Can't have it all for free. I've been a paying user for nearly 8 years. And I love it.

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.

> It was an annoying enough experience.

For me it was annoying enough to stop using spotify.

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 much much much 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.

They could get past that by quizzing you on the ad.