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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed 1000%. Everyone wants unlimited high quality content that is also free but no ads and conditional privacy and "true" information and ... and ... and ...

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The ongoing success of Netflix proves not everybody is a freeloader, and a report from Spotify made the news for their estimate that 2 million people are using ad-block software to get premium without paying for it - the bigger news should really be that they have 150-some million users that aren't cheating the system, and that 70 million people pay money to Spotify.

Everybody wants something for free, but there are some people that recognize things are worth paying for.

As a paying customer, I'm genuinely surprised that adblocking is possible with Spotify considering they control both the servers and the client.

That said, I started on the free plan and have friends who still use it and the ads really aren't intrustive at all - it hardly seems like it would be worth the effort?

Also as a paying premium spotify customer, I can say they still serve up ads, they're just incognito...

1.) I recently had a splash screen for a Hulu partner "free trial" membership. Turns out it's actually a bundle, but I don't want to pay more for Hulu so keep your "ads" out of my premium feed Spotify. Put it in a special offers section where I can peruse at my liesure.

https://support.spotify.com/us/account_payment_help/subscrip...

2.) My email is constantly bombarded with ads like "[pick a artist] wants to say 'thanks' with presale tickets". I already get presale with Amex. Again, these ads can be placed in a 'shows near you' section vice shoved in my email face.

No ads my hiney.

> My email is constantly bombarded with ads like "[pick a artist] wants to say 'thanks' with presale tickets". I already get presale with Amex. Again, these ads can be placed in a 'shows near you' section vice shoved in my email face.

Doesn't CAN-SPAM legally require them to have an unsubscribe button on anything like that?

IIRC they do have an unsubscribe button, or some other opt-out method, because I know I clicked it, and I don't receive any of the aforementioned ad emails.

Yes, the visual ads in the Spotify client are no big deal, it's behind other windows most of the time when I'm using it anyway. The interstitial audio ads are pretty bad; annoying, repetitive, and too frequent. But the audio ads still take up less "air time" than ads on Top 40 broadcast radio.

I haven't used an ad blockers for Spotify in a long time (because I'm a premium user when I can afford it), but when I was using one, all it did was mute the ads when they came on.

Not perfect, but it certainly didn't break the mood as much as a randomly placed ad.

I use Spotify web with uBlock. It doesn't mute audio ads, they just aren't there. Not sure how it works.

As a side note, the web app is hidden -- they want you to download the desktop app, from which you can't block ads. The thing is, the desktop app performs even worse than the web app

You can watch uBlock's logger when using the web player to see what it does. AFAIK the blocking rules are imported from EasyList.

However, as far as user experience goes, I don't share your experiences at all – the web player is almost unbelievably bad, with frequently malfunctioning (disabled) player keys, volume slider jumping all over the place and common problems when resuming playback after a while. (Also, the desktop application has more features, including the ability to select multiple tracks to perform an operation on, and naturally the support for media keys.)

You can definitely block ads on desktop Spotify: I did it by modifying my hosts file.

As for your first question, I think when it encounters what should be an audio ad in the queue, it attempts to play it, due to the host file, the ad request gets blocked/sent to a black hole and nothing is returned, so the application presumably assumes that everything was fine and continues on.

It’s probably intentionally tolerated. It gains them mindshare.

They control the client but not Browser/DNS/OS

May be that's a consequence of poor society I'm living in, but if I learned any lesson about life, it's that most people won't pay a penny if they can get away with it. You won't make a profitable business believing that some people will recognize the need to pay, because they won't.

This is a compelling thought, but the evidence doesn't seem to back it up. What we actually see in the real world seems to be the opposite - people absolutely _will_ pay for things they could get for free so long as it isn't less convenient than not paying.

Given that the act of making a payment is an inconvenience in and of itself, this does suggest it's _harder_ to get people to pay for a service, but the success of things like netflix and spotify is a clear indicator that people really like the "pay a consistent amount of money and get access to whatever" model.

I've heard that in western countries there are people who track torrent users and threaten them with blackmailing letters. So people are afraid to use torrents to download pirated movies. If that's true, it can be a reason of Neflix success: fear, not convenience.

In my country nobody cares about torrents and I don't know anyone who's using Netflix. There are some people, who don't know how to properly use computer, I can imagine that they could pay for something like that, but that's because they have no other choice, not because they like to pay.

I think it's more complicated than that. At least in my (rich, western) country there aren't any actual concequences for that kind of piracy. I believe there is a system in place for sending emails, but not threatening ones, and not ones with any teeth at all.

The bigger factor might be that for a more well off audience, the cost of these services is low enough that it isn't meaningfully more expensive than piracy anyway, and can be much more convenient. `Search -> Stream` is a much smoother workflow than `Search -> Select well seeded torrent -> Initiate download -> Wait -> Play`.

... and Wikipedia and NPR are excellent if imperfect versions of that model.

Both of which are constantly asking for donations

In case you were curious, the Wikimedia Foundation has plenty of money to keep their sites running. Most of their funds are going to other projects, like conferences and "Wikipedia-in-a-box" type stuff. [1] [2]

[1]: http://mywikibiz.com/Top_10_Reasons_Not_to_Donate_to_Wikiped...

[2]: Despite linking to "reasons not to donate to Wikipedia," I'd still prefer more sites run like Wikipedia and less sites run like YouTube, and I think you should donate to the Wikimedia Foundation if you're a power user. Do not donate to the Wikimedia Foundation unless you're heavily involved in their wikis, but if you are heavily involved and have the money, you should. Their donors need to hold them accountable, and that's not possible if they're getting tons of money from people who have no idea what's going on behind the scenes.

The idea that something in the commons should be funded by the majority isn't a new one. At this point the debate turns into an argument on tax policy and its peripherals...

I don't think that debate will end until we all create some sort of hive mind AI by networking our brains together.

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