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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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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.