"Sponsored recommendations": I pay for Spotify Premium, and yet somehow I'm still the product?

If you're not paying you are the product. If you ARE paying you are STILL the product. This is how big tech works.

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.

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.

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:

1. Monkey see UI to build.
2. Moneky see TikTok big.
3. Monkey do.

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.

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

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.

Advertisements are now pretending to be recommendations

I pay for Spotify

thats where you made a mistake

I stopped using Spotify after I noticed that a song's share URL contains unique tracking elements. Then they started trying to lock down the podcast market, which reaffirms that leaving was the right choice.

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.

You paid yes but... what if MORE money?

About a year ago I switched from Spotify to a local library with the Symfonium music player on my phone and Rhythmbox on the PC. I have not once looked back.

Plus, you get the satisfaction of growing a collection that can last forever.

I highly recommend it !

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.

"What are you gonna do? NOT use us? lmao owned." - Spotify

I canceled after the first time they did this with the "Drake takeover" in 2018. Their customer support claimed it wasn't advertisement, lmao.

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!

If you don't own the music/games/movies you pay for, you are always the product.

delete Spotify. it's toxic

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!

Since they believe that they are the landlord and you are a tenant using their product so ... !

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.

The crazy thing about paying for Spotify Premium is that their podcasts still run ads! disgusting.

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?

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.