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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

#571

Post by _t2kx »

abrowne wrote: post #253
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

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.

Bandcamp is my favorite service precisely because they include FLAC downloads.

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

#572

Post by beefman »

bad_user wrote: post #55
furicane wrote: post #36

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…

What’s fascinating to me is the length people go to in order to justify freeloading. If you don’t like the ads, Spotify has a subscription plan. In my country that’s €5 / month. Surely that’s less money spent than the effort it takes to pirate music for usage with foobar2000.

> 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.

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

#573

Post by simple_phrases »

School-Cotton wrote: post #288
magduf wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then they tell all their less-technical friends and family that Spotify is shitty and evil and not to use them.

If this were a real thing, we'd all be using Linux on the Desktop by now.

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.

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

#574

Post by michaelmior »

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.

Fair enough. I'm in the US, but my tastes are pretty basic.

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

#575

Post by jcoffland »

kgwxd wrote: post #327
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…

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 a…

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.

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

#576

Post by kgwxd »

beering wrote: post #514
kgwxd wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I'm frankly surprised at the level of entitlement that you and others are operating under. Section 8 and 9 of the Spotify T&C is what you are looking for, btw.

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.

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

#577

Post by icebraining »

CDSlice wrote: post #508
icebraining wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Just a FYI if you buy music from iTunes you get DRM free files that you play pretty much anywhere. It's how I get all my music on my Android phone.

Yeah, but I don't have anywhere to run iTunes :/

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

#578

Post by _t2kx »

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.

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.

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

#579

Post by lifeisstillgood »

criley2 wrote: post #543
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. Failures of your business model are not our problem. The only people who can force me to pay is Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Everyone else can persuade me

Enjoy your ban! I'm always pleased when companies stand up to grifters like you. Go back to stealing mp3s or whatever it is you think you're entitled to.

I actually do pay spotify - I just object to the enforcement principle.

(And apple music and Amazon - I think I need to rationalise that one)

I think that the Apple / Amazon model is more appealing - pay us first or basically you get nothing.

I guess this is the early signs of the Freemium model falling apart.

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

#580

Post by ryandrake »

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?
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