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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

#861

Post by crankylinuxuser »

rrix2 wrote: post #810
heheocoenev wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would advocate for legal rights to use an adblocker! If we don’t, it’s going to be banned under CFAA in the future. Ads suck! Nobody has the right to force these on me!

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.

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

#862

Post by undershirt »

SnowingXIV wrote: post #118

Long time premium spotify user, but it seems they are more interested in their ad-tech than anything else. They introduce 0 new features or improvements and in fact actually remove things over time. It's amazing to see a product continue to get worse. Before you could send your friends a message within Spotify to send a song for them to listen while in the application and could even carry on a discussion. It was slic…

I tend to agree. Take their lyrics feature for example—imagine if Netflix showed subtitles, but then obscured them with “interesting facts” at random times, and that they were missing altogether from most of their selection.

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

#863

Post by Wowfunhappy »

kgwxd wrote: post #773
bad_user wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio and video ads are super annoying and I'm reminded of that every time I listen to radio or watch TV, which is why I gave up on both. No thanks. The issue isn't one of arbitrary code execution. Lets not be hypocrites. AdBlock Plus has over 200 million installs on the desktop alone. Are you going to tell me that those 200+ million users of AdBlock Plus are concerned with arbitrary code execution? What percentage o…

Whitelisting won't even be a factor because ad blockers won't work against ads delivered along with the main content. At least not without way more processing power, much more complex software, and a lot more volunteers creating filters manually. The current ad delivery methods are what makes the ads so easy to block. So, being unable to block ads, users will either deal with it, pay for ad-free, or leave, and then t…

I'm not convinced this is as difficult as you describe.

https://www.adblockradio.com/blog/2018/11/15/designing-audio...

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

#865

Post by dylan604 »

ddebernardy wrote: post #700
dylan604 wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Best I'm aware, radios offer unlimited music broadcasting all day long and are doing just fine without subscribers. Unlimited broadcasting of the same set of songs in rotation that they choose for you. That's supposed to be a huge selling point of the streaming services is to offer a larger selection than what corporate radio limits what's broadcast.

Regardless. If radios can get away with throwing an ad every few songs, why can't Spotify et al ?

Because my radio playing an ad does not offer the potential for damaging my computer

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

#866

Post by npongratz »

jwagenet wrote: post #849
npongratz wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now. Spotify has removed so many useful features from their desktop app over the years, I won't be surprised in the slightest when they remove the ability to listen to local files.

As a long time user on desktop, I haven't really seen much change or loss of features. The mobile app, on the other hand, tends to be flavor of the month. No longer defaulting to my library and instead the discovery home is probably the biggest annoyance

I've been a long time user on desktop as well. I was a fairly heavy user of Spotify plugins (and maybe "apps", but I didn't understand the difference). Plugins, of course, do not exist anymore. Looks like maybe about four years ago: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/No-Apps-plu...

I'm a little salty about them closing off third-party development, but it's cool, they can do what they want with their stuff. I saw the writing on the wall a while ago when they were pushing Facebook integration like crazy -- as they become more and more anti-consumer, I'll simply avail myself of their services less and less until they offer me no value.

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

#868

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#869

Post by colemickens »

jshowa3 wrote: post #747
WilliamEdward wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in this predicament, and every one of these people are making up a blatant lie that they can't afford it. What they really mean is they are stubborn. They don't see money logically and clearly, where if they could they would realise their hidden costs far exceed $10 a month... Things like coffee, gas. They don't realise it racks up $10 $15 and $20 dollars behind the scenes. But theyre happy to pay for that... wh…

People don't want to pay for it because there are mechanisms in place that sustain these businesses outside of ads. Just think about how much VC money is dumped into these services that never or barely generate a profit and they're all free to use and have been for years. Twitter and Snapchat come to mind. Blocking ad blockers is incredibly annoying and is just an excuse for ad spamming. Let me tell you watching Yout…

>People don't want to pay for it because there are mechanisms in place that sustain these businesses outside of ads. Just think about how much VC money is dumped into these services that never or barely generate a profit and they're all free to use and have been for years.

Please correct me if this is disingenuous, but I feel like you basically just said you're used to having VCs subsidize your entertainment platforms and that you've extrapolated that entitlement into a justification for never paying for any entertainment acquired over the Internet.

At the very least, it seems obvious that it's unsustainable and likely that creative artists will be the first squeezed. Also, I don't think this explanation combat's the parent's observations about spending habits at all.

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

#870

Post by smichel17 »

akerl_ wrote: post #340
kgwxd wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And if the approach is “I won’t use services that want to use 3rd-party-RCE-style ads”, it makes sense to me. But the folks who are blocking ads are taking Spotify’s offer (pay us, let us run our ads, or don’t use our service, pick 1) and trying to shoehorn a 4th option that Spotify doesn’t offer: get the content w/o Spotify getting paid. To tell Spotify “I’d use your service if you added an option where the ads didn…

> To tell Spotify “I’d use your service if you added an option where the ads didn’t give 3rd parties the ability to run JS on my system” is different from “I picked your current ad-supported option and then prevented the ads from running”.

Is it really, when the solution I'm using to prevent ads from running is blocking a handful of 3rd party domains in my hosts file? I haven't taken away Spotify's capacity to run ads on my machine, only the 3rd party's capacity. Spotify could even test whether I'm interested in blocking first party ads by running their Spotify Premium ads this way.

On the whole, it seems like a more effective way to communicate blocking ads seems like a more effective way to communicate my distaste than abstaining from use of the service and contacting them (how?) to let them know I would use the service if get served ads directly. This way, they know exactly how much I use the service. That way, who's to say whether I'd actually use the service if they changed their ad serving model the way I say?

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