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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

#901

Post by lifeisstillgood »

darawk wrote: post #846
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

Do you say that when you shoplift too?

that's very clearly not what i meant :-)

please see "end of freemium" comment

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

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

#902

Post by jsgo »

hanspeter wrote: post #898
jsgo wrote: post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#903

Post by darawk »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #901
darawk wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you say that when you shoplift too?

that's very clearly not what i meant :-) please see "end of freemium" comment 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 dishones…

> 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".

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

#904

Post by Aeolun »

jimmy1 wrote: post #740
Aeolun wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 year old me had basically nothing. Paying $10 per month for pretty much anything was unthinkable. I still wanted to listen to music though, so I found ways. I really don’t think that was so terrible, and neither do I think the few million people that block ads are.

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…

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).

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

#905

Post by jsgo »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #861
rrix2 wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nobody has the "right" to use a service, conversely.

And why exactly is that considered a fact? 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.

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

#906

Post by Tsubasachan »

jeevan4 wrote: post #712
Tsubasachan wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully Spotify doesn't ban my paid for account because I'm using an Android wide ad blocking solution.

are you using blokada ?

DNS66, same principle.

I suppose I have to whitelist Spotify ad servers. What a shit show.

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

#907

Post by kingosticks »

hanspeter wrote: post #895
kingosticks wrote: post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Section 9.10 > circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service, or creating or distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify Service

This is not included in the terms I see (it redirects to specific terms for my country https://www.spotify.com/dk/legal/end-user-agreement/#s9 ) 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,…

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.

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

#908

Post by bad_user »

userbinator wrote: post #831
bad_user wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 web…

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…

> It's a cat-and-mouse game, and the mice will always win

You don't have much experience with actual cats hunting mice to make that analogy.

Mice can win by breeding, but a lot of mice die in the process while the cat is getting fat.

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

#909

Post by hanspeter »

jsgo wrote: post #902
hanspeter wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#910

Post by feelix »

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…

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.
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