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Spotify Defends Facebook Sign-Up Requirement
An anonymous reader writes "Music service Spotify has got music lovers' tutus in a twist by insisting that new users have a Facebook account in order to sign up. The company has now defended the policy, stating, oddly, that the Facebook obligation would make sign-up easier."
But might it have something to do with the fact that Sean Parker and Peter Thiel, the guys who funded Spotify's recent move to the U.S., also still happen to own a significant percentage of Facebook?
Nah, that's just cynical crazy-talk. It's just to make the sign-up easier for us consumers.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"...the Facebook obligation would make sign-up easier." ...for Spotify.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Don't like it? Use another service.
I'd like to take you up on your offer. Which alternative to Spotify do you recommend for listeners in the United States?
Facebook has been doing some questionable things lately, which is interesting considering they have an up-and-coming contender in Google+ to compete against.
There have been murmurings about the privacy stuff and general griping going on for a while now but there was no "real" alternative. Then G+ goes live and Facebook makes some pretty big interface changes. I figure a lot of people just Facebook because it's comfortable and cozy... but when you introduce a crapload of new things and push people out of their comfort zone that just makes checking out G+ that much easier.
Now they just keep doing things to dare people to leave
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
which is close to what they're saying I guess.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I guess they didn't want my business.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
No, I'm not going to link Facebook to anything. Facebook is lame and has no good intentions. I recently deleted it off my phone and don't miss it a bit. The company sells out their users at every turn with regard to privacy. It's a festering stinkhole of risk to the individuals who use it. And I'm completely bored of all the meaningless crap people post all day.
Good luck, Spotify. I will happily live without you. In fact, my life will likely be richer as a result. Instead of wasing my life on Facebook and Spotify, I will go outdoors and spend time with my family. Ah, I feel healthier already.
How embarrassing to spend all that time building up a company only to effectively "resign" from the internet and cede your entire company to become just a feature of another company. Facebook is the king of getting people to work for them gratis. Spotify did the heavy lifting with the labels and Facebook eats their lunch.
wait, there is a term for this.... ah, yes, here: EPIC FAIL!!!
Any service or website that requires a Facebook account will NEVER get any of my business. This is a very troubling trend. I'm seeeing more and more websites that are requiring it.
Piracy forever man. Accept no substitute!
Always a superior product. Always in the format the market wants. Even with a negligible price point, these dumb companies are just not agile enough.
No weird-ass, windows only client to download. No signup, lock-in and DRM.
The piracy scene has all the web 2.0 social crap like the commercial sites now, so you can talk about the shit you're pirating.
Pure win.
I would love to see a Venn Diagram of "People who object to using Facebook for privacy reasons" and "People who would actually pay for Spotify accounts"
If you want a good relationship with your customers you force them to do something against their will.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
"...The company has now defended the policy, stating, oddly, that the Facebook obligation would make sign-up easier."
I guess the questions are:
1: Why not let me the user determine that?"
2: Why not pitch the idea that I might find Facebook signing easier?
The end result will be easier and better for Spotify but guess what, I am gone!
because I'll be damned if I'll ever join one of those brainless twit websites that completely invade your privacy. Hell if it ever gets to a point where i'm somehow legally or financially required to surrender my privacy to facebook my page is going to be a big white banner that says "FUCK YOU FOR BOTHERING TO LOOK HERE!". I've seen presumably 'personal' sites like this used all the time to discriminate against job applicants. Several times they got teachers fired because someone ELSE posted a picture of a teacher with a glass of wine (no big deal right?); yet because of their districts strict policy, not about drinking but about advertising drinking, they were fired. They can all go fuck themselves as far as I am concerned. and to Spotify, here is hoping you lose your ass on your decision to sell your soul to facebook.
I really used to Love Spotify.
I'm a premium subscriber and still like it, but this trend is depressing... I noticed a few days ago that I can't play Spotify links off Facebook. "Your platform is not supported." even though I run the native Linux client, and now this?
Gotta hate it when mainstream corporate pressure slowly eats away what once was a Good Thing. :/
.: Max Romantschuk
The funny thing is how Spotify spams Facebook's life stream with what you're listening to. I'm sure the music industry loves that, constant free advertising. And most people will just go along with that because it's a fun new feature. Privacy doesn't even enter into the equation.
Unfortunately, there's no viable competitor to Facebook out there. Facebook has stolen a lot of Google+'s thunder. They've introduced a bunch of new features, including matching a lot of what Google+ offered. Google could prove me wrong but I think Google+ is another one of these things that will linger for a few years before they finally kill it like so many other things they've done. And it's not like Google is a paragon of privacy.
And whatever happened to Diaspora?
The "Grey Goo" is Facebook, turning the entire content of the web into "Like" buttons.
Hence why torrent use keeps going down a bit (with a nice new service like Hulu) and then right back up (when Hulu decides to delay shows for a week) and then back down, and so on.
Attention Industry! You are competing with a product that has no sign in requirements, and low (a vpn service) cost. Keep this in mind and prosper. Deny it and fail.
My big gripe with Spotify is that you can subscribe for $5 / month and listen all you want on your desktop machine. If, however, your end point is your phone, they charge $10 / month. I really don't understand what difference it makes to them if the stream end point is my phone or a computer.
1) Spotify is not going to get my business.
2) Facebook is going to get a bogus account against their terms-of-service with a fake name.
Multiply this by every other person who wanted to try Spotify but refuses to sign up for Facebook.
For me- I'm leaning towards #1. I've got Sirius, MP3s, CDs, Cassettes, Pandora, and FM. If I have to live without Spotify because of their rediculous sign-up requirements... so be it.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Make fake facebook user with 0 friends, 0 info, 0 statuses, and 0 pictures. Use a fake name too if it suits you. John Bimblethorpenheimer. Problem solved. They can't invade your privacy if they don't know anything about you.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
I had this 'issue' with another social site in document sharing. I did not login and did not spend any money with the theatre who's document i could not read.
Quite how a website cannot serve a public pdf file without a facebook login seemed odd.
The most relevant response to a straw man argument isn't simply pointing out the straw man as much as explaining the difference between the original argument and the straw man argument and how this difference is relevant. Otherwise, you risk the fallacy fallacy.
Everyone will have an FB login, it's going to be the hub of the Net (that's the plan quasi Internet Log-in) sharing and selling your data, and, can you imagine the psych profile they can do on you with all your different Web items authenticating thru FB?
Never get a good job again.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The problem is, sometimes there is no alternative. A distressing number of news sites are now switching to Facebook for their user talkback logins. My reaction is to go away.
As long as there are other news sites, there is an alternative.
I'd rather use throw-away accounts for these one-off news sites and music sites. What the hell does Spotify need to have my Facebook identity cached for, anyway?
To take advantage of enforcement of a Facebook TOS provision against having multiple accounts. Spotify limits the amount of free service per account, and it needs some measure against people creating alt/mule/plz accounts to work around this.
Why continue to watch a movie, play a game, listen to a song or use a service that offends you?
Sunk cost + caveat emptor. Sometimes one doesn't discover that a product is unsatisfactory until having purchased it. This hurts especially if standard practice in the industry is not to offer a satisfaction guarantee. Or perhaps someone else is enjoying the work and is unwilling to offer one a ride home until after it is over. Songs have an additional complication in that they're more commonly played to a captive audience, such as people in a home, a vehicle, a restaurant, or a grocery store. But the relevance of that complication is a bit off-topic, so I won't go into it.
That's right, Virginia. Facebook can only track and collect information about those who have a Facebook account. Good luck with that.
Do you have to pay in Facebook Credits, where Facebook takes a 30% cut? If Spotify works through a "Facebook app", the App terms require that.
The real reason to tie into Facebook is that FB is the leader in DEMANDING that you put in your REAL information. They delete your accounts if they catch you doing otherwise. Only Paypal is worse. FB gets away with it - for now - in ways Spotify could never manage on their own. This tie-in makes identifying you for every possible making money opportunity is as high is it is possible to be on the Internet.
Have you ever noticed that when a business says that "We're doing this in order to make it easier for our customers," that it never is that at all?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
By requiring a Facebook account for registration, Spotify ensures their future customer base is already on board with having their demographic information sold in return for "free" services.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Spotify is terrible.. even without the Facebook garbage it's the worst music service I've used. Just use another service, all 3 of these are superior:
http://www.slacker.com/
http://grooveshark.com/
http://www.pandora.com/
Almost every time I go to read an article on Yahoo, I get pestered to add my Facebook account. An iFrame pops up in the middle of my screen, and there's no way for me to tell it to stop pestering me. All it does is make me want to not use Yahoo anymore.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
"Facebook obligation would make sign-up easier."
To market you. And to you.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
no longer available in android market.
Grooveshark Anywhere states: "currently supported on phones running Android, Blackberry, Palm, Symbian". There are ways to obtain applications for an Android-powered device other than Google's market.
I'll be happy to use my facebook page. In fact, I'll sign right up for spotify in a minute. As soon as I finish signing up for EA, oh but first I have to sign this agreement on my PS3. Oh dang also forgot I have to sign this other agreement for my new ONSTAR. Wait, come to think of it, why should I even have to sign up? With the amount of info passed around about me already they should know what I'm thinking and it's only a matter of time until they sign me up saying I was going to do it anyway.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Two of my friends had to create new Facebook accounts because they lost control of their original ones to scammers - one of them is fairly well known, I'm guessing 10% of Slashdotters know his name and 99% know the computer game that he is most famous for. One of my friends is on his second account due to having set up the first with a fake email address and forgetting the password. Another friend is on at least his third, maybe his fourth account due to being such a towel.
If I lose my Facebook account, do I lose my Spotify as well, along with any other services that use Facebook as single sign on?
The best part of this - since when have you ever had a hard time signing up to a web site. I probably have account on 30+ software sites alone, that I visited once. Singing up took all of 2 minutes.
Im a very long time customer but this made me cancel my account at the spot. I wont tolerate being sheparded towards Facebook, in any way shape or form. I really dont care if they noticed, i just wont accept Facebook at any price.
HTTP/1.1 400
Gawker Media requires a FB or twitter account to post.
Spotify requires a FB login?
Screw you.
Change your ways, or go away.
The rep that FB has is getting worse. My own mother killed her FB account when I shared some of their sleazy marketing/privacy tricks.
I have no desire for Spotify, so this isn't really in response to that, other than a recognition that I don't like having to use one service in order to do something else I might want to do. However, what I have noticed is that other services have a tendency to want to be linked with Facebook, and that drives me nuts. Goodreads is an example. When I sign onto it, it usually wants to do so by accessing my Facebook profile, and then spams my Facebook account. Yeah, I could configure it not to do that, but who wants to go through that kind of trouble for something so mundane? Recently, I have been writing articles on Viewshound, which ONLY gives me the choice to sign in through Facebook. I really dislike this, but I have no choice as part of my revenue steam somewhat relies on services like Viewshound. I worry that more and more companies are going to go this route. Where it really bothers me is that my workplace has put Facebook off limits, so I have difficulty connecting to a lot of other services I use on a daily basis because I have to sign onto Facebook FIRST in order to use them. Sure, I could be a good soldier and not goof off during the day, but this isn't about being an employee who has no free time at work but about some of the complications for those of us who do have some free time at work.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
If that were true, then they could just use OpenID to accomplish the same goal.
Many sites that use OpenID for logins make it easy by providing pre-configured FaceBook, Google, and Yahoo buttons along with an 'Other' button for those who want to provide their own OpenID URL. For example, StackExchange sites provide five buttons and a more link on their login page. This makes it trivially easy for most people, possible for most of the rest and provides alternatives for geeks and contrarians.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
<tinfoilhat>
In a year, 10% of the sites on the web will have no such thing as a "sign in". Facebook will provide your identity and "login" information as a "service" with slight monetary cuts to those who use it as an encouragement.
</tinfoilhat>