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Spotify Is Cracking Down On Users Pirating Premium-Like Service (torrentfreak.com)
People who access Spotify using hacked apps that remove some of the restrictions placed on free accounts are receiving warning emails from the company. Noting that "abnormal activity" has been observed from the user's software, Spotify warns that future breaches could result in suspension or even termination of a user's account. TorrentFreak reports: "We detected abnormal activity on the app you are using so we have disabled it. Don't worry -- your Spotify account is safe," the email from Spotify reads. "To access your Spotify account, simply uninstall any unauthorized or modified version of Spotify and download and install the Spotify app from the official Google Play Store. If you need more help, please see our support article on Reinstalling Spotify." While the email signs off with a note thanking the recipient for being a Spotify user, there is also a warning. "If we detect repeated use of unauthorized apps in violation of our terms, we reserve all rights, including suspending or terminating your account," Spotify writes.
So just put a client cert in the official Spotify app...?
I think this will just make people more emboldened because it's rather toothless. If you're going to threaten people, you need to show them you really mean business. I suggest 21 straight plays of "What's New Pussycat" to get the point across.
... to revoke a free account of which there is an infinite supply? Is this like Google closing the GMail account I am using to spam you, and making me open another one?
Unless they were to go through the hassle of attempting to litigate all these free users, what exactly are they going to do? Ban them? They'll just create another free account with a junk email.
Read this. It was written almost 20 years ago. There have been no technological developments since that alter the main thesis of the essay, nor will there be. Further, this has been known to every ethical software engineer for at least as long ("ethical" in this case meaning, "Will not lie to your face about what is technically feasible").
Anyone on your engineering staff claiming not to be aware of these truths should be dismissed immediately.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I don't mind the ads, but being unable to fast forward a song or have unlimited skips in Android was really annoying. If i could have done that I'd have not used the patch and they'd have got their ad revenue.
I just don't listen to enough music to justify the £10/month. Decisions.
"The problem is that Jane controls her computer."
Here is where the war is currently. Add in phones and tablets and other walled off closed ecosystems and you can see this is a bad road where freedom doesn't exist.
Suspension or even termination of an account to a free service? The horrors!
Exactly. The end of the road we are on is only allowing closed "secure" devices to access the Internet. We are almost there. It just takes the major ISPs to get on board. After all, think of the children and terrorists and terrorist children!
Yet, we must admit that making piracy harder than buying the service have been an immensely successful strategy :)
They never needed perfect security, you could always just record the music from the speakers anyways.
We don't live in the world where we have to download mp3s anymore, it's much easier to stream legitimately from spotify than it is to pirate. Now, if only we could get rid of the DRM completely.
why would anybody care if you ban it?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
They even did a front page web design.
I don't get to pick the exact songs, but I haven't gone looking for a station and not found something to listen to. All the way to standup comedy and talk radio.
It works on my phone, browser, Foobar2000, Winamp. If I want to time shift it or make a playlist for an old MP3 player there's StationRipper.
I'm guessing they're blocking ads? Sorry if this was mentioned somewhere that I overlooked.
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
Spotify has managed to make a deal with the music industry, but there are caveats on that deal that restrict how music is downloaded. If the music industry gets wind that Spotify has become a conduit for pirating music, it could see them lose those deals and the rights to stream music and basically kill their business entirely.
Who knows why but the value of streaming music isn't considered as valuable as a service which allows download and ownership. Spotify allows download of offline copies of music but it is limited to 3,333 songs which is a pretty artificial and completely arbitrary limit.
Anyhow, I can see the day coming when this notion of streamed vs downloaded music/video is considered quite antiquated. What difference does it make to the listening/viewing experience if content is streamed vs played off local storage?
If you have a connection to the internet answer is absolutely none!
Except of course when you're paying internet fees for the data downloaded. The days of that being a concern for most people out there are fast drawing to a close, with the cost of internet access gong down and data limits going way up.
Personally, I don't actually have any desire to "own" music when it is available to me on demand. I spend 95% of my time listening to new music, off spotify, soundcloud etc.. Music has to be pretty exceptional for me to listen to it multiple times. So I have no interest in Spotify hacks to download and stockpile music that I'll probably never listen to again.
Except all this DRM bollocks makes piracy a better experience for any mildly competent user.
Since this relies on streaming rather than local content (unless you're paying), it's a lot easier than that. Just don't trust the client. There's no reason to. Let it authenticate and then let the server decide what's allowed, not the client.
Only apps can app apps, and these appers are using appy app apps, NOT LUDDITE software!
Apps!
So they're going to cancel my free account? Whoopdie do... Go right ahead and about 30 seconds or less after that - guess what I have?
Morons running these places. Absolute morons.
I'm not sure that's true.
Google play and Spotify offered me a better experience than a personal library and a sub Sonic server.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Hence their right to suspend the accounts.
You invite someone over for dinner and they steal your cutlery and napkins.... what do you do? Stop having people over for dinner?
As with any service, there are always going to be people who abuse it. And it's not just Spotify that suffers, its the artists that suffer the consequence of their material being pirated.
Despite having payouts to artists as low as 0.006c per play Spotify is still running big losses. At the other end of the line artists complain about Spotify's pay out rate. It's strange how many people can be fans of a band, love their music, love the band, and then take actions that scr3w them over.
Spotify has a vast amount of music to listen to from all sorts of genres from all round the world, and they give people access to this amazing service for free at the cost of listening to an ad or two. But that's not free enough for some people!
What if I file a Notice Of Intent to pay for an account instead?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/02/why_cant_the_spotify_billionaires_find_ed_sheeran_to_pay_him/
I can't even think of a metaphor for it. Pirates dislike pirates pirating what pirates pirated.
I think that's what Spotify did. They observed the behavior of free users and saw some strange behavior. They investigated and found the hacked apps would do that behavior, so they simply disabled the apps that showed that odd behavior.
Spotify made a mistake that allowed people on the free plan to get premium features using unofficial apps. They close the loophole server side and disabled the service if they detect the app trying to access the premium features for free.
Slashdot should seriously consider IP-banning these anonymous off-topic trolls, maybe even shadow-ban them. They post deliberately instigating off-topic drivel (e.g. pro or anti Trump) at the beginning to hijack threads. They are of no use to anyone.
Since this relies on streaming rather than local content (unless you're paying), it's a lot easier than that. Just don't trust the client. There's no reason to. Let it authenticate and then let the server decide what's allowed, not the client.
This. To my knowledge, the difference between premium and free is commercials and the audio quality. You can easily control the audio quality from the server, and while you can't make sure that the listener listens to the commercial, you can easily make sure that no songs will be played for as long as the commercial should be playing.
I don't much like ads but in streaming media it's really easy to get them to the client. I know I shouldn't give them ideas, but it's honestly confusing to me how it's even possible to block video ads on Youtube.
"It's strange how many people can be fans of a band, love their music, love the band, and then take actions that scr3w them over."
It reminds me of how many people also say something like "(Band) is my favorite band ever!!!!!" - and then they only like 1-2 of the 30+ songs by the band. And can't even recognize any other songs.
I remember when Napster was still the main easy way to get mp3s, people would justify downloading the music they wanted with "Well every CD comes with a ton of songs I don't want to listen to and don't like." But yet it'd still be their "favorite band."
You can easily control the audio quality from the server, and while you can't make sure that the listener listens to the commercial, you can easily make sure that no songs will be played for as long as the commercial should be playing.
Only sometimes. Music files are cached and stored on the users' machines.
Yes, I guess that if you buy one month of premium and then make sure to cache all the music you want to listen to, you could hack the client to listen for free forever after that. But you could not expand your high-quality library without going premium again. And you could not listen to new music at all without running the risk of having to either listen to a commercial, or listening to nothing for like 20 seconds.
...installing some cracked version of Spotify when you can just as easily install a legitimate torrent client on your phone and download free music that doesn't take additional bandwidth through streaming? You're already dealing in potential malware, and now the company you're piggybacking is working towards pushing you off, might as well drop the pretenses and just grab the raw files from other sources.
If you're confused how it's possible to block video ads on YouTube, then you truly haven't figured out anything about how ads are served on any site. YouTube does it the same way as everyone else.
YouTube videos are stored in one place (logically, not physically). Ads shown by YouTube are stored in another place. YouTube doesn't stream jack shit. It's not coming over the pipe in real-time. It's just a "play while you download" arrangement, with a side order of "delete the downloaded data once you're done with it". Ads are a separate download and are merged into the client-side player software at times that the software deems appropriate. By blocking the ad video data, by intercepting the request and returning null data, you give the software no choice but to either handle the null data gracefully or simply stop working altogether. The first option allows ad blockers to "win". The second option stirs up a shit-storm every time your CDN hiccups. The smart business decision here is to allow the minority of freeloaders to freeload and, instead, prevent problems for the 90% case. That's the one YouTube has made.
You invite someone over for dinner and they steal your cutlery and napkins.... what do you do?
The weird thing with digital media and where this metaphor breaks down, is that even if that someone stole your silver cutlery and silk napkins, next time you open the drawers of your kitchen, they'll be magically full again, and you can still invite someone else on your table with proper silverware.
The closest thing would be inviting someone for a private view of a master's painting in your living room. But the guy take a polaroid, so he can look at it whenever he wants (shitty quality of the analog compared to what digital media replication allows aside).
The main problem is that we still apply an absolutely out of date method to pay artists for creations - making the duplication the paying step, even if nowadays it's actually the simplest and cheapest step of the process.
The industry solution is to try to invent some magical snake oil that suddenly makes Polaroid not work in the presence of work of art.. Which is cryptographically impossible to achieve when the usual "Alice" and "Eve" are actually the same person.
The actually potentially successful solution would be trying to find better ways to pay artists to keep creating, while not taxing the simplest part. Patronage and crowdfunding seem to be potential parts of the solution.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Here is where the war is currently. Add in phones and tablets and other walled off closed ecosystems and you can see this is a bad road where freedom doesn't exist.
If data is kept locked on the corporation's cloud, do you even need the phone and tablet ?
You can just keep the software as web app, and have the users keep paying a recurring fee if they want to have the privilege of keeping to work with the data they left locked. (see Software as a Service, "Microsoft Office Online", etc.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Remember: they need you more than you need them.
The contents of this message have been doubly encrypted by ROT13
Maybe I missed something, but are they going against this kind of blocking (read: blocking intrusive ads with which they effectively decided to hamper their free-service experience)?
I wonder if they are telling the recipients of that email that they have about as much chance of litigation against individual consumers as newspapers and Google adsense have had...
And I thought this "you make it public (ads or not), it's free" argument was settled. Spotify is trying to manipulate users to its business model, instead of moulding itself to the world it exists in... A lot like the MPAA, RIAA or Springer/Sciencedirect hiring DMCA trolls for a problem they will never solve. And what's worse, they're doing so at the tone of "we already make so much money but we'll go the full stretch just to protect our poor investors and our paying customers' honour". Good God...
Lol. IP ban. That's so cute.
And then cue in companies complaining how they now need much more CPU in their servers, because instead of blindly serving files in the clear, they need to secure traffic with HTTPS and check authorization to send data.
And complaining how it costs more bandwidth because every single piece of data must be sent again over internet and can't be cached due to access control.
And how some people will be capturing and storing the streams locally any-way.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'd use you and love you if you didn't make me turn on HDCP on the PS4.
That changes even one word of the lyrics.
We don't live in the world where we have to download mp3s anymore, it's much easier to stream legitimately from spotify than it is to pirate. Now, if only we could get rid of the DRM completely.
If you are legitimately using Spotify for streaming music, or even offline use, why does it matter if the service has DRM or not? Other than general principles of opposing DRM in the first place. I've used Spotify for years and never been inconvenienced by the DRM.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Library is limited to 10,000 songs. Not a download limit - just the number of items (tracks + albums) that can be saved to the list that is the "Your Library" section.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Increase-maximum-songs-allowed-in-quot-Your-Music-quot/idi-p/733759
We don't live in the world where we have to download mp3s anymore, it's much easier to stream legitimately from spotify than it is to pirate. Now, if only we could get rid of the DRM completely.
And yet people are still too tight to fork out a few dollars a month and instead try to get around the restrictions of the free offering to get the premium offering for no cost.
Idiot
Dear Spotify,
Challenge accepted. Good luck. Stay tuned. We will...
I am actually surprised some people still care about Spotify. It's on its last breath anyway. https://droidinformer.org/Stor... To hell with it, I say.