I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a “sponsored recommendation”.
Why am I seeing ads if I’m already paying for the premium plan!? 😑
If you’re not paying you are the product. If you ARE paying you are STILL the product. This is how big tech works.
Basically every computer hardware manufacturer is collecting telemetry and sending it home. If you’re using MacOS or Windows, your OS is doing it aswell
Or Android, or iOS, or a Chromebook, or whatever other OS you’re using next year, if it isn’t some sort of Linux/UNIX system… and even some of those might not be great, but at least you can find out.
I mean… Android and ChromeOS are Linux underneath. MacOS is… related to Unix. Hang on, I need to look up that lineage…
Also Lineage.
Edit: MacOS used/uses the Mach kernel, and uses code “derived from BSD”, vague as Wikipedia is. That could mean it’s a whole copy-paste or that it just borrows ideas from BSD.
It has a history in the US anti trust (when the laws really worked)
MacOS has userland tools from some FreeBSD version (quite obsolete, IIRC). Also there’s a port of bhyve called xhyve for MacOS. Its kernel I wouldn’t expect to have much in common with BSDs.
Tbh i have used linux on my home pc for years now and now they are very polished products , except most corporate apps are not there !
Which corporate apps?
Perhaps I’m lucky, but I rarely have an issue.
Adobe , microsoft office , catia etc etc etc
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I suspect that’s a fraction of a percent of Android devices, though.
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You become the product with name, address, and payment details attached to the account for improved demographic data for them to collect. Win win.
But you’re paying for the GOOD recommendations now, not the free bad ones… /s
That’s not how big tech works, it’s how DRM works. It is possible to sell music/games/movies in an ethical way, without DRM.
In the immortal words of James Stephanie Sterling “corporations don’t just want some money. They want all of the money”
Because why make money off you one way, when they can make money off you two ways?
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It seems you can turn it off by touching “what’s this?” or “learn more” the next time you see one of these.
Really shitty that they don’t even put this as a setting though.
Might I add, I hate the way every user-facing UI has devolved into the Youtube Shorts / TikTok “doomscrolling” swipe-UI now. There seems to be absolutely not a single braincell left in UI development to even consider the actual use case of the interface.
It’s all just:
- Monkey see UI to build.
- Moneky see TikTok big.
- Monkey do.
Not sure what this has to do with the post. You don’t need to swipe to dismiss that modal.
Hold on! This is a modal?! That’s even worse, I had these card-style things as scrollable cards before! 😧
what’s worse about it? You just need to touch “DISMISS”
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they made this tiktok change a few months ago but reverted back after backlash
The lesson is that corporations will take, take, take no matter what. They will never honor any kind of social contract, and will always abuse anyone and everyone for profit to the maximum extent they are able.
So stop letting them take advantage of you.
And if they make a mistake, “my bad”. You make a mistake and it’s $100 in fees.
Unless, usually, they are a not for profit organization.
Or at least not a corporation that is expected to provide infinite growth for their shareholders.
Even then. Look at the way they pay people and treat volunteers…
I agree that there are also organizations from this kind
And push for legislation that doesn’t allow em to do this in the first place.
Cause it doesn’t make it right, but on some level it’s hard to blame them for pushing the limits, if there’s no resistance or repercussion. That’s how we ended up in this mess.
Tech moves fast. Government moves slow. Most of these issues boil down to legislative failures.
I go hard when it comes to this. Firefox + uBlock Origin, use open source alternatives, don’t communicate outside of Signal, 2FA on everything, you name it. And it’s exhausting at times, not gonna lie. But my effort reinforces my sentiment that it shouldn’t fall to the consumer to put in all this effort just to have some a basic, healthy blend of convenience, privacy, and security.
That is literally what non-Open Source/capitalism is like:
- You don’t pay, you are the product
- You pay, you are the product and you pay for it
no, you pay spotify so they can give Joe Rogan money to make up bullshit every day.
Enshittification in action.
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, it’s everywhere. Once a platform has lock-in from users it turns its attention to vendors. Then once they’re locked in it rakes in the profits until nobody can tolerate it any more and something else takes its place.
People defend intrusive advertising by appealing to some sort of social contract (ie you suffer through these things in order to get Spotify or whatever for free) but it’s not a social contract if the platform holds all the cards
Are we getting Spotify for free, if we’re buying premium?
The problem is you can’t “buy” products any more. Companies see that as interest, and then start to throw additional advertising to see how much they can get away with. Fuck that shit.
They’ve also run almost any way to do it outside of their ecosystems. If I want to listen to happy hardcore music, I have to hope spotify has it, but it’s rare to find that on most playlists, I’d have to go spend thousands of dollars for the same experience that Spotify offers, and that’s to own every track I’m even curious about.
Well we can always pirate !
Yo ho, yo ho!
What I really love about commercials is that if I click on them and order a life time subscription of whatever product they’re selling, I’m still gonna get the same commercials.
Spotify is garbage. You pay them to basically pirate unlimited music (they pay table scraps). They have no values or integrity, but they do have a greedy business model.
I buy albums off bandcamp instead. Or from the artist’s site directly.
A bit difficult if you want to just stream random music that somehow matches your interests.
If you’re going to p1r@te, you don’t have to pay sp0tify to do it…
I’m not going to deal with a seed box and a ton of pain in the ass steps in between to listen to music. I’d rather pay Spotify or Amazon or Google or any of the other providers because of the convenience factor.
Also owning music isn’t something I particularly care about. Games, maybe, but music is so broad that I’ll just listen to something else.
WTF is a seedbox?
I have no trouble listening to unlimited music, it’s literally everywhere.
Plus it’s not just about owning the album (although I absolutely insist on listening on whichever device I choose). It’s also about paying the artist.
Sp0tify pays peanuts. When I buy the album from the band’s site or bandcamp they get a hell of a lot more money from me. And I want to support them.
You cannot support any artist through Spotify.
How I have to torrent cause my isp will cancel service over it.
If you’re pirating you’re not paying the artist at all. Spotify is better than pirating.
I don’t pirate. I buy albums.
You’re advocating for piracy explicitly
If you’re going to p1r@te, you don’t have to pay sp0tify to do it…
There are patches like spicetify which can do that and way more than just adblocking with a ton of customisation if that’s what you’re looking for
That doesn’t really fix the “somehow matches your interests” part of their need. Your torrent software isn’t able to track your listening habits and recommend things that other people with similar habits also liked.
Pandora is still around and does a decent job finding new music based off listening habits.
There’s other streaming services. I’d recommend any over Spotify.
Which one do you prefer / recommend?
I’ve been enjoying apple music on Android (the audacity, I know) mainly for family plan convenience. I used to use Tidal, back when it was the only one offering higher quality audio. Now that’s more common.
However I do miss a few things from Tidal. It had full credits for albums and songs like a CD would have had. And when you’re on a track and go to the artist it will let you pick which one you want if there’s features or a collab. Apple Music will just automatically take you to the page of the first artist listed. So that’s something to consider especially if you’re into hip-hop.
There’s many options though and they pretty much all pay artists more than Spotify does too.
Soundcloud is one! Some artists let you download their music and others don’t. Other than than Soundcloud isn’t open source, I don’t see what’s wrong with them.
Bandcamp is DRM-free, so whatever you buy there, you truly own it. Unlike on most other platforms.
DRM-protected music stores went extinct over a decade ago, following Steve Jobs’ open letter to the music industry on the topic. By 2009, iTunes music was completely DRM-free and alternative stores had to follow suit to remain competitive.
Wow, you are right! I was confused about iTunes, because it seems to require an app, but it is DRM-free and so is Amazon Music. That’s great! So I guess only Spotify has DRM.
All the streaming services use DRM, it’s just download stores that are DRM-free. Which makes sense, when you buy an album, you should own it.
I see, that makes sense. But I also think that every content that you have paid to access should be DRM-free, so even in a streaming service.
It’s personally a catch 22 for me.
I listen to an absolutely absurd amounts of different artists. A large portion of them simply don’t have albums available for purchase and if they did… I would actually go broke buying all the stuff I listen to.
Every single day I type in a Combo of 2 random letters and numbers into spotify and listen to the first artist I don’t recognize.
It really sucks that Spotify doesn’t pay the artists anything reasonable but I haven’t found an alternative that allows me to consume as much different music as I currently do.
This isn’t even including the podcasts and audio books into the equation.
It’s the same as pirating, except Spotify gets paid.
Why letters and numbers?
Some artists use numbers in their names and adding numbers will change what the search returns sometimes with odd results.
Greedy business model seems slightly unfair tbh. Spotify struggles to remain profitable and they’ve only raised their prices by like $1 in a decade
Just because they’re incompetent doesn’t mean they’re not greedy.
Also, executives can still be cleaning up even as the company struggles to profit.
Executives being greedy isn’t the same as a greedy business model
This makes no sense. Greedy execs are the ones who would implement a greedy business model to pursue their greed.
What part of the executive compensation package are you taking specific issue with exactly? From what I could see, they’re largely paid in stock and the CEO hasn’t taken a bonus since COVID.
Or are you just talking executives in general and not looking at what Spotify does specifically?
So they’re incompetent on top of greedy. They’re selling access to everybody’s music and paying peanuts.
Maybe they shouldn’t’ve thrown so much money into the pivot to podcasts, then thrown a bunch of money at that meathead idiot.
Yeah that $100 billion they gave Joe Rogan is where your payments go.
they didn’t give Joe Rogan 100 billion dollars you dunce.
I think it was 1000000 trillion bazillion dollars, you drooling braindead goon.
This comment says a lot more about you than it does about me.
Remember when you called me a dunce? And now you’re self righteous? Anyway, goodbye.
No company in their right mind would pay one person $100,000,000,000! Come on!
yeah, it’s not spotify’s fault that splitting $10/month between all the music you listen to doesn’t pay the artists very much.
Yea, companies that pay more typically either charge more (Tidal) or have the advantage of a massive profitable company backing them (Apple Music)
Honestly it’s a shame that most good music pirating sites have gone to the shitter, literally the only way to actually pirate and own music I could find via searching vigorously was through youtube to MP3 converters.
rutracker and soulseek are good options for finding music.
Napster was so much fun back in the day.
Unpopular opinion - in Spotify (and Spotify ONLY) I actually like that it does this. I like discovering new music and Spotify seems to have really good recommendations sometimes. Sure they collect a lot of listening data - but how else could they give good recommendations if they don’t know what you like?
I agree with you, but you may be missing the point - this recommendation is sponsored, so likely it wouldn’t have been recommended unless the artist paid.
It seems relatively harmless as long as they don’t overdo it though. The only incentive for someone to pay for this is that that you might like their music and will listen to it more in the future, which would be a win for you as well.
Maybe it also allows smaller artists to gain momentum without only depending on the magic recommendation algorithm.
Thats how all advertisements started. Small, not overdone. Then people became okay with paying and receiving ads. So they slowly increase the amount until you have what cable has become.
Most ads are terrible because they are annoying and advertise bad products. I think that’s less likely to be a problem here because your music is the ad, if it is annoying and bad you will simply stop listening and they lose money on the ad.
If it would be ads for podcasts for example, it would be much much worse for me.
If Spotify cared about smaller artists they wouldn’t pay them the least.
If Spotify cared about artist they would pay any of them even remotely fair!
Of course they don’t care about small artists. That’s my point, if you pay for ads you have an option to be less dependent on the platform to make you famous by paying for it. Simply waiting for people to find your music is unlikely to be succesful.
I still don’t want to see ads. One of many reasons I don’t use spotify.
The recommendations will likely become worse over time, because they want you to listen to whatever makes them the most money and that might not be the same stuff you want to listen to. The same happened to tiktok recommendations and youtube subscriptions (people stopped getting notifications on creators they subscribed to).
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But that’s not what this is. This is just an ad. Not a “since you like X, try Y”
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If there is any company that can do personalized ads for music then it is Spotify. It’s what they are best at, why would they skip that opportunity?
Without this feature, I wouldn’t have known that Yeah Yeah Yeahs and PJ Harvey released new albums. So I’m torn. On the one hand, I’m happy artists I already love can still reach me; on the other hand, I hate that smaller artists I don’t know about yet still have to pay to play
It’s the least offensive type of advertising I see day to day. I couldn’t care less how my listening data is shared, and I don’t understand the zero tolerance some people have for adverts - it’s not all bad.
If they ramp up the adverts, people will vote with their feet.
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