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

1. It's not just 1 type of ad. In Little Snitch, I have permitted Spotify to connect to 281 different domain names, most of which are ad-related. That's a lot of companies being allowed to run JS in whatever webview Spotify uses to display ads. I don't listen much on my computer anymore.

2. They keep advertising deals to me - $0.99 for a month, or $9 for 3 months, that I can't subscribe to because they don't let people in Quebec sign up for them, (something related to the consumer protection laws here). These ads are audio, in-app visuals, and even E-mails. This leaves a horrible taste in my mouth, and I've let them know several times, but they never change it. That, combined with the fact that I feel like the $10/month subscription is a tad expensive, make me very reluctant to subscribe again, (I was a subscriber through my mobile phone plane for a long time). At $5/month I'd subscribe instantly. $7-8 I'd probably still do it. $9-10 I can buy 10-12 CDs per year that I own in perpetuity.

I feel like if they did the ads right, (in-house, with non-insulting geotargeting), or offered a subscription price closer to one latté per month, I would have a lot less animosity and be more supportive of this move.

> When people aren't willing to pay for 1-2 coffees for a month of unlimited music streaming are you really surprised that companies have no choice to use an advertising revenue model?

No. But I get the sense you're trying to express moral indignation at such users, and I don't see the logic behind that. "I like $site_owner therefore I whitelist $arbirary_third_parties whose behavior cannot be controlled nor even really measured by $site_owner" isn't a workable/scalable lesson to try to teach users.

To be clear, I also don't see any reasonable argument to be morally indignant about Spotify blocking the blockers. This is the web as it currently exists.

I mean, if they show you a notification that you should really sign-up for a paid subscription or disable your adblocker, this does not really seem a big deal for me and all right for Spotify. However, if they terminate your account because you happened to use Spotify for a while on a system with adblocking enabled (does being on a Pi-Hole network count?), I am wondering if they won't just drive a lot of potential customers to Apple Music & Co, which is the last thing they need right now... I mean, if they would terminate my account like this, I definitely would not come crouching back to them asking for mercy to be allowed to sign-up for a paid subscription. I mean, I do have some dignity left.

(I usually use Spotify using their apps, so without ad-blocking, but I cannot guarantee that I haven't been using their web player from time to time, too, and of course my browser has an enabled ad-blocker. I don't pay for Spotify because I buy my MP3s and use Spotify primarily to discover new songs.)

Where do you buy coffee that one coffee costs $10?! (or even $5?) I still don't think it's a lot of money, but not quite so trivial.

> 1. Pay for the service

> 2. Suffer through the ads

> 3. Don't use the service

Those are the customer's options. What about Spotify's?

1. Offer the service as paid-only, no free with ads option.

2. Offer a paid version and a free version, but some people use ad blockers.

3. Offer a paid version and a free version, block ad blockers and expose your customers to malware.

The last is the only one that has "expose your customers to malware" in it, so maybe they should pick one of the other two. Because if all the customers chose either paying or not using, that's the same anyway, and if they didn't, they're actively harming the remainder.

The reason why every large service on the Internet is ad-supported is that it does not need to follow advertisement laws. They don't even need to follow computer crime laws. If society would start enforce such laws onto online services we would see a major shift away from ad-supported services.

Now that a service is offering subscriptions, people still don't want to pay for it, and the goalposts are shifted further.

My answer was two-fold - never use Spotify, and always use an ad-blocker.

There's a reason for that. Most people don't care enough about ads to bother installing an adblocker. It's intrusive, disruptive ads that drive them to do that. It wouldn't have come to this if site owners had taken responsibility for the content of their advertising.

And, unfortunately, most people don't bother to change their adblocker's default settings (and raise holy hell if the default settings allow non-intrusive ads), so the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. Bad actors ruin the funding model for everyone.

How did we ever get to the point where letting anyone slap any ads they want over your content seemed like a good idea? Imagine a newspaper or a TV channel running porn ads and saying "sorry, we don't control the content of our ads." They'd be crucified.

I am surprised that they continue to believe that they should have any revenue "[W]hen people aren't willing to pay for 1-2 coffees for a month of unlimited music streaming."

It's like realising people do not want to pay for what you are selling and then, instead of owning up to the fact you therefore have no viable business, you turn around and vengefully sell those same people out, keeping them around by reducing price to 0. There is no business regarding that service. You find a new customer (advertisers) and sell something else (ads). Then you portray the original "service" as your business.

No matter how popular this has become, it is still a sham.

Selling ads is a different service with a different customer. It is not the same business.

There are probably some Internet service companies that do manage to sustain themselves on paid subscriptions. Perhaps they are few and far between.

Pretending that a successful ad sales business is the same thing as a successful Internet-based paid subscription service is disengenous.

I've never used Spotify, but if its free, supported by ads option means serving web-based stuff, then it might want to look into getting rid of that and serving audio ads every few songs instead. Ad Blockers wouldn't be a problem in that scenario, and Podcasters have long shown that the what essentially amounts to radio ads are a perfectly valid way to monetize audio content.

Note also that in the case of Spotify, Apple Music, etc., most people will only need to subscribe to one of those services to cover pretty much all of their music streaming needs.

With, say, newspapers and magazines they can try to make the argument that to meet their needs they would need to subscribe to a bunch of different papers and magazines and that would get prohibitively expensive very fast.

You can even try that argument somewhat with video streaming services. There are enough exclusive deals between movie producers and movie streaming services that picking one service only means you likely miss out on a lot of movies you want.

But with music that argument just does not work.

That said... Go with #3 everyone. Spotify is horrible for artists.

It's my device. I understand Spotify's motivation to want compensation for their great service, but shouldn't I be able to run my software, on my device, on my terms? I understand this argument doesn't solve anything, and puts Spotify in a bad situation.

But...how long until someone creates a solution to scrub the audio of ads in real-time? With a beginning delay for the listening buffer, of course. This isn't trivial, but it sure is repeatable.

I wish I had something better. I don't know; this quickly feels like digital [media] in the early 2000's all over again.

It also very often does this if connection is bad which is super weird considering all the songs are supposed to be downloaded for offline consumption.

I still wanted to listen to music though, so I found ways.

I really don’t think that was so terrible, and neither do I think the few million people that block ads are.

For the record, I pay $20 or so for Google Play Music for the family plan, despite being single. (Or at least I do until they shut it down, leaving me with no option for mostly streaming plus artists that aren't on any streaming service such as Tool or Neil Cicierega.)

You seem to take sides with business, but never forget the old adage: the customer is always right.

Seriously, I would have continued to pay them, if I could have used the same software I originally got with it.

Of course I am also the sole user who ever paid for groveshark premium, and none of the current efforts are even a tiny bit remotely close to its interface, much less its music selection.

I'm still debating on if I want to spend $10.00 a month on something I may not use often enough to justify it? For now, in the spirit of everything, and to not be blocked, I turned off my ad-blocker. I can deal with it for now.

One thing I think about that is analogous is the fact that every month I donate $5.00 to my local NPR station - but I haven't listened to it in months! But - those are tax deductible (or at least once were? I'm not sure how it works now this tax year), and I do like the station, but I can only take so much of it at a time.

Maybe if Spotify weren't a paid service, and instead were "listener supported" with tax deductible donations - I could more readily get behind it...?

Ten dollars a month isn't that much, sure - it's something I need to think about more (it would be nice if there were an easy way to track when you use Spotify and for how long; that could help me too).

10 dollars is not a trivial amount of money, and its WAY above most people's pre-spotify music budget. If you don't spend that money, you have an extra $120 bucks at the end of the year.

Thus, there really are only two options here when it comes to the free tier on Spotify: "Endure our ad experience or no 'free' service for you." However, there is a 3rd option here when it comes to the free tier: Spotify fixes the currently-terrible ad experience on its service.

I'd be 100% fine with ads on Spotify if they were bespoke like the ads I see from https://carbonads.net. Their ads are relevant, tasteful, and unobtrusive. Oddly, I end up paying more attention to Carbon ads than I've ever paid to a Spotify ad.

Sadly, Spotify is only offering consumers two options without any hint that they've even considered that they themselves could do something to address the issues underlying their customers' use of ad blockers.

>Spotify has a pretty cheap paid option that removes all of that.

Five dollars a month for the rest of my life is not "cheap".

Frugal people look at the total cost of a loan, not just the monthly payment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising

Lol it's $10 per month. Who pays $10 for a coffee?

Where is that price from? What if I live in a poor country and price of 2 cup of coffee is $0.40?

I have the right to selectively choose what code runs on my computer, including code designed to grab ads and display/present them.

I also have the right to selectively choose what requests and traffic to allow in and out of my network.

Spotify has the right to do the same, including to deny to send me any traffic from their service for any reasons.

I also have a right to not like it if spotify does that, and everybody else has a right to not care if I do or don't.

Ad agencies are bad actors. Not intentionally but because they have zero incentive to really police what garbage goes out across their systems. I block them on the client. I block them at the DNS level. I block them at the firewall.

I've dealt with the worst case scenario, no thanks. Previously I'd sub to spotify for a month when I was traveling and just deal with the ads that got though my standard setup when I wasn't. Now I just won't bother.

It’s my TV / my phone / my screen. Me. MINE. If someone else emits some information they make freely available, that in no way entails they have any say whatsoever about what I permit to be visible on MY screen.

How about if marketers want me looking at their ads, they can stop pouring millions of dollars into research about how to spy on me through those ads against my will.

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.

Well, it was nice knowing you Spotify.

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.

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.

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.

If you don’t like the ads, Spotify has a subscription plan. In my country that’s €5 / month.

Surely that’s less money spent than the effort it takes to pirate music for usage with foobar2000.

I stay a subscriber because of (1) the size of the catalog and (2) the 'discover weekly' constantly delivers me new songs/bands that I thoroughly enjoy and would never have discovered on my own

Why not just pay for it!?

Personally, I pay for Spotify and use it constantly to listen to everything from game and movie soundtracks (and covers), rock and metal bands, EDM, indie, pop, and more obscure instrumental music.

I understand if you mostly listen to a few bands from the era you grew up in, or don't listen to music too often at all, it might make more sense to keep a paid music collection and use Spotify less frequently (and justify using the free version), but if I paid for all of the music I listen to individually, it would easily rack up to something like 10 times (or more) the amount my yearly Spotify does. IMO, if you aren't a "power user," use a different streaming service or buy your music individually.

They don't randomly delete things. They remove content due to licensing expiring. Thank our backwards media licensing system for that.

Personally, if you don't own the content I don't think you can whine when it goes away.

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.

Users: Blocks known malware vector.

Spotify and 'the usual' HN crowd: shocked_pikachu.jpg

Neglegible marginal impact. Nevermind that most of this manpower seems to be wasted on adtech and bullshit redesigns. Their service sure hasn't improved recently.

> resources

This was completely self-inflicted. They used to run a p2p network, they chose to shut that down. That's fine, but they can't blame that on their users.

> licensing

Spotify's licensing budget is a fixed percentage of their revenue. A user that doesn't bring in any revenue won't increase their licensing costs.

I guess artists could opt out if they thought their licensing slice was too small, but that's effectively career suicide. Just look at Prince.

I think privacy is what the majority of people who use these blockers are trying to get. I know that is the reason I use ad blockers at least. I do have a right to privacy, and the amount of information advertisers can learn about me though meta data is a serious violation of that privacy. Unfortunately with targeted advertising, then line between ads and tracking has disappeared, they are one and the same. And yes, I am aware that a lot of advertisers allow you to disable targeted ads- however they still collect the same amount of information, they just claim not to use it for their ad choices.

If you keep listening to Spotify, surely it brings you value.

I know I’m getting value from it. I listen to music all day at work and personally I don’t have many services that I use so often.

It's not like I'm offended at there being an ad for an adult store or anything, but it's just really offputting? I guess? to hear about some buy one get one on adult toys or whatever while I'm eating.

I don’t listen to Spanish music, and I don’t speak Spanish. Multiple times when I had my free Spotify it would randomly decide that I would get all of my ads in Spanish that week. No idea why. My first thought was that my account had been hacked and someone changed my language - but nope, Spotify just doesn’t know my demographic.

I have since upgraded to premium.

I definitely won't get the only product they advertise to me. I already have Google Play Music, and just use(d) Spotify occasionally for discovery and when people link to playlists.

I suppose nobody is advertising to Australia then.

Why not? I don't understand the problem with a condom ad.

Plus the genre's are rather limited, it's usually one or two pop stations (with 90% song overlap), one or two country, maybe NPR or something in a podcast format, etc. Meanwhile all of the ads.

Personally I'm on the student plan, and for what I like the listen to it's a steal for 5$ (and free hulu?) Any of the alternatives, deezer, apple music, etc would likely work too, but I can't imagine only using fm radio stations.

It's a globe you can move around and tune into radio stations all around the world just like you're talking about.

It was once highly upvoted on HN.

It makes sense to block freeloaders, especially when they need to PAY some for the song one listened. It is reasonable that they get some revenue in one form or another.

On this one, I believe people should be protesting over the nature of format of ads, not the existence of ads altogether.

Although I personally treat ads as a malware vector and block them. Hopefully I don't get banned from Spotify as I'm a paying customer. If I do, I'll switch to another platform.

[1] http://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/domains.txt

I am very interested to hear a more qualified interpretation of the situation.

Would you thing it was more ethical if Spotify just got rid of the free option completely?

Anyway, I also dislike that my premium subscription is only 320kbit vorbis. I can hear a difference between that and a lossless flac on my 2016 OnePlus 3 and 15$ KZ ZSN Headphones. Obviously even bigger difference on my desktop DAC and over ear monitors. I guess I have to build an offline lib and sync it with syncthing and use Spotify like soundlcoud only to discover new stuff

I guess that answers that one.