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Spotify quietly moves lyrics behind a paywall.
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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Really who cares? The free tier is shit and has always been shit. That's the point of the free tier, to get you to pay.
Previously they didn't even have a free tier, now they do and it's free. Of course not every feature exists and especially not a feature like lyrics which isn't essential and Spotify has to pay extra for.
The backlash is generally against all enshitification.
You get a useful free plan. Make it useless over time to convince people to pay for a plan. Make THAT plan useless over time to make people pay for the more expensive plan.. repeat until capitalism ends.
That's why people care. Eg: see all subscription services ever
Or, as we call it, the principle of the thing.
If people are thinking "I don't care, I got mine", they need to learn why that elitism is wrong.
Yeha, but they can make their free tier as shitty as they want, it is their product...
If you don't want to pay, just use one of the thousands tools to pirate music. If you don't want to pay but still think you deserve a product with all the features you like, then you're delusional.
Who suggested they couldn't? Having the right to do something doesn't mean no one else can voice their displeasure.
It has nothing to do with "deserve". Shitty businesses practices are worth calling out. Especially because this has nothing to do with supporting Spotify and everything to do with enriching stockholders. It's a sign of desperation: they can't make their product better to entice new customers, so they're making their free product worse. It's trashy and greedy.
But please, go on expending your energy defending a corporation from valid criticism.
I agree, but this isn't one of those cases. Netflix, Disney, and Amazon adding ads to their paid products is worth calling out. Microsoft adding ads to their paid OS is worth calling out. Roku changing the rules and forcing people to agree to arbitration after purchase of a TV is worth calling out.
But Spotify putting lyrics behind their paid service isn't like that at all. You can easily get lyrics with an Internet search, it's a non-issue. Either pay or look it up yourself.
So I agree with the person you're responding to, it's not worthwhile criticism. I have no problem with corporations making money, I have a problem with corporations abusing their position to screw over customers, and Spotify has been remarkably well-behaved.
Right, I used their free tier for so long that I even started enjoying the lack of control I had. Like, music would just play for me. I bought the subscription because I really wanted to give them the money. I recall their ads even being only about Spotify premium, so I wouldn't get random shit like YouTube ads.
LTT mentioned some time ago on the Wanshow about how gaking away is destroying more goodwill than adding new stuff only to the premium tier.
This is probably why most are so worked up about the issue.
Yes, but, like comma splices, we get to judge them.
If you don't want to pay, then don't use it. Regardless of everything, music producers still need to live and pirating is a shit move to help them.
If I won't pay, pirating isn't going to take money away from them. Yeha, I know it is stealing, I won't pretend it isn't like many do, but hey, if they are giving me a shit service, they left me no choice.
I pay for most of what I consume but when I have no choice, I pirate. I do pay for Spotify premium, I don't even mind the free tier, I just wanted to give them the money because their app is great.
Kudos for paying Spotify (as I do). I disagree on "if they give me shit service" part. If that happens, you have an option to either switch service or don't use any of them. IMO pirating is not an option. Also when pirating though P2P, you also distribute the content.
I think there are plenty legit reasons to pirate, but I do agree that it isn't ethical. The thing is, I'm not a 100% ethical individual and I'm OK with that, it's not like I'm supporting a drug cartel by buying illegal drugs or killing someone, I have a threshold I consider acceptable for myself. At least I'm not the type of pirate who thinks they are saving the world by pirating content.
Some people think their acceptable threshold is drink and driving. My personal threshold is downloading a movie that the 3 streaming services I'm already paying for don't offer. Pretty vanilla if you ask me.
but it's a free plan and if you can't afford 5-15$/mo for unlimited music and can afford to spend time complaining about this then you have some much bigger problems in your life.
It's free 🤷
Also the free tier was worse when it launched. And the free tier has always been useless for me.
When did they not have a free tier? I remember the free version being around at least 10 years ago.
I searched and I may have misremembered, the free version seems to have been around since the start except that the free version was initially invite and desktop only. Eventually everyone could use it but still only on desktop. The free version was even more limited back then it seems with a limit on how many hours you could listen to each month.
I could personally never use it. Because it was so incredibly limited. Not being allowed to skip tracks makes it unusable and I'm genuinely surprised anyone used it apart from trying the service.
I have a faint memory of it being announced that Spotify first got a free tier but I may be completely wrong, I was very young back then. I'm also from Sweden so we had Spotify very early compared to most countries and it got popular very quickly here.
I used it in college, I didn't have money. Honestly I didn't mind. You were allowed to skip five or six times in an hour, and I would just make custom playlists and it ended up being like a nicer radio. Fewer ads than radio, music I like, a few skips.
Honestly at that time, I don't remember anyone who paid for it. I remember the first time I heard someone say they had premium was a friend who worked at Starbucks in like .. 2017? Because Spotify premium was a job perk. At the time it was like, oh she only has premium because of Starbucks. And then somewhere along the way everyone got premium.
I do remember the free tier being introduced at some point. But it was a really long time ago. Probably 10+ years. I was still on XP back then.
Why are they even charging you for lyrics to begin with? It's not like they write them. It costs nothing to give you that feature for free.
Kind of like the YouTube app requiring a subscription for background playing. It's a basic function that does not cost them anything, yet they break it to sell it back to you.
Stripping extremely basic features away and locking them behind paywalls is shitty and should be called out as such, full stop.
Because they need to pay their supplier of synced (and non-synced) lyrics, Musixmatch.
And they obviously want to make money and free users don't make them much if any profit.
I highly doubt that. Lyrics are copyrighted like anything else, so record labels are going to charge for it.
That's an artificial limitation, as evidenced by NewPipe, Grayjay, and multiple others offering the same exact thing without a premium tier.