Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

Any kind of specialty drinks, which most people I would believe get at Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, the local coffee shop, end up being $5-8, not even in a major city or metropolitan area.

$10 is obviously nuts, but I find this one surprising as I've seen it come up a couple times. I'm on Vancouver island in BC and I'd be hard pressed to find a non-drip coffee that's not from a fast food place and isn't almost $5 after taxes.

On the other hand it’s nice to visit a place where restaurant food costs more than in Finland.

EDIT: A Finnish comparison might be ”It’s just a pint or two per month”. So not that expensive.

A coffee is cheap, most of the times it is less than a dollar, sometimes as low as 10 cents if you brew it yourself from cheap ground beans.

But you probably paid $5-$10 for a coffee on a few occasions too. Though TBH, you may have done it just to rent a seat at Starbucks.

So 1-2 coffees is probably something you correctly value at about $1. By associating it with coffee, they make you think their $10/month service costs you just $1, using the super expensive case as an excuse.

When I lived in Seattle... the numbers on the signs were still the same. $4-6 for morning coffees.

As a not student, I pay £10 p/m. As I've had coffees that cost me £5 in the past, that is two coffees.

I have a Spotify subscription because Amazon Music didn't used to exist and now I am used to Spotify, but if I'm paying for Amazon Prime anyway then why not make the switch?

happened to use Spotify for a while on a system with adblocking enabled

drive a lot of potential customers

If they're not paying and blocking ads, they're not customers. And if they weren't willing to pay for Spotify, why would they suddenly be willing to pay for Apple Music?

being on a Pi-Hole network

The number of people setting up home filtering devices isn't even a rounding error to a service the size of Spotify. All of those people could disappear and they wouldn't even be noticed.

Ditto for the number of people who might just happen to end up on an ad-restricted network at a friend's house.

That said, full disclosure I'm a notorious pirate on the dread sea qbittorrent with little qualms about denying others profit; so take anything with a massive grain of salt.

https://adexchanger.com/digital-audio-radio/spotifys-f-1-sho...

People go to extraordinary lengths to rationalize being outrageously cheap.

I feel like I hold an opinion no one else reading hacker news has, I believe website owners should be able to deliver ads and website visitors should be able to block them.

They don't, clearly, as there are people who are running software they would prefer people don't run.

What they do have a say on is whether you get to have a Spotify account, and they can base that on whether or not you're seeing the ads their software uses for revenue.

You of course have the option to pay for the service, which results in the ads being removed from the service.

I say all this as someone who doesn't use Spotify at all.

To tell Spotify “I’d use your service if you added an option where the ads didn’t give 3rd parties the ability to run JS on my system” is different from “I picked your current ad-supported option and then prevented the ads from running”.

And "acceptable ads" policies of blockers could require those properties. They wouldn't even need a fixed whitelist or cooperate with specific companies for that, all they have to do is allow iframes with appropriate CSP rules. I.e. it's a vendor-agnostic approach.

All true and all irrelevant to his point.

If no, then the loading of JavaScript isn't really the issue, isn't it?

What popular belief is this? The ready counterexample is the delivery of an ad to a vaccuum-tube TV in 1950.

I myself is skeptical about advertisements having future as such. In the age of the Internet, ads are the least useful method to discover product info.

The analogy for Internet ads today is like if modern cars were propelled by horses - an unviable arrangement. I know many online only companies making good money and spending literally zero on ads. The industry will eventually follow that path.

Other services like twitch have done what you said and users are equally irate about ads they can't skip and are completely embedded.

Basically it sucks for all parties involved. But at the end of the day you have to monetize or die.

Also I feel a lot of users are voting that 2 coffees a month is too much for music. I'm an old so... but for most of my life music just came out of a box for free. Sure I didn't have much control over it. But when I use spotify I just or pandora or amazon I tend to just get a genre based station going and just let it roll. Just like radio. I don't have time to be futzing around with optimizing playlists and that, I literally just don't care about music very much. Hell one of my friends, when he wants to concentrate, just puts the same song on repeat all day long (8+ hours).

That used to cost: cost free, price of tape/cd ($16 / year way over priced), free(napster,piracy), free with ads (pandora)...

Hell I can't even stomach paying $12 / month to xm when I'm going to drive cross country with no coverage.

In practice the second group is miniscule. There is zero incentive for companies to improve their practices and grow their market by targeting those people. Instead the only path to maximising profit is to increase the value they can get from people without ad blockers.

I find this rationale, while likely true for many readers on Hacker News, unlikely to generalize to overall population fo Spotify ad blockers.

This is good in other ways! One of the problems with Spotify is that the musicians don't really get paid a realistically useful amount. I say this as someone who has both a Spotify subscription and musician friends whose music is on Spotify.

That said, I personally find the subscription price surprisingly low for what I get, but I wouldn't try to tell you what to do with your money.

Your pre-spotify music budget was less than $10 per month? Pre-streaming music I was definitely buying more than one CD per month, to my recollection those were about $10-15.

Even if coffee doesn't cost $5, and it costs $2.50, that's 4 coffees.

Or even $1 coffee, that's 10 coffees.

Unlimited music streaming for a month is absolutely worth 10 coffees.

The coffee example is brought up because _most_ people that claim that $120/year is a lot for them, spend a lot more than that a year on coffee.

That's not to say $10/month is trivial. I'm sure it's not a trivial amount of money for some people. The parent isn't denying that. They're saying that they're happy that Spotify is banning people that are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They're blaming people that CAN afford 1,2,5,10 coffees a month, and still chose ads or worse, adblockers for a service they can easily pay for as the demise of the internet. Which I wholeheartedly agree with.

Unlimited broadcasting of the same set of songs in rotation that they choose for you. That's supposed to be a huge selling point of the streaming services is to offer a larger selection than what corporate radio limits what's broadcast.

If enough people think the laws are terrible, then lobby your representative to have them changed. This is how the system works. Half the reason it doesn't work is admittedly our corrupt officials taking the big media money (RIAA and MPAA subsequently), but the other half the equation is you and me. Everyone just wants things to magically change and be the way they think they are suppose to be without putting any skin in the game.

Agreed. But I don't block ads just because ads are annoying. I don't even block ads because I don't like being tracked. My reason for blocking ads can be summed up in a single word.

Malvertising.

As soon as ad networks began trying to spread malware through ads was when ads moved from being a nuisance to a serious security concern.

Honestly, 10$/month is bordering on suspiciously cheap for what you actually get.

It's the same sort of odd psychology when it comes to paying for apps compared to paying for dinner. $2 for an app seems expensive, but $50 for a dinner for two is generally not even questioned.

In turn, Spotify can prevent whomever they want from streaming their content for free.

> ...how long until someone creates a solution to scrub the audio of ads in real-time?

Let me tell you a little open secret. Ad-blocking in general can be circumvented right now. Even the most aggressive ad-blocking techniques can be brought to their knees, because they can be detected and the website can serve the content in such a way as to make ads impossible to block without ruining the content.

Not many publishers do it because publishers have chosen to not piss off the minority that has ad-blockers installed. But this minority has been growing and what you're seeing is them fighting back.

You ask how long will it take to block audio ads? It's irrelevant, because the publisher can deploy DRM in such a way as to make ad-blocking attempts illegal and easy to trace, since the streaming is done in real time from a central source. And thus users can receive big fines as to stop everyone else from doing it.

That publishers don't do this yet, that's only because they preferred to play nice with ad-blockers. But threaten their bottom line long enough and they'll fight back.

And who can blame them? Here's Spotify with a pretty good subscription model and users are now up in arms for no longer being able to get their content for free without ads.

It is amazing value for money, and at least some of it goes to the artists.

[0]: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/COMPLETE-GUIDE-How-...

After a price drop...

> Why can't they offer it for $5/month?

Another price drop.

> Subscriptions are expensive. Why can't they offer a free plan?

A free plan is released, with ads.

> Why can't they offer it for free with less ads?

Ad density is reduced.

> Why can't they offer it for free with no ads?

> I don't want all these songs. Why can't they have an a la carte option?

A la carte option has existed for a while, but company gives it a marketing rebranding.

> These a la carte songs are kind of pricey. Why can't they be $0.80?

> $0.50?

> They're just bits. Bits want to be free.

> Why are you ignoring your loyal potential customers? I'm going to stop pirating your product and tell everyone I know to avoid you.

Less than 5 grand for a literal life time of music.

It's not five dollars a month for the rest of your life though. It's five dollars a month for as long as you want to listen to music on Spotify without ads...

> Frugal people look at the total cost of a loan, not just the monthly payment.

It's not a loan.

I mean, they're pushing things to your device at your request, because you logged on to use their free service. If you don't want them to push ads to your device, they were kind enough to offer you a paid option where they won't do that.

Can't help you with movies/Netflix, but in the case of Spotify, you could go back to buying mp3's. Google Play, Amazon, iTunes (aac format), etc will all sell you DRM Free tracks at $1.30 a piece, and the ad-free songs become yours forever to listen to however you wish.

This is less than ideal, but it works for now.

Wish they had a more fully-featured experience for streaming music on PC. Downloading to play in foobar is a bit of a faff sometimes!

I'm in the same boat(no pun intended), and also still pay for the subscriptions. I thought that more streaming services and more maturity(time passed) meant this situation would be improving - not degrading.

For movies, criterion collection is coming out with a streaming service, if that's your thing. I don't have netflix but I will have that.

I'm not sure if they'd satisfy these requirements, but I generally open paid Hulu more than I do Netflix. Google Play Music seems to cover everything Spotify does and there is no free option (so there are never ads), but it's Google, so it could go the way of Reader at any point.

Feels great flying the black flag again with Plex.

???

I pay $14.99 a mo and my wife and I enjoy as much music as we can stomach. It's the one subscription I never even think about. Their service never goes down and they are constantly trying to improve the product.

> Sonarr + Couchpotato + Plex + Subsonic is somehow a more consumer-friendly experience than their 'legitimate' counterparts.

???

If you have the time to configure all of that stuff (and support it, and find pirated content) you need to seriously up your billable rate and reconsider the value of your time.

Then again if you just enjoy doing it yourself and running your own gear, that is fine too, but admit it. I don't think this has anything to do with the market being hostile.

Turns out Spotify invalidated her as part of my family plan and asked me to add her again. Cool.... I go to the config to add her and Spotify asks for her address and does not let me add her when putting her/my address... I don't remember what address did I enter when I opened spotify more than 5 years ago, and the stupid thing does not let you see your address (like, 1 field in a database, how hard is that?)

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/How-can-I-check-my...

Needless to say, I cancelled Spotify Family premium and went to Google Play Family plan. Great deal if you tell me.

On a data connection redirected me to my ISP's game shop that apparently lets me buy crappy games for I don't know what with one click via phone bill.

Multiple redirects to a website that claims my phone is infected while maxing out the CPU and triggering permanent vibration.

Not that I have ever used Spotify, but that would be how I would defend it. If I did, I would just move on since my account would soon be suspended.

So how does Spotify defend running potentially malicious ads from 3rd party providers on end-user systems? Do they even vet those ads? Are they even aware of what code will be running on users computers that they are serving via the ad frameworks?

However, they do seem to include ads in their podcasts for all users. So it's not quite that simple.

Also I'm very pissed off with people who say freeloading. It's not freeloading. I pay with my time to watch or listen to your stupid ad. I should not also pay with my personal data. An ad is just an ad it should not have evolved to the monstrosity of tracking you.

It has evolved in the same way copyright has until we find a way to kill both of them as they are not needed in our world.

Fuck the money, I’m not letting a site run arbitrary code on my machine, especially when they have a track record of spying and installing malware. They have a right to make a living, I have a right to own my property without having it damaged by casual greed.

If that requirement is freeloading then I disagree with that definition of the word. They enjoy the benefit of behavior which if it was offline would be illegal, and out competes those service which operate more ethically. Since society currently expect the users to be responsible if their machine get infected by malware, it is fully ethical if they use software like ad-blocks to protect themselves.

I can tell you didn't read carefully what I wrote, but that's fine.

Here's what Spotify tells me: "Spotify gives you instant access to millions of songs – from old favorites to the latest hits. Just hit play to stream anything you like."

Where's "but we'll also monitor you and inject whatever code we can, we might allow our customers to do so too, we don't know what it might be but since we wasted $0.003 to acquire you, we need to make at least $5 off of you and we don't really care what happens to your device or if someone breaches our customer and does bad shit to you."

I believe in reciprocity - and the odds are worse at my side if I "freeload" :)

I know this news doesn't affect me, but the principle is the important thing.

Everybody has the right to control what is displayed on their computer when they browse the Net, and Spotify has the right to cancel free accounts for whatever reason they want to. There is nothing wrong with running adblockers and anti-anti-adblocking scripts, etc., and there is nothing wrong with canceling free Spotify accounts. There is also no cognitive dissonance with running and ad-blocker and being angry when Spotify cancels your free account because of it, it's a perfectly reasonable and consistent attitude.

In the U.S., its $10 a month for your entire life. If you live another 100 years, thats $12k that could have bought top top top of the line speakers or enough cds to fill multiple bookcases. We have so many services like this now that are packaged monthly to hide the real cost of long term use. Its like rent to own all over again, except when you stop renting you do not own.

I agree. For the past two decades, companies have privatized immense swaths of the digital commons and paid nothing for it, freeloading on the work of the countless public institutions and hobbyists who both created it, and created the culture which attracted billions of "users" to it.

With Spotify it is even worse. They have taken music, a prehistoric participatory artform and characteristic behavior of our species, and are trying to gamify it into a product that is no longer just music and which they own.

For the record I am a musician, and I'm pleasantly well-off so I have a paid Spotify subscription though I rarely use it. I held out until mid-2018, and didn't listen to even a single track on the service before then. Not that there is the slightest moral issue with using an adblocker while consuming broadcasts that contain ads, which I also do.

In comparison, Release Radar is an easy win; all the ML is already there.

> services like Spotify and Apple Music incourage extra data usage, and randomally delete music as they see fit

I certainly wouldn't use a service that deletes my music.

What do you mean? Prince only took his music off spotify for about a year before he died. Was there a very obvious effect on his career in this time?

In other words you use the service when you are satisfied with it's cost, instead of using the service and then negotiating the transaction posthoc.

I don't like the increasingly intrusive behaviors from big tech companies, and this case with free Spotify is a good example. If they can't provide a free service without privacy intrusions, they shouldn't offer it. Radios and broadcast TV survive on ad-based model without privacy intrusions.

Your statement sounds very akin to "fine, kick me out of this party I was clearly enjoying, I don't want to associate with these kind of people anyway..." which feels disingenuous.

I think you really just don't care that much about using spotify, which is a perfectly cromulent opinion.

I don't understand the entitlement you seem to feel to demand that third option.

It sounds like you are offended. How else would you characterize being "offput" by something? We also use Spotify in our household and I vaguely recall hearing A&E ads as well, but they just jumble together in my subconscious with all the other ads.

Some work places are far too serious.

I haven't seen even if they specified whether it must be the account user or not. E.g. your network host or isp can do it.

So that seems interesting, unless they can do it on a whim anyways and dont have to prove anything. Though they could just say, "no free service if we cant serve ads".