Submitted 1 year ago by ojmcelderry@lemmy.one to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.one/pictrs/image/cfe14db3-e5fb-43ab-bd0a-39db679f9d9f.jpeg
I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a “sponsored recommendation”.
Why am I seeing ads if I’m already paying for the premium plan!? 😑
In the immortal words of James Stephanie Sterling “corporations don’t just want some money. They want all of the money”
Because why make money off you one way, when they can make money off you two ways?
You are always the product when you do not own physical or digital non-DRMed copies of your media.
If you can’t reliably and repeatedly play your music in the middle of nowhere 50 miles away from any internet signal, you are the product. Download MP3s and take your music back.
so i should have like and hdd of 1000tb just to listen to musica and series?
Just like back in the day.
You don’t have to carry it all at once, swap playlists around. Carry 300-500 songs at a time, more than enough to really appreciate each song rather than bebombarded with choices
They treat your subscription as a promise of continued business. You’re literally funding them trying to continue monetizing you and dominating your attention.
Fuck Spotify, fuck Netflix, fuck all of them.
VPN + Stremio
It seems you can turn it off by touching “what’s this?” or “learn more” the next time you see one of these.
Really shitty that they don’t even put this as a setting though.
Might I add, I hate the way every user-facing UI has devolved into the Youtube Shorts / TikTok “doomscrolling” swipe-UI now. There seems to be absolutely not a single braincell left in UI development to even consider the actual use case of the interface.
It’s all just:
Not sure what this has to do with the post. You don’t need to swipe to dismiss that modal.
Hold on! This is a modal?! That’s even worse, I had these card-style things as scrollable cards before! 😧
That is literally what non-Open Source/capitalism is like:
Man you’re absolutely correct. But I’ve yet to find a simplified music streaming solution that functions as seamlessly across a wide range of devices as Spotify connect does.
I want an alternative… I also don’t want to manage a library as extensive as a streaming service’s offerings myself. I need convenience.
I have a pretty sizeable local collection, and it can be a pain to manage sometimes. Tagging can become a real pain as well. A real splinter on the scrot.
Convenience really is what you buy with your data/attention in a lot of these cases.
Facebook makes it more convenient to keep in touch with people even though you could reach out and stay in touch via email.
Google maps makes it more convenient to navigate but clearly people used to be able to get along without it.
People are addicted to convenience and companies know that.
I recently found Spotube. It uses the Spotify search API then plays the audio from youtube. Basically spotify premium for free.
Haven’t actually used it yet though.
After trying to find an app with something even close to Spotify Connect I gave up and switched to Apple Music and replaced my speakers with newer Denon that have Apple streaming support.
It was the choice between letting Spotify fuck me over again and again and spending a few hundred dollars on new speakers. Annoying but fuck Spotify and their relentless upsells, ads, podcasts, books, etc
(I feel pretty strongly about that because I used it daily since they released their beta version close to two decades ago).
The lesson is that corporations will take, take, take no matter what. They will never honor any kind of social contract, and will always abuse anyone and everyone for profit to the maximum extent they are able.
So stop letting them take advantage of you.
And if they make a mistake, “my bad”. You make a mistake and it’s $100 in fees.
Unless, usually, they are a not for profit organization.
Even then. Look at the way they pay people and treat volunteers…
Or at least not a corporation that is expected to provide infinite growth for their shareholders.
And push for legislation that doesn’t allow em to do this in the first place.
Cause it doesn’t make it right, but on some level it’s hard to blame them for pushing the limits, if there’s no resistance or repercussion. That’s how we ended up in this mess.
Tech moves fast. Government moves slow. Most of these issues boil down to legislative failures.
I go hard when it comes to this. Firefox + uBlock Origin, use open source alternatives, don’t communicate outside of Signal, 2FA on everything, you name it. And it’s exhausting at times, not gonna lie. But my effort reinforces my sentiment that it shouldn’t fall to the consumer to put in all this effort just to have some a basic, healthy blend of convenience, privacy, and security.
no, you pay spotify so they can give Joe Rogan money to make up bullshit every day.
Enshittification in action.
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, it’s everywhere. Once a platform has lock-in from users it turns its attention to vendors. Then once they’re locked in it rakes in the profits until nobody can tolerate it any more and something else takes its place.
This is because capitalism requires infinite growth… which is literally fucking impossible so everything either grows infinitely or dies… or option three: gets so fucking big it abuses governance to prevent itself from dying while murdering it’s competition.
I hope they die but I doubt it.
Why do you hope they die? It’s not the next one in lune is going to be any better.
I wish there was a way to permanently store this article into people’s brains.
Well, not really. But you know what I mean.
What I really love about commercials is that if I click on them and order a life time subscription of whatever product they’re selling, I’m still gonna get the same commercials.
Or even worse you’ll get more. It applies to everything too. I got a vacuum a while ago and Amazon keeps recommending more. Who tf is out there buying multiple vacuums? Why does Amazon think that someone who spent $50 on a shop vac is now in the market for a $700 Dyson? For stealing so much of our data they sure are shit at advertising
Why does Amazon think that someone who spent $50 on a shop vac is now in the market for a $700 Dyson?
Because their “algorithms” suck. Their “ML/AI” recommendation engine garbage sucks ass. I have no idea why publications or advertisers think this is in any way a better form of advertising than just…recommending things related to what you’re watching / reading / listening to…but hey…I guess it at least allows them to spy on everything you ever do anywhere on the Internet and then try to join that up to what you do in real life through phone data, so the ends justify the means I guess.
Some people do use the strategy of buying a cheap product if you aren’t sure you need a higher end one and then getting the better one if you don’t like the cheap one. So people who buy a cheap x might actually be more likely to buy an expensive x than people who haven’t recently bought a cheap x. Especially if they know that cheap x they sold you sucks.
Spotify is garbage. You pay them to basically pirate unlimited music (they pay table scraps). They have no values or integrity, but they do have a greedy business model.
I buy albums off bandcamp instead. Or from the artist’s site directly.
A bit difficult if you want to just stream random music that somehow matches your interests.
If you’re going to p1r@te, you don’t have to pay sp0tify to do it…
There’s other streaming services. I’d recommend any over Spotify.
Bandcamp is DRM-free, so whatever you buy there, you truly own it. Unlike on most other platforms.
DRM-protected music stores went extinct over a decade ago, following Steve Jobs open letter to the music industry on the topic.
It’s personally a catch 22 for me.
I listen to an absolutely absurd amounts of different artists. A large portion of them simply don’t have albums available for purchase and if they did… I would actually go broke buying all the stuff I listen to.
Every single day I type in a Combo of 2 random letters and numbers into spotify and listen to the first artist I don’t recognize.
It really sucks that Spotify doesn’t pay the artists anything reasonable but I haven’t found an alternative that allows me to consume as much different music as I currently do.
This isn’t even including the podcasts and audio books into the equation.
It’s the same as pirating, except Spotify gets paid.
Greedy business model seems slightly unfair tbh. Spotify struggles to remain profitable and they’ve only raised their prices by like $1 in a decade
Just because they’re incompetent doesn’t mean they’re not greedy.
Also, executives can still be cleaning up even as the company struggles to profit.
Maybe they shouldn’t’ve thrown so much money into the pivot to podcasts, then thrown a bunch of money at that meathead idiot.
yeah, it’s not spotify’s fault that splitting $10/month between all the music you listen to doesn’t pay the artists very much.
Honestly it’s a shame that most good music pirating sites have gone to the shitter, literally the only way to actually pirate and own music I could find via searching vigorously was through youtube to MP3 converters.
People defend intrusive advertising by appealing to some sort of social contract (ie you suffer through these things in order to get Spotify or whatever for free) but it’s not a social contract if the platform holds all the cards
Also we getting Spotify for free, if we’re buying premium.
The problem is you can’t “buy” products any more. Companies see that as interest, and then start to throw additional advertising to see how much they can get away with. Fuck that shit.
They’ve also run almost any way to do it outside of their ecosystems. If I want to listen to happy hardcore music, I have to hope spotify has it, but it’s rare to find that on most playlists, I’d have to go spend thousands of dollars for the same experience that Spotify offers, and that’s to own every track I’m even curious about.
Advertisements are now pretending to be recommendations
Haven’t ads always been recommendations in some roundabout way? Regular ads are technically just a company recommending their own product/service to you (whether you need it or not).
I mean, real life recommendations are more often than not that too. I mean, ones you get asking friends.
I would bet that on Spotify most people discover music by listening to personalized generated playlists and not by waiting for ads to guide them. Have you ever used Spotify?
Unpopular opinion - in Spotify (and Spotify ONLY) I actually like that it does this. I like discovering new music and Spotify seems to have really good recommendations sometimes. Sure they collect a lot of listening data - but how else could they give good recommendations if they don’t know what you like?
I agree with you, but you may be missing the point - this recommendation is sponsored, so likely it wouldn’t have been recommended unless the artist paid.
It seems relatively harmless as long as they don’t overdo it though. The only incentive for someone to pay for this is that that you might like their music and will listen to it more in the future, which would be a win for you as well.
Maybe it also allows smaller artists to gain momentum without only depending on the magic recommendation algorithm.
The entire point of Spotify being so popular. The algorithm learns what you like to listen and presents you with new music of the genre you probably were unaware about. This ad is just one more way of they doing that (but now artists who pay the ad can push it faster).
But that’s not what this is. This is just an ad. Not a “since you like X, try Y”
Without this feature, I wouldn't have known that Yeah Yeah Yeahs and PJ Harvey released new albums. So I'm torn. On the one hand, I'm happy artists I already love can still reach me; on the other hand, I hate that smaller artists I don't know about yet still have to pay to play
It’s the least offensive type of advertising I see day to day. I couldn’t care less how my listening data is shared, and I don’t understand the zero tolerance some people have for adverts - it’s not all bad
I pay for Spotify
thats where you made a mistake
He fell for the classic blunder
delete Spotify. it’s toxic
I haven’t had any issues with Spotify. I’ve discovered a bunch of new artists since joining a couolr years ago. I even remember the very first. I had no idea who Token was. Now I’m a fan. What’s wrong with this kind of thing? I’ll admit it’s not as good as old fashioned radio used to be but it’s still great, and being as free when paid is pretty amazing.
Nothing wrong with discovery, though masquerading an ad as an algorithm recommendation is super shady.
That said, Spotify has a track record of treating artists horribly. It also has atrocious sound quality compared to every other service out there.
I’m using Tidal. Has one of the highest artist pay out rates, and top notch quality.
Yeah they have been playing fast and loose with their ‘premium’ plan for a while. I cancelled and switched when they started serving ads to podcasts (not the baked-in ones from the podcast - dynamic ads inserted by Spotify).
It’s insulting that they would pull this crap and embarrassing that we all put up with it.
I just cancelled Spotify and switched to Tidal a few months ago exactly because of shenanigans like this. I was getting popups to look at recommended eBooks that I had to buy.
That was it for me and I cancelled immediately. Between the ads and the countless bugs and issues I had while using their app, glad I made the change. Been a premium member with Spotify for almost 10 years.
About a year ago I switched from Spotify to a local library with the Symfonium music player on my phone and Rhythmbox on the PC. I have not once looked back.
Plus, you get the satisfaction of growing a collection that can last forever.
I highly recommend it !
I stopped using Spotify after I noticed that a song’s share URL contains unique tracking elements.
I canceled after the first time they did this with the “Drake takeover” in 2018. Their customer support claimed it wasn’t advertisement, lmao.
Yeah, I dropped Spotify when they started plastering my home screen with ads for podcasts that I didn’t want to listen to. If there had even just been a way to hide them after the fact, but no. I guess they really needed to justify the deal with Joe Rogan.
You paid yes but… what if MORE money?
“What are you gonna do? NOT use us? lmao owned.” - Spotify
GenX here. Spotify came long after my youth. It came during my regression into second childhood.
TLDR: You don’t need a spotify/tidal/whatever, a personally curated collection of music is awesome and not being able to instantly play anything is not a death sentence. It can make things more fun by introducing things like anticipation.
I was once a music-obsessed child whose only access to most music was the random chance of hearing it on the radio. There were a few magical tunes that I wasn’t sure what album they were from or even who it was that would sometimes come in from the universe and give me a lift.
Then my mom got me a Woolco stereo for a birthday, 6th or 7th I think, and I now had the incredible ability to buy a 45 for a small amount of money - my allowance covered at least one, I remember, with money leftover for a large stash of candy to last out the week - and be able to hear any (one) song I wanted, anytime (that I was near my stereo). At used record stores I could get whole albums.
At some point I discovered that some record stores (I’m talking mall record stores in Saskatoon here, not hipster record shops on the lower east side) had a sort of 45 backlog, a section of older hit records you could still order, with a book you could look through for titles. Back then, it was understood that sometimes one hit tune was all an act was ever gonna have, and there was not a need to shove 9 remixes down your throat as an excuse to pump you for the price of an LP.
When you bought an LP, you got this 12" square of cover with it, big enough for detailed photos of the band, or lyrics, sometimes you’d even get a gatefold sleeve (so four broadsides instead of just two in full color, occasionally they would do this even without a second LP being included). Sometimes even high concept stuff, like Styx’s “Kilroy Was Here” in the mid-80s, a concept album which featured still shots and narrative segments of a 20-minute movie the band had shot of the Science Fiction storyline, which was a response to the various shenanigans of the political establishment of the time. These included the Satanic Panic, which has been thoroughly explored in podcasts in recent years, along with Tipper Gore’s P.M.R.C., which started with she heard Prince do Darling Nikki and by the end had elevated Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver as an unlikely triumvirate of free expression champions who spoke eloquently and with no uncertainty as to their message against this nascent fascism, and which I believe was the real reason Al Gore lost his election.
Anyone who loves music or freedom remembered.
Anyways I remember on many boring car rides where all I got was, you know, Aerosmith for the billionth time, that I wished there was a kind of car radio that you could just tune in by artist name and song and it would just play anything. As I saw it, we had telephones that I could talk to our relatives in other places with, why couldn’t I just tell the radio station what song to play electronically as well?
And about forty years later, we did indeed have that. More or less. All we had to do was murder the idea of music as art that is worth paying the artists for. We can quibble over rates and such, say this streamer only shaves the skin down to a few quivering nerve endings whereas Spotify skins the artist alive, but we all know that flogging the artist until they have no skin left is not the way to produce great art.
So I got off. I’ve started to collect up my old physical collections as flac files, which my phone has plenty of room for. I make playlists like I used to make mix tapes to entertain myself on my drives.
Now in my case I can point to having spent about $20 in 90s-00s money on most of the albums I’ve amassed so I just put it together how i could. I bought LPs, I bought cassettes, I bought CDs and I even bought some itunes downloads, and in many cases I did it twice for the same record over the years. In other cases I never bought the record, sure. Some of those allowance weeks I bought blank tapes instead of 45s OR LPs.
But basically, pick the artists you actually like who are working and signaling that they need help, and make a point of sending them some money. Buy a shirt, buy a physical media, LPs are still a lot of fun but pretty pricey. But just, take your music into your hands and your hard drive. Don’t stream anything. Carry it with you. Figure out how much space you’ve got on your phone, or get an SD card for it. Phone doesn’t have an SD card? You picked a bad company to buy from I guess, cause now you’ve started to play the game of triaging.
In the 80s, if I was going out of town for the weekend to camp or whatever, I had to decide how much collection to carry with me. Do I just bring a few mixtapes? Do I bring a box of tapes to cover every musical necessity? Do (gasp) just listen to the radio? It was a whole part of your packing, deciding what music to have at the ready and what to not be able to play if you don’t think of it now. It was a game you played with yourself. Later on it was burnt CDs, then CDs full of MP3s when the stereos got smart enough. But same game, until Spotify “solved the problem” by just making everything available everywhere, at a price you won’t believe (because someone’s been skinned to get that price, and it wasn’t the scumbags at the head office, I assure you).
Get off the streaming. Take your music into your hands. Build a collection of your favorite music and cherish it. Support artists directly. Stop pretending that paying for a streaming service is doing anything but murdering music as art and making you lazy in the soul.
If you don’t own the music/games/movies you pay for, you are always the product.
It’s funny because the radio industry used to have this pay-to-play model. It began to be called “payola” and triggered a huge controversy including congressional investigations and an FCC crackdown. Yet here we are, with the same shit happening again in digital format. This is honestly worse than payola since radio was free and this is not. I don’t like paying to be advertised to. Considering leaving Spotify; there seem to be more and more shenanigans like this popping up, AND their subscription price just increased!
Me listening to Joe Rogan in my car:
“This episode is brought to you by Athletic …”
“Aaaargh! I pay Spotify! They gave you eight and eight figure contract! Why the fuck are there ads??”
rubikcuber@feddit.uk 1 year ago
If you’re not paying you are the product. If you ARE paying you are STILL the product. This is how big tech works.
sebinspace@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Basically every computer hardware manufacturer is collecting telemetry and sending it home. If you’re using MacOS or Windows, your OS is doing it aswell
essteeyou@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Or Android, or iOS, or a Chromebook, or whatever other OS you’re using next year, if it isn’t some sort of Linux/UNIX system… and even some of those might not be great, but at least you can find out.
NightOwl@lemmy.one 1 year ago
You become the product with name, address, and payment details attached to the account for improved demographic data for them to collect. Win win.
jarfil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
But you’re paying for the GOOD recommendations now, not the free bad ones… /s
Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s not how big tech works, it’s how DRM works. It is possible to sell music/games/movies in an ethical way, without DRM.