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!? 😑

    • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      If you have a shit ton of time and don’t care about mediocre to bad quality for the size, you could do the straightforward 80s way, play and record on “tape” (which can be digital files nowadays).

      If you have any way of exporting to a list, then you might have some luck with some console wizardry and yt-dlp. Essentially “search” each title on youtube and auto-download the audio from the first result and try to fill in the track and artist fields automatically.

    • ImpossibilityBox@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Any sailor worth his salt needs spend a few seasons earning his sea legs before he can begin to call to claim any understanding of the sea.

      AKA, There is no easy way. It will lots of time and manual labor to find all the individual files in your Playlist.

  • Bongles@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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!

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.
  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Dasnap@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah it’s odd for it to act cocky when it’s actually one of the few modern service products that has plenty of competition that people are willing to use.

    • Mannivu@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      Deezer, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal waving furiously Pick me! Pick me!

      • I need NOS@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I haven’t tried all of those, but I like Deezer. It plays music and it’s much less pushy about podcasts or other crap that Spotify always clutters your start page with. The queue interface is also simpler to use. The only downside I see is that search is noticeably slower than Spotify on desktop.

        • Mannivu@feddit.it
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          1 year ago

          Aren’t you buing just the license to play it, though? Like, if they delete them from their catalogue you can’t listen to them anymore?

          • Null User Object@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            Not unless you’re “buying” it from some service that doesn’t let you download the file. Definitely don’t do that.

            • Buy the mp3s.
            • Download them (& backup to a separate location)
            • Listen to them on whatever mp3 player you want.
            • Gradually accumulate an enormous music collection that you can listen to for free forever.
    • aard@kyu.de
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      1 year ago

      Spotify pissed me off with some billing or API thing (don’t even remember the details) back in 2012, so I cancelled and never looked back. From what I’m reading now and then things is just getting worse and worse - and I have no clue why people (especially paying ones) are sticking with it.

        • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          I’d rather support an independent European company like Spotify than any of the big five.

          I’d rather support the actual artists more. Apple pays the artists 3 times as much per stream as Spotify.

  • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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!!

  • null@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    I’d love to leave streaming services and roll my own server, but I rely on things like the Release Radar and song radios for discovery and just haven’t been able to find a self-hosted solution for that.

    I don’t want to have to plan out the music I’m going to listen to, I just want to dive in.

  • Loom In Essence@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Ktheone@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • N-E-N@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Loom In Essence@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • N-E-N@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Executives being greedy isn’t the same as a greedy business model

          • Loom In Essence@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            This makes no sense. Greedy execs are the ones who would implement a greedy business model to pursue their greed.

            • EssentialCoffee@midwest.social
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              1 year ago

              What part of the executive compensation package are you taking specific issue with exactly? From what I could see, they’re largely paid in stock and the CEO hasn’t taken a bonus since COVID.

              Or are you just talking executives in general and not looking at what Spotify does specifically?

      • Final Remix@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Maybe they shouldn’t’ve thrown so much money into the pivot to podcasts, then thrown a bunch of money at that meathead idiot.

      • notatoad@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • N-E-N@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Yea, companies that pay more typically either charge more (Tidal) or have the advantage of a massive profitable company backing them (Apple Music)

  • theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • QubaXR@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    In the immortal words of James Stephanie Sterling “corporations don’t just want some money. They want all of the money”

    • Baketime@kbin.social
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      How to introduce ads to the current premium tier without having everyone complain and leave

      Step 1 - Introduce a new paid tier that’s cheaper, has all the premium features, but still has ads

      Step 2 - wait a few months

      Step 3 - increase all prices so that new “cheaper” tier is the same price as the current premium tier

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • sab@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      For being so sophisticated, it’s incredible how dumb the Spotify algorithm is.

      For me somehow it decided Pink Moon by Nick Drake was my favourite song. At first it just threw it in the mix randomly when albums finished playing and it went on to play suggestions, but after a few times of me not skipping it it went ballistic. Now every time an album finishes it goes straight to Pink Moon. No matter what Spotify radio I try playing it will be Pink Moon. I keep skipping it and it keeps coming back. I don’t have a problem with Nick Drake I just can’t stand that song any longer. I never once played that song intentionally.

      In the end I just cancelled my subscription.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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        1 year ago

        It feels like they did it on purpose, because the main reason I actually pay for Spotify is because it generally is actually pretty good at recommending songs based on other songs I’ve checked the like box on, and I was able to find new music that didn’t completely suck balls.

        This shuffle feature doesn’t seem to use the same algorithm. It just shuffles in artists that are currently popular and may have paid for the bump.

    • Aviandelight @mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I absolutely loathe this new shuffle feature. I want to listen to my playlists not be spoon-fed advertising garbage. I remember one year Spotify had this thing where it was injecting popular x-mas songs into your playlist in the free version. What’s worse was you couldn’t skip the songs. I went back to using old MP3s for the rest of the month.