
OP was asking if it was limited to the free version, and your answer seemed to imply that the web player served ads for all versions, since it didn't specify the account type. If that wasn't the implication, then my question is no longer valid.
+1. This only seems to be applicable to free accounts, but that doesn't mean that's the way it's written. Anyone want to bite the bullet and read the legalese?
No one is allowed to guarantee that an ad shows up on a screen I own. They can TRY to show an ad on my screen, and I might let them. But the conditions of use of any type of free service they emit out into nature emphatically does not include being allowed to control what appears on my screen. Nope. Never.
I am perfectly allowed to consume their free service AND ALSO control what I allow to appear on the screen that I own. It’s my screen.
As a point of fact, they cannot, because their goal with "controlling their service" is to control what is displayed on someone else's personal property as a condition of listening to the free data stream they decided to emit.. and so Spotify (or anyone else) is not capable of making that a reality.
They could change their service to try to block users who protect their personal property from having certain harmful pieces of information (like ads) mixed in with otherwise freely available data sources. But it would just be a silly failure, since lots of people already circumvent that type of thing easily and legally with technology all the time.
The only thing they could actually do is to entirely shut down their emitted free stream of data all together, both content and ads alike. Of course they are free to do that if they want. Nobody suggested they have to emit a free stream of data.. only that if they choose to then people will just keep consuming it without allowing ads to appear, and the ads will keep being legally and successfully blocked regardless of any type of ban that Spotify tries to implement.
Time to stop using it, I guess. Their ads blast my head off with double the volume and make the whole thing unusable.
~$120/year to remove ads is a lot of money just so I can listen to the odd pop song someone mentions that isn't on YouTube. I don't listen to much big label music. "Big label music in one place" is basically Spotify's value proposition. $120 buys a lot on Bandcamp.
We have been thinking, admittedly for a few months, about paying for a Spotify subscription and this sort of makes me lean more against -- particularly as a Pi-hole user (though it doesn't block Spotify's audio ads).
I wish Bandcamp would start a radio-style service. I have tried in the past to use it that way but it always tends to fall out of my mind because I can't just hit play and let it run.
I use a Firefox extension to protect me from CSRF attacks and tracking networks. It basically blocks all content from domains which do not not pertain to the page that I am reading. A side-effect of this is that it blocks most ads. The extension is frequently mistaken by many websites to be an ad blocker. I've no problem with ads per se, I realise that they are often important for funding a website. What I have a problem with is that the overwhelming majority of ads on the internet come from networks that are used for tracking.
I don't think I'm alone. I wonder what percentage people use ad blockers primarily for privacy purposes. In a perfect world, websites would implement their own way of displaying ads that doesn't rely on ad networks. This would make ads much harder to block, websites could potentially take 100% of the ad revenue, privacy advocates would be much happier and there would be less incentive for anyone to develop or use ad blockers.
Are they still going to take all sorts of telemetry and 'share' (read:sell) it to third parties if I pay for the service? Yes? Okay, then I'll continue to support the most dastardly peglegs to ever sail the seven seas. I value my personal data at twice the value of their service, so technically I'm paying more than my fair share by not collecting on it. I'm saving THEM money - they would owe me the cost of their service if I didn't block ads. And just like Spotify, I don't have an opt-out option, so I don't take it personally if they cease to provide service. I mean, technically, I DO require a 3 month notice and reserve the right to collect a $50,000 early termination fee, but I'm a nice guy.
It's funny how automated systems that are impossible to oversee operate. It's almost as if it shouldn't be allowed, but, hey, they have my info and could have contacted me.
You get my data or my money, not both. There was a time when I would be fine with data collection - when it actually improved the product - but now that it's another revenue stream to sell all that off to random third parties I have no control over, sorry, no dice. I have zero qualms with people not wanting advertising thrown at them 24/7 while their life is continuously data mined.
Advertising is mental pollution. It's not even junk food, since it offers no sustenance. It's predatory. People need to stop pretending it's an inconsequential option to throw it on a mediocre product no one would actually buy. If someone told me the apps/programs I paid for bumped their prices up by 10x, I would still buy them. If I installed your app and chose the ad-riddled version, it's because I barely care that it exists or didn't want to bother with sifting through 10,000 clones.
This is what we get for the mobile app race-to-the-bottom. Mentally, "$0.99 vs free" is much closer to "$20 vs free", than "$20 vs $40". But, now we're stuck. No one's going to up their price to something reasonable, and if stores eliminate the free tier, then the ads will just migrate to the lowest priced tier. I 100% expect that ads will require camera permissions and force you to look at them within 10 years, maybe 5. Are people still going to be singing the startup-saving praise of ads when Pepsi is permanently burned into their retinas? "I mean, you're already looking at your phone, and you get this neat flashlight button!"
I wonder if they'll penalise paying users who also happen to be running an ad blocker. I pay for a Spotify family subscription but also block advertising and analytics domains in the hosts file on each of my devices. Spotify queries Scorecard Research regularly in the background even when it's ostensibly not running (on Android).
I’m just concerned as a paying customer. I blanket block all known ads and tracking scripts network wide via pihole. Are they going to ban me too because their precious tracking is blocked and their automated system thinks I’m the same as a free user blocking it? Solution that’s less hostile would be to just axe free accounts altogether.
To the other (currently) highly-positioned comment here who proposes "just pay for it or don't use it":
How do they know if you close your eyes or look away? How do they know if you plug your ears? How do they know you are actually paying attention to the ads and not just ignoring them? Are those actions, none other than the human free will, not essentially a form of adblocking?
My biggest concern with the "just pay for it or don't use it" attitude is not how much it costs. That's irrelevant. It's the idea that it's wrong to not "consume" ads somehow, or that it's acceptable for companies to use increasingly intrusive techniques to monitor users for "compliance" of this consumption.
Not a Spotify user, so I have no skin (or ears...) in this game. But now I'm even more unlikely to become one.
I think more companies with a free and paid teir should start doing this. The answer to ads shouldn't be an ad blocker, it should be to pay for the service. The big problems we have to solve with this is making it easier and safer to pay for online services, and giving more services a paid and a free tier.
It blows my mind that an advertiser would present their product on Spotify’s ad network. The audience selects for people unwilling to spend even very little money on high-quality goods.
(In my social circles, avid consumers subscribe to Spotify by default. Several even subscribe to both Spotify and Apple Music.)
People here on HN are confused and believe that breaching a TOS is some sort of moral peril.
Calm down. It’s business and no one is going to jail because they blocked an advertisement. Society at large doesn’t think piracy is even worth punishing, so why and when did we become obsequious for RIAA or MPAA?
So... they just became profitable, and now they're about to spite a lot of users for about 10% of their revenue? I hope this day haunts them.
I can't believe how many people are discussing this as if ads are the utmost legitimate moneymaker. Ads are parasitic by their very nature, their purpose is to forcibly occupy some mind real-estate. Nobody wants to see ads, yet a large industry exists based on making people see them anyway.
I'm happy when I learn that more and more people are using adblock, and I hope companies that rely on ads to survive disappear. Spotify has chosen to put itself in that camp. I think it's foolishly short-sighted, and I hope time proves me right. The alternative is a future where the ads win... who really wants that?
I get where they are coming from, but I've never seen this kind of strategy work. If someone wants to keep listening to their songs for free they will find a way to do it, possibly with a different vendor.
There's also the possibility this is just talk to keep the advertisers happy.
I'm having a hard time understanding the rationale of this being "Good."
It's not like forcing people to watch or listen to the ads will make them click the ads, or like the products sold in those ads. In fact, i'd suspect forcing someone who prefers not to see ads to see them anyway will most likely make them dislike the advertised products, or the service that runs those ads, so it'd be a net loss.
It that not the case? If it is, then what's point of doing this?
(Note: i pay for Spotify. I like the service, and i think providing "extra" features like being able to play exactly the songs you want, or download them is a better way of promoting the paid version than running annoying ads.)
I have never used one of these subscription services because I hate renting my music. I buy my music. I frequently buy CDs in bars and rip them. I know when I buy a CD from an indie artist, they usually only paid $1 ~ $2 for that CD and get the full amount I pay them minus that. Bandcamp is seocnd best, because they only take 15% (compared to over 30% from Amazon/Apple/Google).
Buy your music people! You can get 250GB microSD cards. Back when the limit was 128GB, sure I couldn't get all my music on my phone (I just had A-V .. W - Z just had to wait), but now I have all of it on there and probably won't max out until larger cards are affordable.
I'm surprised at the amount of entitlement hiding behind "I'm worried about the security concerns of allowing 3rd party JS to run on my device." If you don't want that happening, use one of the many alternatives and take the usability hit. Pandora, online portals for actual radio stations (like BBC Radio 1), and Youtube all work, but maybe don't have as great of a user experience as Spotify (or another paid streaming service). And let's be honest, the small minority of people here who evangelize "Spotify is evil" to friends/family is not going to have a meaningful impact on their user numbers.
Anyone know if there's a host file blacklist for malicious domains only? Most of the ones I've seen block all ads.
The first time I experienced a malicious ad in Spotify on my Linux machine, I started blocking them via my hosts file [1]. I was only hoping to block malicious sites but it ended up giving me a completely ad-free experience in Spotify.
As a free user I accept that I will be exposed to ads in exchange for not paying for the service, but they seriously need to do a better job vetting for malicious ads.
Malicious advertisements are served off of normal ad distribution networks, which is what gives them their power - they're being hosted using the normal process, not from anybody new or special. The server used for the malware is disposable and ephemeral. Vetting advertisements would interfere with the real-time auction process, so nobody does any more than is required.
You can use the malware domains blacklist [1]. It can be applied through uBlock Origin or as a hosts blacklist if you process the file.
Although I personally treat ads as a malware vector and block them. Hopefully I don't get banned from Spotify as I'm a paying customer. If I do, I'll switch to another platform.
I wonder how Spotify's revenue sharing agreement between themselves, record labels, and independent music producers compars with Spotify's ad agreements between themselves and people buying ads.
Why doesn't spotify just stop playing the music if it "detects" ad blocking? It sounds like they don't know how to detect ad blockers and are resorting to fear tactics like this instead.
Isn't the latest versions of Firefox blocking ads and trackers by default now? Is Spotify just going to block every Firefox user now? This seems extreme, I guess we'll have to wait and see.
I used Spotify for a few years (with an ad blocker at the DNS-level) and never heard a single ad. I was constantly blown away by how great the service was, and free! Then I was on a road trip and heard the ads on my phone because I wasn't using my at-home DNS. The ads were so annoying, came on after ever 3-4th song. Ad blockers were really effective on Spotify.
I don't have an adblocker per se, but I do have a great deal of ad domains rerouted to localhost in my hosts files (not intended for Spotify but for the web in general). This occasionally causes issues with Spotify, like the playlist not continuing because an ad can't be loaded properly, but I still do get some ads (which I don't really mind). I wonder if this will affect my account or not.
I'm wondering the same thing. I've paid for a premium account, and run a pi-hole on my home network. The way I interpret the language in the terms of service (IANAL) is that the act of blocking an ad is forbidden, but not the running of the ad-blocker itself. Since a premium accounts are not delivered ads in the first place, I would hope that this means paying users will be unaffected.
I am very interested to hear a more qualified interpretation of the situation.
Using an ad-blocker to listen to Spotify for free because you "don't believe in their malware serving practices!" is sort of like being vegan but eating meat anyway. If you really can't accept Spotify on some fundamental level you shouldn't be using Spotify.
All these people up in arms about ad-blockers on Spotify are just trying to justify being cheap.
I basically see two schools of thought in the discussion:
1. People that believe ads are strictly a source of revenue. If you don't like them but want to use the service, pay for the service
2. People who believe that ads are more than a banner on the page, its permission for ad networks and services to run potentially malicious content on their computer
Even if 2 is true, how does that change the point? "Either pay us for our content, or let our ad networks run whatever they want on your browser" sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Would you thing it was more ethical if Spotify just got rid of the free option completely?
I like spotify, I pay for a family subscription which gives us an account each for my partner and I, plus a bunch of spare accounts for things like Sonos and Alexa to use. Never hear an ad because I pay for the service.
If they did start shooting ads at me, I'd cancel in a flash, same goes for Netflix etc.
Most music is freely available on YouTube now and there's even desktop clients that just grab the audio stream from YouTube videos. Spotify in my experience often has less content than YouTube so I'd say it's probably worth negative time, sound about right?
That's a valid reason. I don't think that most people have the same view, and after people experience Spotify playlists like Discovery, it's hard to go back to the old way of finding music.
I find those spotify generated playlists are really bad. I think they try to prefer music that's cheaper for them to play or something. Definitely not a great discovery tool for me.
I have no idea what the ads on Spotify are like now as I haven't used it in over 3 years but it was pretty annoying where you're listening to heavy metal and then an ad for a pop band comes on.
And are they still doing that crap where a free account can't pick any specific songs?
Cool. For all those hating on grifters, I don't think anyone's in the moral right or wrong here. Spotify is trying to monetize a free service, some people don't like that. This won't affect Spotify's profits meaningfully, and the grifters will always grift.
I don't agree with blocking users with ad block. Just embed ads in stream, it makes so much more sense.
This is just an excuse so Spotify can run ad spam on their clients. I'll stick with Google Play. 100 times better. Only play a few embedded stream ads (like Pandora).
I wonder how this works with things like Pi-hole. I block ads at the DNS level for my whole house with dnsmasq. Any guest who connects to my WiFi AP gets this benefit through their DHCP configuration. Will Spotify ban their accounts for using the service while visiting me?
I also wonder about this. I'm a paying Spotify member who uses DNS-level ad blocking. Without a clear explanation of how they detect as blocking or if this applies to paid members, I can't tell if things I'm doing for web safety will get me banned from a service I was never trying to block ads for in the first place.
I use an app to mute my android device's volume when "advertisement" appears in the "now playing" notification. For the past 4-6 weeks I've noticed Spotify will sometimes 'fail' to accurately update the "now playing" notification. I brushed it off as a bug, but this ToS makes me wonder if they are collecting device volume (which they can definitely do in android) and perhaps testing to see if I'm using the notifications to auto-mute? [puts on tinfoil hat]
Pandora will pause the music if it detects you muted your phone (it tells you this, not a hypothesis) so I always mute it and up the volume one bar. This way I still cant hear it but it is not technically muted.
I hate ads and they are often brain melting / malicious / resource hogging anyway. I also cannot afford to pay $5-10 for dozens of separate services a month at the moment. Guess I'll be listening to other sites if they ban me. You win Spotify.
There are so many complaints about Amazon's power and reach, but does anyone else here see an in for Amazon Music? I've been a Spotify paying member for years, but even though it only affects free members it makes me raise my eyebrows.
Interesting. I wonder if this includes paid customers. 'cause I pay for Spotify, but run ad / tracker block on my network. If they suspend or terminate me they'll be losing a paying customer.
Monthly paid service for all the music I can possibly want is such a good deal vs. the old days of collecting CDs. This is one specific area where the Internet as absolutely delivered on it's potential.
I recently cancelled my Spotify subscription because of their low quality audio. But i was reverting to it for music i couldn't find on Tidal. I guess I'm going to have to nuke it entirely now.
I'm assuming they are going to consider my use of outbound traffic restrictions on the Spotify app "ad blocking". Spotify makes all kind of ridiculous outbound requests for ad services, and many of those requests are over plain text http. Given that Spotify is a webkit app, that's a nice little attack vector Spotify is providing. Not to mention malicious ads often make their way into the ad networks. So i just block anything other than 443 to *.spotify.com domains.
Anyway, I also dislike that my premium subscription is only 320kbit vorbis. I can hear a difference between that and a lossless flac on my 2016 OnePlus 3 and 15$ KZ ZSN Headphones. Obviously even bigger difference on my desktop DAC and over ear monitors. I guess I have to build an offline lib and sync it with syncthing and use Spotify like soundlcoud only to discover new stuff
So, I block Spotify ads by adding entries in the hosts file on Linux, Mac, and Windows... will Spotify still ban me since I'm not using an ad blocker or a modified app?
Isn’t spotify family plan expensive? Netflix & Amazon prime - both are < $15 per month for HD family plan. But spotify just for music is $15. Is it fair?
Right, but most folks have an adblocker just on all the time. So, the paid users shouldn't get penalized in any way if it happens to be on while browsing Spotify. I'd wager this is the case, but the article doesn't specify.
It is my prerogative to decide which media files my browser consumes. It is my right to enforce security protections in my browser instance. All those that say 'good spotify is blocking the freeloaders' -- this is not the point. They are requiring you to consume specific media which you do not wish. Advertising is coercive, and Spotify is applying violence (threats) to enforce their business model. Not my problem. Not that I would pay any of this trash anyway.
If the service Spotify uses to host/serve ads get hacked and delivers malware to my computer, they should be held responsible for the cost and time spent addressing the malware. If I actually brought this up with them, I assume I would be laughed out of their office. Spotify can't have it both ways.
"circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service, or creating or distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify Service;"
so anyone who contributes to a general-purpose adblocker like ublock origin is in violation of spoitfy's ToS? what if someone has a paid account but is also (for example) the author of pihole? that's over-reaching.
Yeah, corporate filters blocking a number of ad domains is quite common, and a lot of people listen to Spotify at work. This is probably going to go very badly.
> The following is not permitted for any reason whatsoever:
...
> 10. circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service, or creating or distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify Service;
Not for Spotify directly. However, I do use Purify for iOS as a content blocker for Safari. It might work depending on if Spotify has any web views embedded in its app.
With an ad blocker on your browser, you can skip all ads. If you're afraid of getting banned and losing your playlists, then create your playlists using one Spotify account, set them as collaborative, then import them from another Spotify account, and run them from there.
Spotify has a pretty cheap paid option that removes all of that. To those who justify wanting the paid service for nothing by saying Spotify won't "take responsibility" or "assume liability" for their ads or those ads "might deliver malware" or are "intrusive" as a weak rationalization, you present a false dichotomy. There are at least three options:
1. Pay for the service
2. Suffer through the ads
3. Don't use the service
This thread is an object lesson in why basically every large service on the Internet is ad-supported. When people aren't willing to pay for 1-2 coffees for a month of unlimited music streaming are you really surprised that companies have no choice to use an advertising revenue model?