Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers • Hacker News Board

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

#501

Post by jammygit » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #440

wool_gather wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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 mone…

I'm willing to bet that your musician friends wouldn't be getting much of a payout if Spotify didn't exist either. The actually popular artists make great money from Spotify.

Apparently almost the entire musician-as-a-middle-class has been wiped out since the internet and streaming got big. Jaron Lanier talks about it fairy often: now, almost everything goes to the top earners.

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

#502

Post by CDSlice » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

discreditable wrote: post #398

EpicEng wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, blocking Spotify's ads directly harms their revenue and not just their feelings. So I would say it is comparable.

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

#503

Post by sotojuan » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #410

wool_gather wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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 mone…

CDs don't send money to musicians either, unless they are self-publishing. But there's still a gap: I can't mix my paid-for (ripped) CDs and paid-for MP3s/AACs with streams in one app. This is the problem of letting the music distributer (Spotify) also control the player app.

I do this with Apple Music.

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

#504

Post by delecti » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

dvtrn wrote: post #337

unethical_ban wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then pay for the plan! That's the point! Or don't. I've pirated music and movies. I just don't get too mad about it. My point, put another way: I respect the desire to block JS ads, AND I respect the will a non-critical app in a competitive market to make stupid decisions with their ad policy. AND people who don't like that policy can move to Amazon/Google/Apple/other music platforms, or pay Spotify Premium.

Then pay for the plan! That's the point! Pardon my language, but it's a fucked up point to say pay a service money if you don't want their software to conduct clandestine operations on a device that probably contains all sorts of sensitive and private data that NOBODY has claim to but you, and the people you've expressly desired to share it with. That's the point it would seem to me reading these comments; I realize…

You aren't paying to get rid of ads, you're paying to get music. Ads pay for the music, or money can. It's only paying to get rid of ads if you view the music as an inevitable outcome, and this change is Spotify asserting that's not the case.

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

#505

Post by contravariant » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #91

kryogen1c wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah not to be glib, but that would be a deal breaker for me too.

Well, it's a free service. They have no reason to care about users, who block ads and don't intend to ever become paying customers.

That last part is conjecture, and just because they don't care doesn't mean you can't call them out on it.

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

#506

Post by qes » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

dmurray wrote: post #478

grogenaut wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hard thing for platforms is that no one trusts the platform to not lie about delivery metrics. Thus the need for advertisers to run code to verify it ran and run alternative networks. No idea why advertisers trust the ad networks over say spotify. This was going the otherway then facebook's massive lies about video ad views tanked it. Other services like twitch have done what you said and users are equally irate…

Spotify's customers could get some anonymous Spotify accounts and verify they are getting the expected number of ads? Or pay someone to do that for them.

That's what the ad networks do, and why advertisers accept their numbers. They've been measuring advertising impact for decades and have clear processes that generally include transparency and 3rd party auditing.

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

#507

Post by rchaud » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

mwest wrote: post #379

rchaud wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The selling point of BC for me is the sense of community. You can see reviews of releases from other fans, and you cannot post a review unless you've paid up, which eliminates 99% of trolls/shit-stirrers. 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 retrospecti…

Must agree with you here (even though I do like me some Lana del Rey). Majority of Bandcamp music in my collection is retro/synth/new wave, and some "drone" which is nice to have on as white noise while working.

Nothing wrong w/ LDR at all, I was taking issue with Spotify's nudging behaviour like "Hey, millions are listening to these artists, why aren't you?", when my listening history would clearly indicate that I'm not interested in those artists.

Old-school sites like last.fm used user-submitted tags to link my listening history to new artists I'd probably enjoy. You don't need any fancy machine learning for this kind of basic pattern recognition. Spotify could obviously do this, but like Netflix, Amazon etc, they choose to push artists that make them the most money.

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

#508

Post by CDSlice » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #422

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If bootlegs and unreleased tracks were officially released, they would become official and released tracks. If there's a specific unreleased track you want, fine, pirate that. I don't think there's anything wrong with pirating content that's not available for sale (as long as you buy it if/when it does become available for sale). However, the existence of some unreleased tracks do not give you license to pirate track…

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.

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

#509

Post by ratling » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

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…

shrug youtube-dl -x --embed-thumbnail ${url}. Run a normalizer across it. Dump into iTunes. Get on with my life.

Ad agencies are bad actors. Not intentionally but because they have zero incentive to really police what garbage goes out across their systems. I block them on the client. I block them at the DNS level. I block them at the firewall.

I've dealt with the worst case scenario, no thanks. Previously I'd sub to spotify for a month when I was traveling and just deal with the ads that got though my standard setup when I wasn't. Now I just won't bother.

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

#510

Post by heynk » Fri, Feb 08, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #438

gowld wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pandora and Google Play Music (and maybe Spotify too I don't know) put ads in the audio stream (and video, if you are looking at the app screen while listening to music for some reason). Seems simpler to do this than get into a technical arms race with users.

They already do this, there are constant interruptions for 30-second audio ads. Currently, you can turn the audio down, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do something akin to the black mirror episode "fifteen million merits" where you have to look at/listen to the ads for them to go away. The main gripe is using adsense which can still often be used to deliver malware.

I've paid for Spotify for a while, so its been some time since I've heard an ad. But from what I remember, if you put the volume below ~30%, the ad pauses.