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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 im

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/ 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 legitimate need to bring in revenue from free users, but they should stick to audio, video and image ads.

nathanaldensr 8y ago
"We can push anything we want to your device but don't you dare try to block it. That's a Terms of Service Violation." Well, it was nice knowing you Spotify.
- kryogen1c 8y ago
  Yeah not to be glib, but that would be a deal breaker for me too.
  - yreg 8y ago
    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.
    - fartcannon 8y ago
      It's purely hubris. They clearly don't understand the nature of the beast.
      - umanwizard 8y ago
        A non-paying customer who doesn't listen to ads has absolutely zero value to Spotify. Why shouldn't they block them?
        magduf 8y ago
        Because then they tell all their less-technical friends and family that Spotify is shitty and evil and not to use them.
        umanwizard 8y ago
        If this were a real thing, we'd all be using Linux on the Desktop by now.
        simple_phrases 8y ago
        Well it worked on me and I'm usually wary of consumer-facing subscription services. I heard about Spotify through a musically-minded, but not technical, friend. I joined because of their insistence that it was a good service 3+ years ago. Today, they complain about the desktop client and ads. I no longer use Spotify.
        magduf 8y ago
        I've been trashing Windows for ages too, but there's a big difference here: people who really want to run some particular (usually proprietary) software generally have to use Windows to do that, and Windows has a lock on non-Apple computers for that and for many other reasons. Spotify doesn't have any kind of lock on music. The Apple fans are all using Apple Music, after all, and there's lot of other choices out there. Ditching Spotify isn't going to affect your life or digital device using in any significant way.
        enraged_camel 8y ago
        Because non-paying customers have the potential to become paying ones.
        umanwizard 8y ago
        Plenty of businesses don't give away free samples, and survive fine.
    - oligopoly 8y ago
      You have lot of students and people who can't afford it as of now but can convert to paying customers later on. If you buy into the system you are more dependant on it than just going another route and you end up not giving a damn about Spotify
      - peapicker 8y ago
        Students are $5 a month. Same as one Starbucks coffee a month. It is cheap already.
    - dessant 8y ago
      The attitude you describe can easily hurt their business. They may be future paying customers that are exploring your service, or don't have the money yet to subscribe. And even in the latter group there is an opportunity for building brand loyalty. But to see these opportunities, the first step is to not have a hostile attitude towards your users.
      - number_six 8y ago
        but you forgot how businesses work these days: Fuck you, Pay me
        kaelin 8y ago
        That's how all businesses have worked since the beginning of time.
        majewsky 8y ago
        No, that was just "pay me for this service/good". Most businesses who ventured into "fuck you" territory would soon be out of business because disgruntled customers opens up opportunities for competition to rise. Sadly, you don't have that anymore with today's economy-of-scale effects.
        mikestew 8y ago
        As opposed to the good ol' days when businesses all incorporated as 501(3)c's, funneling their funds to widows and orphans?
        EpicEng 8y ago
        Right, I really miss the good ol' days when business was all "Hey guy, I like you, here's some free stuff."
    - contravariant 8y ago
      That last part is conjecture, and just because they don't care doesn't mean you can't call them out on it.
- kevincrane 8y ago
  > We can push anything we want to your device I mean, they're pushing things to your device at your request, because you logged on to use their free service. If you don't want them to push ads to your device, they were kind enough to offer you a paid option where they won't do that.
- fastball 8y ago
  I'm sure they're very sad to be losing users that cost them money and generate $0 revenue in return.
bicubic 8y ago
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 content I paid for. It's not because I don't want to pay for the content, I'd happily pay 2-3x under the right circumstances. It's because no one wants to take my money and provide the content I want without bundling it with drm, ads, dark patterns, insane region segmentation, and manipulative cross-sell tactics. Whatever arguments were made about piracy detracting from sales are laughable now. The copyright and ad lobbies are detracting from those sales, piracy is just a symptom of the cancer that they are. Sonarr + Couchpotato + Plex + Subsonic is somehow a more consumer-friendly experience than their 'legitimate' counterparts. The fact that the premium subscription cost for those services is more than netflix+spotify, and yet people are willing to pay that much for their piracy, that should be pretty telling to any industry analyst.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  > It's not because I don't want to pay for the content, I'd happily pay 2-3x under the right circumstances. It's because no one wants to take my money and provide the content I want without bundling it with drm, ads, dark patterns, insane region segmentation. Can't help you with movies/Netflix, but in the case of Spotify, you could go back to buying mp3's. Google Play, Amazon, iTunes (aac format), etc will all sell you DRM Free tracks at $1.30 a piece, and the ad-free songs become yours forever to listen to however you wish.
  - bubblethink 8y ago
    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 codecs than mp3. So the choice of encoding should be up to you so that you can choose a better codec in the future if you wish. And mp3 wasn't even free until last year. So until 2018, it was illegal to play mp3s on a free system.
dspillett 8y ago
> 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 cameras or microphones (luckily caught by permissions blocks elsewhere), played obnoxious loud audio, played high-res bandwidth chewing video, opened pop-ups or pop-unders, and so forth. Serve the adverts from your own domains and agree to take responsibility for any damage done by code/other served from your domains, and we can talk. Otherwise: no ads. Ban me from your site or application for that if you wish.
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  Yes the drive by microphone adverts should be banned. There's no reason an advertiser needs access to my microphone, ever.
- zeeZ 8y ago
  Here's two more for the list opening their site on a mobile browser: On a data connection redirected me to my ISP's game shop that apparently lets me buy crappy games for I don't know what with one click via phone bill. Multiple redirects to a website that claims my phone is infected while maxing out the CPU and triggering permanent vibration.
jamespo 8y ago
Access to spotify free tier is not a human right, it's quite easy to just not use it
- paulgb 8y ago
  Exactly. I use an ad blocker (usually I disable it when a site asks nicely, but I turn it right back on if their ads are intrusive) but I don't get the sense of entitlement that seems to come with ad blocking for some people. If I want to use an ad blocker, that's my right; if a service wants to block me for it, that's theirs.
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  Access to my site that tries to inject your pc with malware isn't a human right either.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Nobody said it is. It's your choice to use the service.
    - NullPrefix 8y ago
      It's your choice to use the malware site too
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
danpalmer 8y ago
> They allow advertisers to run JS on your device, and ads are a trendy way to deliver malware. I wonder if the ad industry is onboard with HTTPS yet? In 2013 when I was last looking at ads as an attack vector, none did, and many executed JS, or gave privileged access to system APIs on device via JS, which meant that it was fairly trivial to intercept ad delivery, return malicious JS, open a "reverse JS shell" and poke about the filesystem in the app, open new screens, etc, all remotely. I reported this as a vulnerability in several apps, telling them that HTTPS was an important aspect of preventing this, and was told that ad networks were against HTTPS and therefore they had to find alternative mitigations.
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  iOS/MacOS block HTTP requests by default unless you request (and for apps on the App Store, are granted) an exception. So, I’d think that in-app advertisers on iOS would want to support HTTPS.
  - danpalmer 8y ago
    I believe this slightly pre-dated that enforcement on iOS. As you mentioned though, you can get exceptions, and I'm sure many large apps do get this.
tuxt 8y ago
Maybe just stop using spotify?
- josteink 8y ago
  Or pay for your account?
  - DoctorPenguin 8y ago
    Today I could easily afford that. But thinking back a few decades when I was young and didn't have much money at my disposal I would say using stuff for free isn't that bad. Especially when piracy is so much easier than getting your account suspended for using an adblocker.
    - praneshp 8y ago
      > But thinking back a few decades when I was young and didn't have much money at my disposal Setting aside the possibility of malware for a second, would you have taken spotify/pandora with ads back then?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- ip26 8y ago
  Ridiculous! This is about ideals, and principals, and getting a nice service for free!
stevespang 8y ago
Absolutely right.
mattbessey 8y ago
I can just about understand this attitude with services that do not have an ad-free subscription option, but Spotify does! How do you reconcile that you deserve to be able to use Spotify both without paying them money and without them monetising you via ads?
- godshatter 8y ago
  Because they offer it? They are giving public access to music and ads, choosing to only accept their offer of downloading the music (given that the ads are annoying and may contain malware) is only making use of part of what they offer. Their business model is their own business. Mine is making sure my computer stays secure and that I'm not bothered by annoying interruptions. Not that I have ever used Spotify, but that would be how I would defend it. If I did, I would just move on since my account would soon be suspended. So how does Spotify defend running potentially malicious ads from 3rd party providers on end-user systems? Do they even vet those ads? Are they even aware of what code will be running on users computers that they are serving via the ad frameworks?
- 13415 8y ago
  Why not? Spotify is not entitled to forcing you to display their ads either, and there are plenty of other free services on the Net that don't require you to watch ads.
criddell 8y ago
The simple solution is that Spotify accept liability for any malware delivered via their ad system.
- number_six 8y ago
  woah woah woah, you can't go expecting a company to take responsibility for what their service does. I think there's a constitutional amendment about that.
  - two2two 8y ago
    CDA 230?
josteink 8y ago
> People are using ad blockers not just to hide annoyances and to improve performance, but to protect themselves from bad actors. We are talking about people who use ad-blockers to get a “premium” experience while using free, unpaid accounts. Basically leeches undermining everyone else. I see no issue with Spotify terminating these accounts. Even as someone using an ad-blocker. Because I pay for the freaking service I use.
- zeeZ 8y ago
  I skimmed the legalese in the article and did not see them differentiating between account types. Seems like a general statement that may also apply to premium accounts.
- kingosticks 8y ago
  I agree with what you are saying. If you don't want ads (and whatever that means to you) then pay the money. However, they do seem to include ads in their podcasts for all users. So it's not quite that simple.

nathanaldensr 8y ago

"We can push anything we want to your device but don't you dare try to block it. That's a Terms of Service Violation." Well, it was nice knowing you Spotify.

kryogen1c 8y ago
Yeah not to be glib, but that would be a deal breaker for me too.
- yreg 8y ago
  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.
  - fartcannon 8y ago
    It's purely hubris. They clearly don't understand the nature of the beast.
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      A non-paying customer who doesn't listen to ads has absolutely zero value to Spotify. Why shouldn't they block them?
      - magduf 8y ago
        Because then they tell all their less-technical friends and family that Spotify is shitty and evil and not to use them.
        umanwizard 8y ago
        If this were a real thing, we'd all be using Linux on the Desktop by now.
        simple_phrases 8y ago
        Well it worked on me and I'm usually wary of consumer-facing subscription services. I heard about Spotify through a musically-minded, but not technical, friend. I joined because of their insistence that it was a good service 3+ years ago. Today, they complain about the desktop client and ads. I no longer use Spotify.
        magduf 8y ago
        I've been trashing Windows for ages too, but there's a big difference here: people who really want to run some particular (usually proprietary) software generally have to use Windows to do that, and Windows has a lock on non-Apple computers for that and for many other reasons. Spotify doesn't have any kind of lock on music. The Apple fans are all using Apple Music, after all, and there's lot of other choices out there. Ditching Spotify isn't going to affect your life or digital device using in any significant way.
      - enraged_camel 8y ago
        Because non-paying customers have the potential to become paying ones.
        umanwizard 8y ago
        Plenty of businesses don't give away free samples, and survive fine.
  - oligopoly 8y ago
    You have lot of students and people who can't afford it as of now but can convert to paying customers later on. If you buy into the system you are more dependant on it than just going another route and you end up not giving a damn about Spotify
    - peapicker 8y ago
      Students are $5 a month. Same as one Starbucks coffee a month. It is cheap already.
  - dessant 8y ago
    The attitude you describe can easily hurt their business. They may be future paying customers that are exploring your service, or don't have the money yet to subscribe. And even in the latter group there is an opportunity for building brand loyalty. But to see these opportunities, the first step is to not have a hostile attitude towards your users.
    - number_six 8y ago
      but you forgot how businesses work these days: Fuck you, Pay me
      - kaelin 8y ago
        That's how all businesses have worked since the beginning of time.
        majewsky 8y ago
        No, that was just "pay me for this service/good". Most businesses who ventured into "fuck you" territory would soon be out of business because disgruntled customers opens up opportunities for competition to rise. Sadly, you don't have that anymore with today's economy-of-scale effects.
      - mikestew 8y ago
        As opposed to the good ol' days when businesses all incorporated as 501(3)c's, funneling their funds to widows and orphans?
      - EpicEng 8y ago
        Right, I really miss the good ol' days when business was all "Hey guy, I like you, here's some free stuff."
  - contravariant 8y ago
    That last part is conjecture, and just because they don't care doesn't mean you can't call them out on it.
kevincrane 8y ago
> We can push anything we want to your device I mean, they're pushing things to your device at your request, because you logged on to use their free service. If you don't want them to push ads to your device, they were kind enough to offer you a paid option where they won't do that.
fastball 8y ago
I'm sure they're very sad to be losing users that cost them money and generate $0 revenue in return.

bicubic 8y ago

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 content I paid for. It's not because I don't want to pay for the content, I'd happily pay 2-3x under the right circumstances. It's because no one wants to take my money and provide the content I want without bundling it with drm, ads, dark patterns, insane region segmentation, and manipulative cross-sell tactics. Whatever arguments were made about piracy detracting from sales are laughable now. The copyright and ad lobbies are detracting from those sales, piracy is just a symptom of the cancer that they are. Sonarr + Couchpotato + Plex + Subsonic is somehow a more consumer-friendly experience than their 'legitimate' counterparts. The fact that the premium subscription cost for those services is more than netflix+spotify, and yet people are willing to pay that much for their piracy, that should be pretty telling to any industry analyst.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
> It's not because I don't want to pay for the content, I'd happily pay 2-3x under the right circumstances. It's because no one wants to take my money and provide the content I want without bundling it with drm, ads, dark patterns, insane region segmentation. Can't help you with movies/Netflix, but in the case of Spotify, you could go back to buying mp3's. Google Play, Amazon, iTunes (aac format), etc will all sell you DRM Free tracks at $1.30 a piece, and the ad-free songs become yours forever to listen to however you wish.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  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 codecs than mp3. So the choice of encoding should be up to you so that you can choose a better codec in the future if you wish. And mp3 wasn't even free until last year. So until 2018, it was illegal to play mp3s on a free system.

dspillett 8y ago

> 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 cameras or microphones (luckily caught by permissions blocks elsewhere), played obnoxious loud audio, played high-res bandwidth chewing video, opened pop-ups or pop-unders, and so forth. Serve the adverts from your own domains and agree to take responsibility for any damage done by code/other served from your domains, and we can talk. Otherwise: no ads. Ban me from your site or application for that if you wish.

cannonedhamster 8y ago
Yes the drive by microphone adverts should be banned. There's no reason an advertiser needs access to my microphone, ever.
zeeZ 8y ago
Here's two more for the list opening their site on a mobile browser: On a data connection redirected me to my ISP's game shop that apparently lets me buy crappy games for I don't know what with one click via phone bill. Multiple redirects to a website that claims my phone is infected while maxing out the CPU and triggering permanent vibration.

jamespo 8y ago

Access to spotify free tier is not a human right, it's quite easy to just not use it

paulgb 8y ago
Exactly. I use an ad blocker (usually I disable it when a site asks nicely, but I turn it right back on if their ads are intrusive) but I don't get the sense of entitlement that seems to come with ad blocking for some people. If I want to use an ad blocker, that's my right; if a service wants to block me for it, that's theirs.
NullPrefix 8y ago
Access to my site that tries to inject your pc with malware isn't a human right either.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Nobody said it is. It's your choice to use the service.
  - NullPrefix 8y ago
    It's your choice to use the malware site too
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

danpalmer 8y ago

> They allow advertisers to run JS on your device, and ads are a trendy way to deliver malware. I wonder if the ad industry is onboard with HTTPS yet? In 2013 when I was last looking at ads as an attack vector, none did, and many executed JS, or gave privileged access to system APIs on device via JS, which meant that it was fairly trivial to intercept ad delivery, return malicious JS, open a "reverse JS shell" and poke about the filesystem in the app, open new screens, etc, all remotely. I reported this as a vulnerability in several apps, telling them that HTTPS was an important aspect of preventing this, and was told that ad networks were against HTTPS and therefore they had to find alternative mitigations.

fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
iOS/MacOS block HTTP requests by default unless you request (and for apps on the App Store, are granted) an exception. So, I’d think that in-app advertisers on iOS would want to support HTTPS.
- danpalmer 8y ago
  I believe this slightly pre-dated that enforcement on iOS. As you mentioned though, you can get exceptions, and I'm sure many large apps do get this.

tuxt 8y ago

Maybe just stop using spotify?

josteink 8y ago
Or pay for your account?
- DoctorPenguin 8y ago
  Today I could easily afford that. But thinking back a few decades when I was young and didn't have much money at my disposal I would say using stuff for free isn't that bad. Especially when piracy is so much easier than getting your account suspended for using an adblocker.
  - praneshp 8y ago
    > But thinking back a few decades when I was young and didn't have much money at my disposal Setting aside the possibility of malware for a second, would you have taken spotify/pandora with ads back then?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
ip26 8y ago
Ridiculous! This is about ideals, and principals, and getting a nice service for free!

stevespang 8y ago

Absolutely right.

mattbessey 8y ago

I can just about understand this attitude with services that do not have an ad-free subscription option, but Spotify does! How do you reconcile that you deserve to be able to use Spotify both without paying them money and without them monetising you via ads?

godshatter 8y ago
Because they offer it? They are giving public access to music and ads, choosing to only accept their offer of downloading the music (given that the ads are annoying and may contain malware) is only making use of part of what they offer. Their business model is their own business. Mine is making sure my computer stays secure and that I'm not bothered by annoying interruptions. Not that I have ever used Spotify, but that would be how I would defend it. If I did, I would just move on since my account would soon be suspended. So how does Spotify defend running potentially malicious ads from 3rd party providers on end-user systems? Do they even vet those ads? Are they even aware of what code will be running on users computers that they are serving via the ad frameworks?
13415 8y ago
Why not? Spotify is not entitled to forcing you to display their ads either, and there are plenty of other free services on the Net that don't require you to watch ads.

criddell 8y ago

The simple solution is that Spotify accept liability for any malware delivered via their ad system.

number_six 8y ago
woah woah woah, you can't go expecting a company to take responsibility for what their service does. I think there's a constitutional amendment about that.
- two2two 8y ago
  CDA 230?

josteink 8y ago

> People are using ad blockers not just to hide annoyances and to improve performance, but to protect themselves from bad actors. We are talking about people who use ad-blockers to get a “premium” experience while using free, unpaid accounts. Basically leeches undermining everyone else. I see no issue with Spotify terminating these accounts. Even as someone using an ad-blocker. Because I pay for the freaking service I use.

zeeZ 8y ago
I skimmed the legalese in the article and did not see them differentiating between account types. Seems like a general statement that may also apply to premium accounts.
kingosticks 8y ago
I agree with what you are saying. If you don't want ads (and whatever that means to you) then pay the money. However, they do seem to include ads in their podcasts for all users. So it's not quite that simple.