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!? 😑

  • @theragu40
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    21 year ago

    Yeah I mean, I am not paying to own it, you know? I don’t think of it in those terms at all. I’m paying for access to Spotify’s library. The product is the access. It removes a ton of decisionmaking overhead for someone like me whose primary enjoyment comes from listening to a huge variety of music and listening to as much new (or new to me) music as I can get my hands on.

    I wasn’t buying an album per month before, but that also means I wasn’t discovering music at anywhere near the rate I can today. Before I had to make the decision to spend 10-15 bucks on an album that maybe I wouldn’t even like. Now the barrier to giving a new album a shot is essentially zero. For me that is just so cool.

    So I think it comes down to what you enjoy and what your music habits are. If you’re confident in what you like, don’t find music discovery to be something worth paying a fee to improve, and want to listen to a few albums a year on repeat… Then yeah it’s a bad value proposition. But for me, it’s an astonishingly good value. And to be clear, I still do buy albums for bands I really enjoy because I want to fully support the artists. But there are lots of bands id never even have given a chance if I hadn’t been able to first discover them as part of a service I already pay for.