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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 Spot

by akerl_ 8y ago

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’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”.

gowld 8y ago
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.
- judge2020 8y ago
  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.
  - heynk 8y ago
    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.
    - gmueckl 8y ago
      That was one of the annoyances that finally made me pay for the service. The other one was that they were constantly changing what the free plan allows you to do back then.
    - Bonooru 8y ago
      I haven't ever used spotify, so forgive my ignorance. How are they measuring the system volume from inside a webapp? Shouldn't that information not be visible to them?
      - andai 8y ago
        It pauses it if you put the in-app volume too low. I think the desktop client also reacts to the system volume setting, but it's been a while since I had the free plan.
      - Scoundreller 8y ago
        I have this issue with the NPR One web player on Windows7. When the laptop is muted and I press the physical button to unmute it, the mute light goes off, but the web player soft-mutes. Argh. Why can’t the mute button just be a physical switch!?!?!?
        SturgeonsLaw 8y ago
        You could try getting a 3.5mm stereo cable, cutting the end off and using that as your physical mute button. Not sure if that routes audio to the "headphones" at the software or firmware level, but anything reading volume levels would still see it set to whatever level the OS is at.
    - wasdfff 8y ago
      There are headphones where %30 volume would do some damage.
      - kingosticks 8y ago
        And if there's some kind of bug where the volume shoots up to max, you just go deaf?
        thaumasiotes 8y ago
        Yeah, there are headphones like that. I have unfortunately owned a pair.
      - astura 8y ago
        Yep, my headphones are only used with the lowest volume my phone allows, and I'd prefer them to be a little quieter.
    - logfromblammo 8y ago
      Buy headphones with their own thumbwheel attenuator and/or mute button, or plug your corded headphones into an extension cord or dongle that has them. Traditional broadcast radio gets zero feedback from most receivers. Spotify is already a step ahead of that by preventing users from avoiding ads just by changing the radio station, and I think that the clever tricks with the volume are really pushing it in terms of user hostility. I pay to not get ads, so I'm not really motivated to explore avoiding them. But if you try to advertise at me no matter what I do, or overestimate what I would pay, I will join in the arms race against your advertisers. I'll block the ads, and block the ad-blocker detectors, and block the ad-blocker-detector-blocker detectors. I'll crunch your cookies, and squash your pixel, and firewall your home-phoner. Maybe I put a 30-minute buffering program on the audio stream that the music program is allowed to use, and tell that program to skip ahead during the ads. Maybe I also train another program to recognize the ads, and tell the first program exactly how far to skip ahead. Maybe I lock the music program in the matrix, and control all the data it tries to get from the system, to the point that it cannot ever say what reality truly is. There's something to be said for just playing the ad audio without trying to ensure someone is listening, or identifying who it might be. After all, Spotify could be playing music to a cat in an otherwise empty house, with the mobile device quietly displaying "Now playing 'Meow Mix Theme - Metal Version' on device 'Bluetooth speaker'." (If that song actually exists, I cannot attest to its quality, because I swear I thought I was making it up.)
      - EGreg 8y ago
        The Tivo option: prerecord streams and strip out ads. I will tell you why the VCR was different: TV shows didn’t play on demand, so you had a legitimate reason to record stuff.
    - angry_octet 8y ago
      Diabolical.
    - nojvek 8y ago
      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.
      - charlesdm 8y ago
        Can't have it all for free. I've been a paying user for nearly 8 years. And I love it.
        iknownothing52 8y ago
        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.
      - scotty79 8y ago
        > It was an annoying enough experience. For me it was annoying enough to stop using spotify.
        mygo 8y ago
        sometimes annoying UX can turn users away instead of leading the users to give them money. They know the ads are annoying and can turn users away. So they nudge the users with one of those "hey, these ads suck don't they? pay us for an ad-free experience" during ad spots or in place of ad spots. I don't think I've used another service that uses so many of their prime ad spots to try to advertise getting rid of ads. This may also suggest that Spotify makes much much much less than $10/user/month on ads. So much less that they can afford not to show paid ads in an ad spot if it'll lead to more paying users. Which I'd agree. Or maybe supply and demand kicks in and they just up their ads pricing as a result of showing less ads. But I don't think the ad-buying market can bear increases in ad pricing, otherwise facebook could just up their ads pricing instead of destroying the newsfeed with so many ads, which hurts user retention.
    - NoodleIncident 8y ago
      I've never had issues on Mac, Windows, or Linux with the operating system's mute stopping ad playback. On a related note, Spotify's volume controls should never be touched, because no matter what you set the music volume to, ads will play at full volume. It's usually louder than the music anyway, but the damage to your ears can be minimized.
  - bscphil 8y ago
    If I'm not mistaken the audio ads still use ad servers, so if you're on a network where someone is running a PiHole or something similar, the ads will be blocked. So running Spotify on an another person's network could get your account suspended if they're blocking ads, I guess.
    - Tsubasachan 8y ago
      Hopefully Spotify doesn't ban my paid for account because I'm using an Android wide ad blocking solution.
      - jeevan4 8y ago
        are you using blokada ?
        Tsubasachan 8y ago
        DNS66, same principle. I suppose I have to whitelist Spotify ad servers. What a shit show.
- loco5niner 8y ago
  >Pandora and Google Play Music ... put ads in the audio stream Why would you want to encourage Spotify to adopt this horrible practice? I don't WANT ads injected into the audio.
  - davidcbc 8y ago
    Then you can pay for the service
    - loco5niner 8y ago
      You misunderstand. I'm fine with paying for the service and DO (Spotify Premium). I also use other services on occasion and HATE when the audio is interrupted with ads. Show visual ads all day long, that's fine. Audio ads just suck. Especially when they raise the volume threshold for commercials.
    - loco5niner 8y ago
      Oh, like cable, Amazon Prime video, etc... where you pay for the service and STILL get ads?
- nobodyandproud 8y ago
  Video stream. That's when I uninstalled Pandora. They get my ears. At the volume I dictate. If they exceed that threshold, then into the trash they go. Spotify is no better.
kgwxd 8y ago
I've never used this phrase in my entire life but it seems absolutely perfect for the described scenario. Sorry not sorry. I personally chose not to use Spotify at all, but I'm not going to fault anyone for using it with a thrid-party blocker. Even if Spotify didn't also do advertising the right way (e.g. branded playlists (I believe paying users get those too)), no one is obligated to subject themselves to personal harm, even if someone is dumb enough to expose people to that risk as a subsidy for their service, no matter how useful the service is.
- fastball 8y ago
  If you don't want to "subject yourself to personal harm" you can either not use the service or pay for the ad-free service. You don't have a right to use Spotify how you want. It's an online service, not a piece of personal property.
  - v_lisivka 8y ago
    But I still have right to NOT use service provided by Spotify or and another third-party service, completely or partially.
    - fastball 8y ago
      You do NOT have a right to use the service "partially" (by blocking ads), as blocking ads on their free plan is against the ToS.
      - sieabahlpark 8y ago
        He has all the right to, that's why he's not in prison. Spotify gets to dictate who gets to use their product though.
      - zanny 8y ago
        ToS's (online, at least) aren't legally enforceable. If they were actually legally binding companies would be sueing users for violating them all the time. Theres a reason the extent of ToS enforcement is just account closure, its because they have no legal standing and just act as a safeguard against actual legal challenges.
teawrecks 8y ago
This is just the argument against piracy. And if anyone proved that convenience combats piracy, it's Spotify. If you ever find your users trying to circumvent part of your process in order to make their experience better, the proper response isn't "hold up now, your experience with our product wasn't supposed to be THAT good." It's on their business to figure out how to maximize their customer's satisfaction, while still remaining profitable. Or another service will come along and do it for you.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  Thank you. Failures of your business model are not our problem. The only people who can force me to pay is Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Everyone else can persuade me
  - criley2 8y ago
    Enjoy your ban! I'm always pleased when companies stand up to grifters like you. Go back to stealing mp3s or whatever it is you think you're entitled to.
    - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
      I actually do pay spotify - I just object to the enforcement principle. (And apple music and Amazon - I think I need to rationalise that one) I think that the Apple / Amazon model is more appealing - pay us first or basically you get nothing. I guess this is the early signs of the Freemium model falling apart.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      I am not sure why you are accusing someone of a crime ("stealing"). Installing an ad blocker is within someone's full legal right. Why are you making false statements regarding what is or is not a crime?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
stale2002 8y ago
It is within someone's full legal right to use an ad blocker.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  Yep! Just like it's within Spotify's full legal right to ban you for using an ad-blocker.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    You know people can just create another account, right? Also, they can do other things, such as starting a consumer revolt against Spotify, and by giving them bad publicity, that may cause paying users to remember about their unused account and cancel it. Bad publicity costs companies a lot of money.
    - brewdad 8y ago
      I don't know about other users, but I'm not canceling my Spotify account to stand in solidarity with the freeloaders. Ad blocking users are a net negative to Spotify, why shouldn't they ban them?
      - jodrellblank 8y ago
        Ad blocking users are a net negative to Spotify, why shouldn't they ban them? It's not unthinkable that ad blocking users are keeping money and attention away from Spotify's competitors, spreading enthusiasm about Spotify to more people who will become paying customers, and giving Spotify more ears and more user information to inform their decisions. Ad blocking users cost, but only as much as a low-bitrate audio stream - and that should get cheaper every year. At some point, will it cross so they're not net-negatives?
  - leothecool 8y ago
    Sure, but can they legally spy on me or search my computer to try and figure out if I am blocking ads?
smichel17 8y ago
> 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?
manicdee 8y ago
Spotify telling us, "you have to let us run unvetted third party software on your device to listen to music for free" is completely different from, "here is an ad-supported music streaming option."
majani 8y ago
Maybe Spotify and others could offer an option to serve untargeted ads, but hide it away under heaps of menus and technical jargon such that only the 0.1% of their users who are obsessed with this topic will bother with it

by akerl_ 8y ago

gowld 8y ago

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.

judge2020 8y ago
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.
- heynk 8y ago
  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.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    That was one of the annoyances that finally made me pay for the service. The other one was that they were constantly changing what the free plan allows you to do back then.
  - Bonooru 8y ago
    I haven't ever used spotify, so forgive my ignorance. How are they measuring the system volume from inside a webapp? Shouldn't that information not be visible to them?
    - andai 8y ago
      It pauses it if you put the in-app volume too low. I think the desktop client also reacts to the system volume setting, but it's been a while since I had the free plan.
    - Scoundreller 8y ago
      I have this issue with the NPR One web player on Windows7. When the laptop is muted and I press the physical button to unmute it, the mute light goes off, but the web player soft-mutes. Argh. Why can’t the mute button just be a physical switch!?!?!?
      - SturgeonsLaw 8y ago
        You could try getting a 3.5mm stereo cable, cutting the end off and using that as your physical mute button. Not sure if that routes audio to the "headphones" at the software or firmware level, but anything reading volume levels would still see it set to whatever level the OS is at.
  - wasdfff 8y ago
    There are headphones where %30 volume would do some damage.
    - kingosticks 8y ago
      And if there's some kind of bug where the volume shoots up to max, you just go deaf?
      - thaumasiotes 8y ago
        Yeah, there are headphones like that. I have unfortunately owned a pair.
    - astura 8y ago
      Yep, my headphones are only used with the lowest volume my phone allows, and I'd prefer them to be a little quieter.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    Buy headphones with their own thumbwheel attenuator and/or mute button, or plug your corded headphones into an extension cord or dongle that has them. Traditional broadcast radio gets zero feedback from most receivers. Spotify is already a step ahead of that by preventing users from avoiding ads just by changing the radio station, and I think that the clever tricks with the volume are really pushing it in terms of user hostility. I pay to not get ads, so I'm not really motivated to explore avoiding them. But if you try to advertise at me no matter what I do, or overestimate what I would pay, I will join in the arms race against your advertisers. I'll block the ads, and block the ad-blocker detectors, and block the ad-blocker-detector-blocker detectors. I'll crunch your cookies, and squash your pixel, and firewall your home-phoner. Maybe I put a 30-minute buffering program on the audio stream that the music program is allowed to use, and tell that program to skip ahead during the ads. Maybe I also train another program to recognize the ads, and tell the first program exactly how far to skip ahead. Maybe I lock the music program in the matrix, and control all the data it tries to get from the system, to the point that it cannot ever say what reality truly is. There's something to be said for just playing the ad audio without trying to ensure someone is listening, or identifying who it might be. After all, Spotify could be playing music to a cat in an otherwise empty house, with the mobile device quietly displaying "Now playing 'Meow Mix Theme - Metal Version' on device 'Bluetooth speaker'." (If that song actually exists, I cannot attest to its quality, because I swear I thought I was making it up.)
    - EGreg 8y ago
      The Tivo option: prerecord streams and strip out ads. I will tell you why the VCR was different: TV shows didn’t play on demand, so you had a legitimate reason to record stuff.
  - angry_octet 8y ago
    Diabolical.
  - nojvek 8y ago
    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.
    - charlesdm 8y ago
      Can't have it all for free. I've been a paying user for nearly 8 years. And I love it.
      - iknownothing52 8y ago
        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.
    - scotty79 8y ago
      > It was an annoying enough experience. For me it was annoying enough to stop using spotify.
      - mygo 8y ago
        sometimes annoying UX can turn users away instead of leading the users to give them money. They know the ads are annoying and can turn users away. So they nudge the users with one of those "hey, these ads suck don't they? pay us for an ad-free experience" during ad spots or in place of ad spots. I don't think I've used another service that uses so many of their prime ad spots to try to advertise getting rid of ads. This may also suggest that Spotify makes much much much less than $10/user/month on ads. So much less that they can afford not to show paid ads in an ad spot if it'll lead to more paying users. Which I'd agree. Or maybe supply and demand kicks in and they just up their ads pricing as a result of showing less ads. But I don't think the ad-buying market can bear increases in ad pricing, otherwise facebook could just up their ads pricing instead of destroying the newsfeed with so many ads, which hurts user retention.
  - NoodleIncident 8y ago
    I've never had issues on Mac, Windows, or Linux with the operating system's mute stopping ad playback. On a related note, Spotify's volume controls should never be touched, because no matter what you set the music volume to, ads will play at full volume. It's usually louder than the music anyway, but the damage to your ears can be minimized.
- bscphil 8y ago
  If I'm not mistaken the audio ads still use ad servers, so if you're on a network where someone is running a PiHole or something similar, the ads will be blocked. So running Spotify on an another person's network could get your account suspended if they're blocking ads, I guess.
  - Tsubasachan 8y ago
    Hopefully Spotify doesn't ban my paid for account because I'm using an Android wide ad blocking solution.
    - jeevan4 8y ago
      are you using blokada ?
      - Tsubasachan 8y ago
        DNS66, same principle. I suppose I have to whitelist Spotify ad servers. What a shit show.
loco5niner 8y ago
>Pandora and Google Play Music ... put ads in the audio stream Why would you want to encourage Spotify to adopt this horrible practice? I don't WANT ads injected into the audio.
- davidcbc 8y ago
  Then you can pay for the service
  - loco5niner 8y ago
    You misunderstand. I'm fine with paying for the service and DO (Spotify Premium). I also use other services on occasion and HATE when the audio is interrupted with ads. Show visual ads all day long, that's fine. Audio ads just suck. Especially when they raise the volume threshold for commercials.
  - loco5niner 8y ago
    Oh, like cable, Amazon Prime video, etc... where you pay for the service and STILL get ads?
nobodyandproud 8y ago
Video stream. That's when I uninstalled Pandora. They get my ears. At the volume I dictate. If they exceed that threshold, then into the trash they go. Spotify is no better.

kgwxd 8y ago

I've never used this phrase in my entire life but it seems absolutely perfect for the described scenario. Sorry not sorry. I personally chose not to use Spotify at all, but I'm not going to fault anyone for using it with a thrid-party blocker. Even if Spotify didn't also do advertising the right way (e.g. branded playlists (I believe paying users get those too)), no one is obligated to subject themselves to personal harm, even if someone is dumb enough to expose people to that risk as a subsidy for their service, no matter how useful the service is.

fastball 8y ago
If you don't want to "subject yourself to personal harm" you can either not use the service or pay for the ad-free service. You don't have a right to use Spotify how you want. It's an online service, not a piece of personal property.
- v_lisivka 8y ago
  But I still have right to NOT use service provided by Spotify or and another third-party service, completely or partially.
  - fastball 8y ago
    You do NOT have a right to use the service "partially" (by blocking ads), as blocking ads on their free plan is against the ToS.
    - sieabahlpark 8y ago
      He has all the right to, that's why he's not in prison. Spotify gets to dictate who gets to use their product though.
    - zanny 8y ago
      ToS's (online, at least) aren't legally enforceable. If they were actually legally binding companies would be sueing users for violating them all the time. Theres a reason the extent of ToS enforcement is just account closure, its because they have no legal standing and just act as a safeguard against actual legal challenges.

teawrecks 8y ago

This is just the argument against piracy. And if anyone proved that convenience combats piracy, it's Spotify. If you ever find your users trying to circumvent part of your process in order to make their experience better, the proper response isn't "hold up now, your experience with our product wasn't supposed to be THAT good." It's on their business to figure out how to maximize their customer's satisfaction, while still remaining profitable. Or another service will come along and do it for you.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago
Thank you. Failures of your business model are not our problem. The only people who can force me to pay is Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Everyone else can persuade me
- criley2 8y ago
  Enjoy your ban! I'm always pleased when companies stand up to grifters like you. Go back to stealing mp3s or whatever it is you think you're entitled to.
  - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    I actually do pay spotify - I just object to the enforcement principle. (And apple music and Amazon - I think I need to rationalise that one) I think that the Apple / Amazon model is more appealing - pay us first or basically you get nothing. I guess this is the early signs of the Freemium model falling apart.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    I am not sure why you are accusing someone of a crime ("stealing"). Installing an ad blocker is within someone's full legal right. Why are you making false statements regarding what is or is not a crime?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

stale2002 8y ago

It is within someone's full legal right to use an ad blocker.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
Yep! Just like it's within Spotify's full legal right to ban you for using an ad-blocker.
- stale2002 8y ago
  You know people can just create another account, right? Also, they can do other things, such as starting a consumer revolt against Spotify, and by giving them bad publicity, that may cause paying users to remember about their unused account and cancel it. Bad publicity costs companies a lot of money.
  - brewdad 8y ago
    I don't know about other users, but I'm not canceling my Spotify account to stand in solidarity with the freeloaders. Ad blocking users are a net negative to Spotify, why shouldn't they ban them?
    - jodrellblank 8y ago
      Ad blocking users are a net negative to Spotify, why shouldn't they ban them? It's not unthinkable that ad blocking users are keeping money and attention away from Spotify's competitors, spreading enthusiasm about Spotify to more people who will become paying customers, and giving Spotify more ears and more user information to inform their decisions. Ad blocking users cost, but only as much as a low-bitrate audio stream - and that should get cheaper every year. At some point, will it cross so they're not net-negatives?
- leothecool 8y ago
  Sure, but can they legally spy on me or search my computer to try and figure out if I am blocking ads?

smichel17 8y ago

> 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?

manicdee 8y ago

Spotify telling us, "you have to let us run unvetted third party software on your device to listen to music for free" is completely different from, "here is an ad-supported music streaming option."

majani 8y ago

Maybe Spotify and others could offer an option to serve untargeted ads, but hide it away under heaps of menus and technical jargon such that only the 0.1% of their users who are obsessed with this topic will bother with it