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!? 😑
If you’re not paying you are the product. If you ARE paying you are STILL the product. This is how big tech works.
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
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.
Tbh i have used linux on my home pc for years now and now they are very polished products , except most corporate apps are not there !
Which corporate apps?
Perhaps I’m lucky, but I rarely have an issue.
Adobe , microsoft office , catia etc etc etc
I mean… Android and ChromeOS are Linux underneath. MacOS is… related to Unix. Hang on, I need to look up that lineage…
Also Lineage.
Edit: MacOS used/uses the Mach kernel, and uses code “derived from BSD”, vague as Wikipedia is. That could mean it’s a whole copy-paste or that it just borrows ideas from BSD.
It has a history in the US anti trust (when the laws really worked)
MacOS has userland tools from some FreeBSD version (quite obsolete, IIRC). Also there’s a port of bhyve called xhyve for MacOS. Its kernel I wouldn’t expect to have much in common with BSDs.
Android isn’t in that list if you’re using something like LineageOS or GrapheneOS.
I suspect that’s a fraction of a percent of Android devices, though.
I wouldn’t know about market share, but why would market share be a disqualifier to your statement? GrapheneOS and LineageOS are both massive projects with a lot of users. It should be mentioned for those that might be interested to know that they have an option for privacy. Not saying you were doing this, but I hate the defeatist attitude that everything tracks so why try? It’s wrong.
I use LineageOS and Linux and FOSS apps/software and selfhost services… if it’s something you care about, you can regain control and privacy over your data.
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You become the product with name, address, and payment details attached to the account for improved demographic data for them to collect. Win win.
But you’re paying for the GOOD recommendations now, not the free bad ones… /s
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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:
- Monkey see UI to build.
- Moneky see TikTok big.
- Monkey do.
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! 😧
what’s worse about it? You just need to touch “DISMISS”
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they made this tiktok change a few months ago but reverted back after backlash
That is literally what non-Open Source/capitalism is like:
- You don’t pay, you are the product
- You pay, you are the product and you pay for it
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.
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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.
Spotube looks really interesting. It says that you can use it as anonymous/guest, but it looks like it still requires a Spotify account. I don’t have an account, but I might have to make one just to test it out lol
Yeah, reading through the github issues it seems the developer meant you can play stuff logged out but you can’t use spotify search without an account so the search doesn’t work unless you log in.
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).
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.
no, you pay spotify so they can give Joe Rogan money to make up bullshit every day.
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… Which is supposed to be the whole excuse for collecting data in the first place lmao
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 companies 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.
EDIT: In addition to it sucking, it’s largely irrelevant and likely prevents some sales from occurring. If I’m listening to a lot of a certain rock band…I’d likely want to know if they’re touring and may be unaware of that fact…but nah, gotta push people to buy another vacuum or whatever instead.
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.
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
Are 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.
Well we can always pirate !
Yo ho, yo ho!
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.
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. By 2009, iTunes music was completely DRM-free and alternative stores had to follow suit to remain competitive.
Wow, you are right! I was confused about iTunes, because it seems to require an app, but it is DRM-free and so is Amazon Music. That’s great! So I guess only Spotify has DRM.
All the streaming services use DRM, it’s just download stores that are DRM-free. Which makes sense, when you buy an album, you should own it.
I see, that makes sense. But I also think that every content that you have paid to access should be DRM-free, so even in a streaming service.
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.
Why letters and numbers?
Some artists use numbers in their names and adding numbers will change what the search returns sometimes with odd results.
It’s the same as pirating, except Spotify gets paid.
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.
rutracker and soulseek are good options for finding music.
Napster was so much fun back in the day.
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
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 that $100 billion they gave Joe Rogan is where your payments go.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
I pay for Spotify
thats where you made a mistake
He fell for the classic blunder
