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Comment by daaaaaaan | Hacker News Reader

I no longer trust anything Spotify says after they fought so hard to get support for home pod actions, Apple added those and years later they haven't bothered to implement that OR airplay 2.

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If you stop trusting companies after they've done one bad thing, which companies do you feel like you can trust?

If you think Spotify has only done one bad thing, you're delusional.

There's mountains of evidence that shows how they regularly fleece artists. Just last week this site hosted a story that researched how they're now using AI to generate fake music to avoid paying artists even further.

They pay a fortune to Joe Rogan, a man who is willfully destroying the country by spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.

This company is responsible for so, so much damage.

I don't doubt that, but for all major companies you'll be able to find a long list of bad things they did.

> Just last week this site hosted a story that researched how they're now using AI to generate fake music to avoid paying artists even further.

Could you source this, please? I've missed it.

> There's mountains of evidence that shows how they regularly fleece artists.

70+% of revenue goes to pay licences, a lot of artists have bad deals with their labels and get shafted from that revenue, deals like labels taking 50-70% of the licencing deals, historically it has been extremely common for labels to shafts artists, way before the internet age.

"The country?"

> misinformation and conspiracy theories

Do people still fall for this FUD?

If you have actual arguments, please list them. Otherwise don't insinuate with far-left dog whistles.

They never backup their group think.

Or with how they shut out third party clients for paid customers by deprecating libspotify without ever providing a playback-capable replacement (despite promises otherwise).

I’m sure paid Spotify users would like freedom of choice just as much as the Apple customers they’re supposedly advocating for. Until they address this, as well as support for devices that aren’t Spotify Connect™ devices (like HomePods), they’re being hypocritical.

It is shitty they killed libspotify, but it isn't hard to reverse engineer the way the app communicates with the backend, this has already happened in the form of https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot as an example.

And if Apples ecosystem wasn't so locked down I could write a HomePod client using librespot and Daniel Ek could get however mad he wants about it.

librespot is a fine piece of engineering, but because it’s reverse engineered there’s a risk of getting banned for using it, which a lot of people aren’t going to want to take a chance on. It also means that apps built on it can’t promote themselves too much or gain wide usage without risk of Spotify coming after the app’s developer and/or librespot.

"Just" make the implementation imitate some old Spotify Connect hardware that isn't being updated anymore and it would be near impossible for Spotify to realistically tell the difference.

Sure, people would still worry about using such software, but from an engineering standpoint, unless there's a signed Spotify Connect chip that for some reason can't be emulated, there isn't much Spotify can do to detect well-implemented reverse engineered API clients.

Not something you throw together in a day obviously, but definitely not impossible.

The point remains that they’re throwing stones in a glass house. There’s no reason that they should be held to any lower of a standard than any other company.

There's scale. Spotify being dicks doesn't impact as many users as Apple being dicks.

But I agree with you in general!

That is quite a niche thing to be angry about...

I don't disagree, but it was enough for me to cancel my membership and just move to Apple Music

It is an infuriating state of affairs.

Ironically, if the Apple ecosystem wasn't so locked down the open source community would have solved this issue by now.

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