311–320 of 963 posts
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A non-paying customer who doesn't listen to ads has absolutely zero value to Spotify. Why shouldn't they block them?
Because non-paying customers have the potential to become paying ones.
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. https://spotifyforbrands.com/en-US/ad-experiences/ > 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 le…
> 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…
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.
I see the user as free to modify their client. On the same note spotify is not obliged to serve 3rd party or out of spec clients.
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.
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> 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.
When I visited San Francisco I saw some cafe lattes and similar to be over $10, and that was the smallest size. That place is seriously expensive. On the other hand it’s nice to visit a place where restaurant food costs more than in Finland. EDIT: A Finnish comparison might be ”It’s just a pint or two per month”. So not that expensive.
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…
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 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 ha…
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?
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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 c…
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!
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).
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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.
Or maybe not, but it's a feeling.
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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.
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…
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.