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This is an issue I've seen with every platform that primarily exists online. They buy every digital service and increase prices with or without the customer's consent. Aside from being annoying and largely pointless, it's anti-competitive because if you subscribe to Spotify you are discouraged from subscribing to some other, better podcast service you actually want because you're already paying for one. It gets even worse as more services get bundled together.

You’re free to cancel, and I’m sure customer service would give you the refund on the extra cost for the first month.

I’ve noticed this in restaurants too, they just change the price like a normal business in an inflationary environment.

I bet you get raises too, or ask for them and move on if you don’t get them.

I have no idea how that relates to what I wrote.

Edit: Actually I see now, you're replying to where I said they bought services and raised prices without the customer consent. If we're using a restaurant comparison, it'd be like your local burger shop raising prices because your meal comes bundled with discounted carwashes. Consumers generally don't want bundles, they want to buy the thing they're interested in.

> Consumers generally don't want bundles, they want to buy the thing they're interested in.

They have been able to buy the individual song for $1 to $2 for a long time.

I mean bundling unrelated services. A subscription to just access all the music is pretty useful if you want to listen to music, but then they decide it should also be attached to a subscription of cloud gaming, shopping, podcasts, it becomes anti-consumer. Eventually you won't be able to just subscribe to the thing you want, but you'll also have to rent the kitchen sink.

Those seem to be arbitrary lines to draw. What if someone only wants to stream heavy metal, rap, classical, electronic, English, Spanish, Hindi, 1950s to 1980s, etc.

Building podcasts or audiobooks or even other services is just a business decision. It’s like cable/satellite TV used to be. The market will figure out where to settle.

Thank you. I don't understand why Spotify licenses all this rock and rap music when I'm only interested in pop music. So ridiculous. Why can't they just exclude all the stuff I don't care about?

I assume you're sarcastic, but Spotify is spending hundreds of millions on Rogan alone (and many other podcasts on top of that), and I have yet to listen to a single podcast on Spotify. They're making you pay for branching out to other content than music. If I want podcasts I go to my podcast app(s).

They aren’t making you pay anything, there’s a wide variety of music services.

A company offering an entertainment service is hardly forcing anyone to do anything.

In the context of Spotify customers, they are. They could have a separate tier including podcasts.

Most restaurants also do this, ever ordered a combo?

Ever gotten a car wash from a gas pump?

If you don’t like it there’s plenty of restaurants that don’t do combos. And plenty of gas stations that don’t have car washing.

> I don't want, and never wanted, Audiobooks or Podcasts or News or other crap on the music app.

Regarding Spotify, which I use daily, I also dislike their updates. I remember some months back I could disable/hide "Recommendations". Now in all my (personal & private) playlists I get a list of Recommendations. It's an annoyance because when I scroll fast to reach the bottom "to listen to that one song" it end up surfing the Recommendations (did I mention I dislike them?).

So, it makes me want to go to apkpure, find an apk from 2020 and use THAT (slim chance it'll work) because most updates are "to increase engagement" (pester you/me/all) with 'new and exciting content!!!' (bleh)

Sidenote: for podcasts I am using a 2021 version of the Podcast Addict (the one displaying the full screen ad)(which you can block with NoRoot Firewall)

My Spotify app almost daily shows me a full screen advertisement for some new album when I open the app. It is clearly labeled sponsored content.

I can then click a tiny 3 dots menu, click “stop showing me this” and “I don’t want to see sponsored content” and it will say “sure thing! We will no longer show you these” and the next day it will show me a new advertisement and I repeat the process.

So annoying. The whole premise of premium is that there are no ads! But now I’m constantly getting visual ads in the app. Every artists page has ads for their merch. Spotify notifies me about exclusive merch for artists I listen to. And is constantly trying to get me to go to concerts of artists I listen to.

"NoRoot Firewall" and I have allowed IPs and URLs that I've trialed-and-errored to Allow. Then . to block everything else. Fun fact: most of the garbage/ads/albums/pushes/etc, as well as your Annual Wrap-Up (or whatever it is called) it is provided by a tracker (I can't remember/see because I haven't individually blocked it - it's blocked under the . rule)(first 10-15 IPs & URLs are allowed, all else is blocked).

I believe that using an Android phone without a Firewall must be a horrible experience/it increases the positive experience by A LOT.

It also helps to see which apps are sneaky and run on their own - even if you disable the 'background run' (e.g. TuneIn Radio starts itself bypassing battery/power settings)

I really like Podcast Addict. Its price is like 10$ per year to hide a small ad on the bottom and to get a choice which screen is the first to show.

I got no prob paying for apps (I buy/subscribe to all of them). I simply hate it when I pay them, and they merely 'hide the add' but still 'talk' to adjust, googletagmanager, and so many other advertisers/trackers.

"Recommendations" never seem even close to what I want, on any platform.

The worst is Facebook (I have friends and family who don't use any other mode for regular contact), where it often behaves as if the ideal way to engage me is, in order of appearance on the timeline:

• "People you may know" (usually devoid of people I've ever even met, and when I do know them they're not people I'm going to add)

• One real post

• A suggestion of a corporation or group to follow

• An advert for something I'm not even capable of getting ("Are you an American living in the UK who wants to renounce their citizenship for tax purposes?" — no on all counts)

• Three more suggestions of a corporation or group to follow

• More ads for things even less relevant than the email spam I got in 1998

--

Even YouTube, where I can recognise the value by comparing what I see when I'm logged in to not logged in, the recommendations are still only 50% useful and 50% dross. (Not logged in it's 98% dross, and yes I did just count 50 items before finding one video I might watch in order to not be a statistic made up on the spot).

Just cancel your Spotify subscription. I did, and now use a combination of Roon and Tidal.

I have a much better listening and discovery experience through Roon and artists get paid more with Tidal.

The problem is that Spotify is the only one that really works well on Foss with libspotify / spotify-qt.

All the others don't have clients for my OS and I don't have DRM in my browser which they require.

Ah annoying, I'd assumed Roon had a Linux client but it appears not to, despite having a compatible server and a bridge client.

lol. Tidal, the guys that tried to sell us snake oil like MQA.

That said you sound like a Meridian shill.

Err, thanks. Heaven forbid someone shares software that they actually like.

If only Tidal (or Qobuz, or...) would implement a Connect feature that allows me to control my PC desktop from mobile, then I would, but it's been on the "promised features" list for years now. It's a deal-breaker for me.

I use deezer and when I play a track on mobile I can continue it on PC. Is that what you mean?

Yeah Spotify Connect really is solid but that’s why I also went with Roon as it allows me to do that and more.

Yeah it looks like Roon can do this. Might be worth checking out, thanks!

Did you try KDEConnect?

Same here. I am on Apple Music. I like it. The automated playlists are way better on Spotify though.

Subscribed to Tidal for about a year until my patience ran out. It has to be one of the buggiest pieces of long living software ever. Pressing the next button would skip two songs ahead for playback and one song ahead UI wise, making the UI tell you the wrong song was playing. That's just one of a wall of bugs I struggled with while I stayed on that service.

The way I use it, I don’t interact with their app at all, it’s all streamed through Roon.

All that is listed are what reasonable customer and people would have assumed. However, things in corporate world seems to have the mind of it's own. It is normally in the interest of centralisation in the name of efficiency, and sadly at cost of human productivity and buyer and seller interests.