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!? 😑
You can disable it pretty easily in the settings. I wish more apps let you opt out of ads so easily.
Could not find it on android, do i need to use the webapp?
Maybe it’s on notifications menu, but there are some many things in there and nothing related to adds
Try clicking the “what’s this?” I think it explained it when I did it. All I know is I got it once like a year ago and immediately disabled. Still stupid that they do this for paying customers but it wasn’t that hard to opt out.
Install ViMusic on Android and all your problems are gone. f-droid.org/packages/it.vfsfitvnm.vimusic/
InnerTune is also nice, UI is closer to YouTube Music.
There are about a million YT Music clients on F-Droid
That one is actually better, thanks
I cancelled my subscription. They’re upping the price for the listening even though they’ve been steadily cutting the payouts to independent artists for years. Support small artists instead.
I also pay for Premium and get these ads. I always think it’s funny because it’s never anything I’d ever actually want to listen to
Honestly a music platform is one of the only places I would actually welcome targeted ads. Where it can analyze my taste and suggest new music accordingly. But instead they just promote the highest bidder which is always lame pop music.
Unrelated service, but I use Walmart for their grocery delivery, which I pay for and I have a Walmart+ subscription. In the “my items” section, the section specifically for things I have already purchased before, they recently added sponsored items.
Yes, it’s clearly marked but for fucks sake Walmart I’m trying to just get more of stuff I’ve bought before. You have pages and pages of sponsored stuff elsewhere, leave my items alone!
According to them here that’s basically an ad that is shown only if the algorithm “thinks” it’s your music taste.
Could help some smaller artists in your preferred genre to show themselves, while Spotify makes a profit.
I’m sure this comes as no surprise, but they need to fix their algorithm. Don’t advertise me Morgan Wallen when I’ve been listening to speed and thrash metal for the past six months and the last country song I listened to was Hank III over a year ago.
Honestly I think it’s like Facebook, the advertiser can pick and choose what demographics see it- and some of them don’t care, and just hit “select all”. Waste of their money and annoys people who have no interest in the artist/genre being advertised because it should be targeted.
No small artist makes a profit with Spotify tho, it might help with publicity but the majority of the money lands in Spotifies pockets!
Yes, in a sense it can lead to killing all these small artists instead.
They control the algorithm. If it gives you good recommendations, it is because they want to lure users in. Then they will slowly start pushing only whatever makes them the most money like other platforms do.
Buy CDs from the artists you like, and then rip them to .flac using Exact Audio Copy! 😁
I use Bandcamp and usually will wait for the days they give artists 100% of the revenue and buy everything I’ve been waiting on. You get a flac download so you can secure your purchase in case the site shuts down later, but you also have access to streaming.
Bandcamp is great too! I’ve downloaded everything I’ve bought from there, but one artist deleted their page and now I can’t download what I purchased anymore. That’s the only negative I can think about.
Plus, Bandcamp will also recommend new music and related artists. The recommended artists at the bottom of a band/artists’s page are listed by the artist themselves, so you can pursue music that inspired the music you like.
The whole notion of “If you’re not the product, then you’re the product” died a while ago.
Now, you’re paying for the product, and you continue to be the product.
Paying for the product = monthly/yearly subscription You’re the product = unique identifiers, data mining/harvesting, tracked across the web, etc. Perhaps even training some AI models in the background, too.
Yup
I don’t use Spotify anymore. But I also don’t listen to “tons of different music”. I have about 200 albums on Bandcamp and I pick up something new every couple weeks. I’m paying money, sometimes as much as a subscription, but I get to keep the music. It supports the artists. Sometimes they even send you a personal message.
Bandcamp got bought by epic and that sucks, but they’re still the best music service I know.
I listened to 9,852 different tracks in 2022 from 3,247 different artists across 6,720 different albums.
It’s just not feasible for me to buy them all.
I listen to ~1500 different tracks from the 19th Century all the way up to the present. I loved iTunes but the “share with friends over the internet” capability has become indispensable recently.
If Spotify keeps going downhill (and let’s face it, it probably will) then I hope someone creates a decentralized playlist-sharing service so that I can put stuff up. Not even necessarily a piracy service, it would be nice to just have links to buy a friend’s playlist’s content on such a service.
Convenience is the only reason I have it. I’ve also got a local DNS server with ads blocked, so that helps. Otherwise I’d be pirating again. Have over 80k songs from back in the day, just need the newer stuff.
Bandcamp hasn’t changed at all since the Epic acquisition. Yet, at least. This is from an artist’s perspective, too, as I use Bandcamp as essentially my website and main place to push people to if they want to purchase my music rather than stream.
Yeah I was real nervous when it first happened, but nothing has gone sour yet. I have held off some purchases until Bandcamp Friday though as a result.
And Spotify didn’t advertise at paying users for almost a decade until, well, today.
Not that I’m a fan of the ridiculous “I tOlD yOu sO” posturing in this thread, given that it’s been almost a decade of initially groundbreaking and later reasonably high quality service.
One thing those commenters are right about though is: these companies will pursue profit to the bitter end and ads are a virtual inevitability for any major media platform.
That’s good to hear. I was pretty concerned.
I recently tried a new feature they added that would add recommended stuff into my already made playlists. I didn’t like it and turned it off in the settings, but it still persists in basically advertising music that is completely unrelated to what I have. Like I shouldn’t be hearing fucking TikTok by Kesha in my 90’s grunge mix.
For being so sophisticated, it's incredible how dumb the Spotify algorithm is.
For me somehow it decided Pink Moon by Nick Drake was my favourite song. At first it just threw it in the mix randomly when albums finished playing and it went on to play suggestions, but after a few times of me not skipping it it went ballistic. Now every time an album finishes it goes straight to Pink Moon. No matter what Spotify radio I try playing it will be Pink Moon. I keep skipping it and it keeps coming back. I don't have a problem with Nick Drake I just can't stand that song any longer. I never once played that song intentionally.
In the end I just cancelled my subscription.
It feels like they did it on purpose, because the main reason I actually pay for Spotify is because it generally is actually pretty good at recommending songs based on other songs I’ve checked the like box on, and I was able to find new music that didn’t completely suck balls.
I absolutely loathe this new shuffle feature. I want to listen to my playlists not be spoon-fed advertising garbage. I remember one year Spotify had this thing where it was injecting popular x-mas songs into your playlist in the free version. What’s worse was you couldn’t skip the songs. I went back to using old MP3s for the rest of the month.
Its annoying for artists too. They pay a great deal to get on these services and then get told they need to pay for promotion for listeners like yourself to discover their work. Spotify at this stage is just a way to siphon money out of people. Nobody wins.
Nexpo and Barely Sociable from Youtube were talking about this on socials a while back. Dont be angry with the artists, be angry with models like spotify who then pay £10 for a million plays.
That’s an odd take. You are conflating completely different things. It costs close to nothing for artists to get their music on Spotify ($25 a year for several releases if I remember correctly). There is no promise from Spotify that they will guarantee discoverability. Tens of millions of releases are uploaded to Spotify annually, how do you surface that to users? Paying for promotions is ads. Artists (or their labels) are fully responsible for buying ads. They are advertisers. They spend money because they want to become more popular. Users, on the other hand, buy a paid product. When they become the product it’s not by choice and it’s not because that improves user’s experience.
I couldn’t deal with Spotify constantly pushing its industry plant artists and those paying to get into my recommendations. Fuck this company for not giving a shit about your actual tastes
Apple Music pays musicians, Qobuz pays the best and costs the most
They both sound really good. If you have the money and are willing to compromise on a few things than Qobuz is the nice one
Apple also rolled out a really good seaparate app specifically for browsing and listening to classical music.
Classical music doesn’t organize easily into “bands/albums” the way most works from the last 80 years do. Most music players tend to fall apart when you try to organize a library of classical music in any coherent manner. So they solved this problem by desiging a completely separate UI for it.
That’s pretty cool. Shame it’s iOS only.
I’ve actually had zero issues with tidal since I switched a couple of months ago, it pays artists better and I think it has more artists on it. I don’t use the mobile app much though if that’s what’s buggy, I mainly use the desktop app (on Linux) and occasionally the Plex integration to listen from my tv
Since they believe that they are the landlord and you are a tenant using their product so … !
I stopped using Spotify when I paid for premium a few years ago And they kept interrupting me to remind me that I was listening ad-free lol
That’s super weird; I’ve had a sub to Spotify for years and never got that.
Yeah I’ve been a subscriber for a way too fucking long and I’ve never had that. Sounds like some sort of glitch on their account or something.
I get the recommendations sometimes (they seem to come in batches, like I’ll get a bunch over a few weeks and then won’t see any for months), but I’ve never gotten this.
You are also the product coz they keep raping your data and selling it to advertisers on other platforms.
Can you download for offline?
I complained about this to their support one time
They gave me a month free lol
…I’m still the product?
Yes. You always will be with any corporate streaming service.
I’d love to leave streaming services and roll my own server, but I rely on things like the Release Radar and song radios for discovery and just haven’t been able to find a self-hosted solution for that.
I don’t want to have to plan out the music I’m going to listen to, I just want to dive in.
I use the Spotify data via Every Noise at Once (everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=name&name=) to gather band suggestions, but it is a somewhat annoying amount of work compared to having a script that sees all of my music and makes a playlist of 20+ songs using that data for me.
Imagine not wanting to be recommended things you’d like lol
But this is a sponsored recommendation. It’s an ad. Will I really like it or do they just want money?
Only one way to find out. If their algorithms are any good at all, you’ll like it.
No matter what, artists only seek to be on Spotify to get recognition/listens, so it makes no sense to be upset about this.
This is the boomeriest shit I’ve seen online in a while.
Yes. If I want a recommendation I'll ask for it.
Ok Boomer lol
You asked for it when you signed up for an app that is built around recommending you music
I dropped Spotify and starting using iBroadcast and haven't looked back. Glad to cut another subscription.
I wasn’t aware of that service. - Thanks, good tip!
This is exactly why I see Spotify as nothing more than a green garbage bin. I’m going back to my vinyl records.
Shit like this is why monopolies and oliglopolies don't work. I hope people complain AND jump ship in big enough droves for this to change. Self-hosting and the old fashioned "buy your own music permanently" option are good too.
I don't use streaming services, I just buy MP3's (or AAC's on iTunes or whatever they're using nowadays, it's been a while) and keep them locally and on the cloud. Never liked most Streaming Services' recommendations anyway.
Mp3s are fortunately in a really good place with them being DRM free. Was why when Google Music shut down I was still able to download my music purchases and keep them for myself. It’s one of more widespread consumer friendly digital options out there compared to all the DRM and account based digital options that exist for other products.
Meh, for not very much a month I can pay for premium Spotify and rip 320 mp3s to my hearts content, for anything that is more obscure or just not released on Spotify I buy through bandcamp. I used to buy a lot more but being much poorer now I’m going to take advantage of saving so much money and still being able to have files that I can hold on to and use how I like.
Juat rip thr files, Spotify pockets most of the money so if it’s about supporting artists it’s a bad solution anyway!
Use vanced Spotify and don’t pay them at all. I don’t use it cause I prefer to have my flac files stored locally and discovering new songs is stupid on Spotify (mostly mainstream bullshit) but for someone used to using Spotify it’s a good choice.
You can definitely discover music outside of mainstream bullshit on Spotify, that’s a terrible take. Storing FLAC is your prerogative I suppose, I get it. I won’t say Spotify doesn’t have its issues though.
I was using it for almost a year. Still it gave me bullshit I didn’t like… Completely useless app for me.
That’s probably because you’re not using Spotify. I’ve been using Spotify using the family subscription of a friend of mine, and the recommendations are pretty good. Still not as good as they were on Apple Music, but hey, it’s free for me.
The biggest bullshit…
Use blackhole or newpipe
I haven’t subscribed to Spotify for quite some time, have they added proper 2FA feature (not for artists)? I think it’s been “under consideration” for a long time
the synonymes entry in the english language for “ads” is expanding everyday
SpaceCadet@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Never understood why anyone would want to rent their music in the first place. As good as the service may be when you sign up for it, you know it will eventually turn to shit as they’re trying to monetize every last cent out of it, and then your only choices are to endure the shit or to quit the service and be left with nothing.
theragu40@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Convenience, pure and simple.
I used to maintain a gigantic Google Play Music library and used that to listen to music. I also had a hard copy locally and used Winamp.
Then Google killed GPM and there was no real good alternative at the time so I picked up Spotify and got easily hooked on the ability to listen to anything I wanted at any time. No ripping, no uploading, no buying, no hassle, no nothing. I’ve discovered so much music through the recommendation engine. Some are bigger bands I just hadn’t listened to, some are obscure.
But the point is, for the cost of a single CD per month I was able to listen to any CD from any band whenever I wanted. It was an extremely easy decision to sign up.
SpaceCadet@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Yeah but my point is, you pay but you don’t actually get those albums. So if after some years Spotify turns to shit you don’t have anything to show for when you cancel the service, and even though you have paid the equivalent of dozens of albums your music collection is gone.
Also, I don’t buy anyting near an album per month, so even on that level it doesn’t make sense to me. I do have a large collection, but I’m not really digging much current music anymore so if I buy two albums per year, it’s a lot.
debeluhar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Never understand why anyone would want to buy their music in the first place. I got tired of music really quickly, so buying would be waste of money for me, since, after some time, I won’t be listening to music I bought. For me, renting music is better than buying. And sometimes I would just like to find some new music, since I’m tired of listening to the same old s*it. Just give me something random, something new, I newer heard before. But that’s just me, and I believe this is not for anyone.