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.
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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.
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”
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.
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.
And people on the lemmy.world instance wonder why we fight for the right to talk about piracy.
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
I want FLACs!
I want WAVs.
Just convert it with FFmpeg
I know I can do that.
Have you heard about sarcasm? That’s what I was doing.
I thought maybe you thought that WAV was purer than FLAC
Nah, I just like to brag about how the file is uselessly bigger
Look, they ask me at the audio store how I listen to my music when I ordered two amps to try out, just to make sure I don’t just use Spotify.
So I guess it’s never out of question that people consider WAVs a completely different sound qualities.
You can download lossless with Apple Music and listen to it with no data connection.
Yes, but I want the files themselves, so I can back them up and not worrying about losing them in the future.
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.
Or at least not a corporation that is expected to provide infinite growth for their shareholders.
Even then. Look at the way they pay people and treat volunteers…
I agree that there are also organizations from this kind
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.
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
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.
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.
There’s other streaming services. I’d recommend any over Spotify.
Which one do you prefer / recommend?
Soundcloud is one! Some artists let you download their music and others don’t. Other than than Soundcloud isn’t open source, I don’t see what’s wrong with them.
I’ve been enjoying apple music on Android (the audacity, I know) mainly for family plan convenience. I used to use Tidal, back when it was the only one offering higher quality audio. Now that’s more common.
However I do miss a few things from Tidal. It had full credits for albums and songs like a CD would have had. And when you’re on a track and go to the artist it will let you pick which one you want if there’s features or a collab. Apple Music will just automatically take you to the page of the first artist listed. So that’s something to consider especially if you’re into hip-hop.
There’s many options though and they pretty much all pay artists more than Spotify does too.
If you’re going to p1r@te, you don’t have to pay sp0tify to do it…
That doesn’t really fix the “somehow matches your interests” part of their need. Your torrent software isn’t able to track your listening habits and recommend things that other people with similar habits also liked.
Pandora is still around and does a decent job finding new music based off listening habits.
I’m not going to deal with a seed box and a ton of pain in the ass steps in between to listen to music. I’d rather pay Spotify or Amazon or Google or any of the other providers because of the convenience factor.
Also owning music isn’t something I particularly care about. Games, maybe, but music is so broad that I’ll just listen to something else.
WTF is a seedbox?
I have no trouble listening to unlimited music, it’s literally everywhere.
Plus it’s not just about owning the album (although I absolutely insist on listening on whichever device I choose). It’s also about paying the artist.
Sp0tify pays peanuts. When I buy the album from the band’s site or bandcamp they get a hell of a lot more money from me. And I want to support them.
You cannot support any artist through Spotify.
How I have to torrent cause my isp will cancel service over it.
If you’re pirating you’re not paying the artist at all. Spotify is better than pirating.
I don’t pirate. I buy albums.
You’re advocating for piracy explicitly
If you’re going to p1r@te, you don’t have to pay sp0tify to do it…
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.
they didn’t give Joe Rogan 100 billion dollars you dunce.
I think it was 1000000 trillion bazillion dollars, you drooling braindead goon.
This comment says a lot more about you than it does about me.
Remember when you called me a dunce? And now you’re self righteous? Anyway, goodbye.
No company in their right mind would pay one person $100,000,000,000! Come on!
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.
Executives being greedy isn’t the same as a greedy business model
This makes no sense. Greedy execs are the ones who would implement a greedy business model to pursue their greed.
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.
Yea, companies that pay more typically either charge more (Tidal) or have the advantage of a massive profitable company backing them (Apple Music)
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?
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.
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.
