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Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

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Re: Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

#391

Post by selflesssieve »

nickdandakis wrote: post #388
ouid wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that really your problem? 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…

It's almost as if people have different tastes and consumption profiles.

Re: Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

#392

Post by josefresco »

yial wrote: post #277
michaelmior wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1-2 coffees a month Where do you buy coffee that one coffee costs $10?! (or even $5?) I still don't think it's a lot of money, but not quite so trivial.

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.

$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.

Re: Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

#393

Post by omegabravo »

anoncake wrote: post #352
brink wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just banners advertising popular new releases.

In other words, yes.

What's the difference between an ad and a recommendation? I'm not sure but this certainly feels like suggested music to me.

Re: Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

#394

Post by wool_gather »

jbeales wrote: post #331
cletus wrote: post #255

Good. 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…

Here's the thing(s): 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 becaus…

> $9-10 I can buy 10-12 CDs per year

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.

Re: Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

#395

Post by Nullabillity »

djohnston wrote: post #256

Spotify: Provide service that costs labor, resources, licensing, etc. Spotify: Use ads for non-paying users to help cover the costs Freeloading Users: Use third party software to sidestep this source of revenue, essentially getting the product for free. Spotify: Ban these users. Freeloading Users: shocked_pikachu.jpg

> costs labor

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.

Re: Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

#396

Post by guitarbill »

00deadbeef wrote: post #183
wolco wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

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.

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 (!).

Re: Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

#397

Post by lmm »

metafizikal wrote: post #180
bubblethink wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

It's pretty easy to learn to recognize mp3 pre-echo and no amount of good encoding will eliminate it.

Re: Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

#398

Post by discreditable »

EpicEng wrote: post #361
bliblah wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should spotify have any say on what software you use on your computer?

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.

I don't think cheating in multiplayer games is comparable. Doing so harms the experience of other players.

Re: Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

#399

Post by barbecue_sauce »

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.

Re: Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

#400

Post by anoncake »

omegabravo wrote: post #393
anoncake wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, yes.

What's the difference between an ad and a recommendation? I'm not sure but this certainly feels like suggested music to me.

AFAIK Spotify gets paid for those banners. If they don't then of course they aren't ads.
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