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Comment by zzzcpan | Hacker News Reader

No, paying for service doesn't guarantee ad-free and tracking-free experience at all, especially for VC backed companies. They probably already inject tons of tracking for paying users. And those users are still just users, not customers. The only real customers of spotify are advertisers and sooner or later paying users are going to be sold to advertisers, there is just more money there and they can't ignore that.

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It sounds like they're only suspending free accounts for adblockers. At the same time, I don't mind spotify tracking how I use the application. It generates valuable data for their product managers to improve the overall experience. If there's evidence spotify is using this data to track users across the internet, then there's problem.

Spotify is not a public service, it is a company. They can pay for user testing in order to improve their product or they can use completely anonymous data. Your privacy is not a necessary sacrifice for products to improve nor should it be.

That being said, I find it OK for them to block users who try to get a paid service, for free. What isn't OK is the advertisement model. A better model in my eyes would be for limiting the free element of the service more and/or running unintrusive ads for the service itself. That way you could still push for more paying customers, without sacrificing the users who can't afford the product.

I do think their is a nuance between tracking how you use the app and letting third party systems track what you do, where you are, etc. Still, they are just a company, not a basic human need.

> It sounds like they're only suspending free accounts for adblockers.

Unfortunately, it is unclear from both the article and the revised terms whether this is the case.

Ads only make up ~10% of Spotify's revenue. If they start putting ads on the paid version everyone will just leave for one of the competing ad-free services (Amazon, Apple, Google). I'm sure you're right about the tracking though.

https://adexchanger.com/digital-audio-radio/spotifys-f-1-sho...

Do you see subscription model work for music in the long run?

This is an absurd claim. I use spotify and suffer zero ads. There is no universe where I am anything but a paying user.

People go to extraordinary lengths to rationalize being outrageously cheap.

Ads and Tracking are two different things. Just because you don't see ads related to the tracked data in spotify does not mean that information is not used by the third party elsewhere.

If pay spotify and you listen to metallica, you might not get ads on spotify, but you might get a link to Metallica merchandise on another website.

The overwhelming bulk of Spotify's revenue comes from paying customers, not advertisers. And for those who are too cheap to simply subscribe, the majority of "ads" are pleas to subscribe (because selling advertising is not the business they want to be in).

The GP's claims are nonsense, discounted by the most cursory investigation. Trotting out some tired rhetoric about advertisers being the real customer to explain away an unwillingness to pay the most trivial of amounts is just embarrassing for everyone. It's especially ironic given that so many are both trying to justify not paying for a worthwhile service while also trying to justify ripping off the same service because...ads, or something.

I am a paying customer for multiple streaming service. I pay more for ad-free experience on Hulu. My problem is not with Ads, my problem is with Tracking, which is not the same. That is what I was saying, not endorsing ad blockers.

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