"Sponsored recommendations": I pay for Spotify Premium, and yet somehow I'm still the product?
"Sponsored recommendations": I pay for Spotify Premium, and yet somehow I'm still the product?
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!? π
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.
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.
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.
no, you pay spotify so they can give Joe Rogan money to make up bullshit every day.
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.
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.
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.
xManager if you're on Android.
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!
I pay for Amazon Prime music premium or some shit, and about a month ago they started putting an ad up literally every time I log in telling me to subscribe to super-duper premium or whatever the fuck they call it. Seriously guys? How about no?
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.
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!
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. It's all the more infuriating that it continues to act as if it is on when I turned it the fuck off.
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?
Since they believe that they are the landlord and you are a tenant using their product so ... !
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.
Install ViMusic on Android and all your problems are gone. https://f-droid.org/packages/it.vfsfitvnm.vimusic/
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 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.
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.
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
I dropped Spotify and starting using iBroadcast and haven't looked back. Glad to cut another subscription.
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..I'm still the product?
Yes. You always will be with any corporate streaming service.
I complained about this to their support one time
They gave me a month free lol
Not to be confused with Tim Janus, world championship burping title holder. I believe he also holds record for longest recorded burp at 18sec.
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
Tidal is a good alternative. Will have to go elsewhere for podcasts, though.
Use blackhole or newpipe
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.
You are also the product coz they keep raping your data and selling it to advertisers on other platforms.
Spotify Exclusive Podcasts also contain sound ads here in germany. For me it was a reason to unsubscribe as i don't listen anymore to so much new music and have a own catalog of music from past.
The biggest bullshit...
the synonymes entry in the english language for "ads" is expanding everyday
Arr.
This is exactly why I see Spotify as nothing more than a green garbage bin. I'm going back to my vinyl records.
Music ads are nonsense
Just been downloading all songs off Spotify to have them locally and find another way of expanding my library forwards, I've had enough of Spotify.
Dude right though!! Those are the worst!! And they only seem to pop up when I'm tossing a playlist on right as I start driving, worst fkn thing!!
Because the dollars must flow
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Tbh the times that these come up it's usually music that is right in my wheelhouse. I've found lots of new music through the recommendations of Spotify.
I understand some people against this, but it's the same as Netflix recommending a show or your cinema showing you other rmpvies to watch. Yeah it could be seen as an ad but it can help you find new content or enjoy other stuff we are not talking about an ad about something completely unrelated like a new toothpaste ...
That's annoying. But I think there's a misconception of "if you pay for something it must be ad free." There's goals to get to X revenue. It's totally reasonable to have that way to get to X to be a blend of subscription fees and some forms of promotional content. Also, I am curious if the record labels have any agreements in place that require Spotify to do occasional promotions to both premium and non premium users in order for the service to have access to their music. I'd be curious to see what the "why am I seeing this?" link says.
Losers born every minute. Lol