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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

#881

Post by iknownothing52 »

charlesdm wrote: post #812
nojvek wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it was black mirror style. You had to listen to the goddamn ad. I used to take off the earphones when the ad played. It was an annoying enough experience. Although I mostly upgraded to paid option for the high bit rate audio. Music sounds so much crispier. Making users pay for no ads may not be enough to nudge them over. Offering a premium pro is definitely a viable model.

Can't have it all for free. I've been a paying user for nearly 8 years. And I love it.

Payments to artists are based on total listens, not who is paying or who you listen to. So your money goes to the artists listened to by others :(

They are also shockingly bad with snooping on you and sharing data.

Ads that come from third parties are open to exploitation and not properly vetted, not to mention may be jarring to your experience.

I was a paying customer for a long time but i dont like basically anything about how they work. I quit after the privacy policy got repeatedly worse and given that i was paying more than it cost to just buy all the music i listened to (when taken over years assuming youtube is as good when you are just showing someone a song not listening for quality). And they were still insisting on spying on me and keeping the data, wanting to know as much as possible about what i was doing! Even though i was paying for the service :(

And to top it all the money was going to effectively top playing radio artists :( direct purchase of flacs from the artist FTW. If you are going to pay for a service make it dropbox or something else more agnostic / flexible.

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

#882

Post by michaelmrose »

Sebb767 wrote: post #768
michaelmrose wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing is taking property with the intention of permanently depriving the rightful owner of said property. One cannot steal data by not watching ads because you can't deprive the owner of said data. Misusing a word to evoke an emotional response is intellectually dishonest and manipulative. Entitled is another overused manipulative term. I am in fact entitled to decide what runs on my computer and spotify is entitl…

> Stealing is taking property with the intention of permanently depriving the rightful owner of said property. > One cannot steal data by not watching ads because you can't deprive the owner of said data. Well, it is. Spotify grants you the temporary license to play the copyrighted song for you listening to their ads. They _pay_ for the right to distribute that song. It's like taking something from a store and refusi…

Stealing is a term of art for the legal arena. Just like a million idiots who call their entire tower a cpu doesn't serve to redefine a technical term you "feeling" like not watching ads is stealing food from your mouth doesn't mean that it is.

There are a number of pieces of actual property involved but the user isn't carting off Spotify's servers and spotify isn't breaking into the users home and stealing their laptops.

What you do want to cart of is the users autonomy to manage how their actual property is used in service to an imaginary moral duty to be brainwashed by propoganda based on terms and conditions that we don't agree are a moral obligation.

You have a moral right to the actual money your users have agreed to pay you if you provide the agreed upon service.

The fact that you actually believe that you can buy their thoughts, their autonomy, their attention, and their time with your cheap crap doesn't mean if they opt not to give you those things you have been stolen from because those things were never for sale and you can't own them.

The best you can do is not do business if you feel like the deal isn't mutually beneficial. Take your ball and go home if you like but don't be dumb enough to call your users thieves for claiming unalienable rights to their own brains and machines.

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

#883

Post by djsumdog »

I have never used one of these subscription services because I hate renting my music. I buy my music. I frequently buy CDs in bars and rip them. I know when I buy a CD from an indie artist, they usually only paid $1 ~ $2 for that CD and get the full amount I pay them minus that. Bandcamp is seocnd best, because they only take 15% (compared to over 30% from Amazon/Apple/Google).

Buy your music people! You can get 250GB microSD cards. Back when the limit was 128GB, sure I couldn't get all my music on my phone (I just had A-V .. W - Z just had to wait), but now I have all of it on there and probably won't max out until larger cards are affordable.

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

#884

Post by webninja »

jplayer01 wrote: post #430
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…

Unfortunately, Spotify has reached a point where there's a potential (possibly even real, but I'm not in any position to know) higher return in monetizing existing users over improving the experience in order to gain new users or make sure they keep whatever miniscule number of users who'd otherwise leave over a lack of updates and improvements (or even a gradual loss of 'minor' features). Spotify is good enough for…

They lose more money and more if you actually use the service. Since they’re a publicly traded company now, they’re probably being pressured to keep earning more and more money each year.

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

#885

Post by webninja »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #147
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #16

Sounds like a reasonable move. Spotify delivers so much value that I couldn’t imagine not paying for it (or enduring ads). I listened to something like 25 straight days of music last year.

I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find someone talking any sense. Is it really the case that most of HN are listening to Spotify all day every day and blocking the ads? Why not just pay for it!?

I wondered the same thing when that New York Times article came up about people paying for News. They acted like the media can support themselves for free, just like artists. One way I differ from some HNers is that I like support good journalism and I like to support the my favorite music artists as well. I know music quality has gone down over the years since artists know they’re much less likely to strike it rich. I met some kids still in highschool and heck even they were listening to music from the early 2000s, 90s and 80s instead, surprisingly.

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

#886

Post by webninja »

nixpulvis wrote: post #20

Considering how services like Spotify and Apple Music incourage extra data usage, and randomally delete music as they see fit, I'm finding myself thinking more and more of these services as discovery tools (akin to radio) and less like media players (they aren't). One day very soon I'll be playing all my music in something else entirely again. While it's impossible to brush off the value of streaming services like Sp…

You can download all of your playlists easily and make them available offline in Spotify. You can even set them to be high fidelity and only download over WiFi.

Now with Apple Music you don’t have the option to choose between WiFi/Cellular for downloaded music but Spotify doesn’t have that problem.

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

#887

Post by webninja »

ox_cable wrote: post #26
sidyapa wrote: post #7

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.

While I'm sure I'm in the minority, I absolutely do have the birthright to control what content appears on my device. If they want to prevent ads from being blocked, blocking me from using their service is 100% fine by me.

Have you found a way to block all the ads on your radio and TV too?

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

#888

Post by webninja »

danijelb wrote: post #60
sidyapa wrote: post #7

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.

Should TV networks try to block you if you don't look at the TV while ads are running? Or if you turn it off/switch channel/mute it? Same goes for newspapers and magazines - do you have a right to skip pages filled with ads and not look at them?

If you install software into your TV that blocks the ads, then they should be able to boot you off. You have a right to not listen or pay attention to ads. However, you bring up a good point with the magazines example. That opens up a whole new can of worms.

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

#889

Post by acct1771 »

themacguffinman wrote: post #764
tomohawk wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify does NOT have the right to run arbitrary code on my device. That is not something that fits into the category of me using their service. That rather fits into the category of me being forced to provide a service to Spotify.

Spotify isn't reaching into your computer and running ads, you are running Spotify. If you don't want Spotify and its dependencies, you can simply not run Spotify.

The ads weren't a dependency, and technically speaking, still aren't.

They could force them to be. And socially, are. But, they're not technically.

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

#890

Post by webninja »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #35

I dont get why people use spotify instead of listening to free online radios from anywhere in the world. As a bonus, its like travelling. There are ads, but they target other people than you so its not even annoying (you will not be influenced to buy a car at a dealership in another country). Note that if you are the kind who likes targeted ads, this does not apply to you.

My favorite online radio is http:/radio.garden

It was once highly upvoted on HN.

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