I was a paying customer for a long time but i dont like basically anything about how they work. They are also shockingly bad with snooping on you and sharing data.Īds that come from third parties are open to exploitation and not properly vetted, not to mention may be jarring to your experience. So your money goes to the artists listened to by others :( Payments to artists are based on total listens, not who is paying or who you listen to. (If that song actually exists, I cannot attest to its quality, because I swear I thought I was making it up.) After all, Spotify could be playing music to a cat in an otherwise empty house, with the mobile device quietly displaying 'Now playing 'Meow Mix Theme - Metal Version' on device 'Bluetooth speaker'.' There's something to be said for just playing the ad audio without trying to ensure someone is listening, or identifying who it might be. Maybe I lock the music program in the matrix, and control all the data it tries to get from the system, to the point that it cannot ever say what reality truly is. Maybe I also train another program to recognize the ads, and tell the first program exactly how far to skip ahead.

Maybe I put a 30-minute buffering program on the audio stream that the music program is allowed to use, and tell that program to skip ahead during the ads. I'll crunch your cookies, and squash your pixel, and firewall your home-phoner. I'll block the ads, and block the ad-blocker detectors, and block the ad-blocker-detector-blocker detectors. I pay to not get ads, so I'm not really motivated to explore avoiding them.īut if you try to advertise at me no matter what I do, or overestimate what I would pay, I will join in the arms race against your advertisers. Spotify is already a step ahead of that by preventing users from avoiding ads just by changing the radio station, and I think that the clever tricks with the volume are really pushing it in terms of user hostility. Traditional broadcast radio gets zero feedback from most receivers. Buy headphones with their own thumbwheel attenuator and/or mute button, or plug your corded headphones into an extension cord or dongle that has them.

Block web spotify ads