"Sponsored recommendations": I pay for Spotify Premium, and yet somehow I'm still the product?
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!? 😑
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Unpopular opinion - in Spotify (and Spotify ONLY) I actually like that it does this. I like discovering new music and Spotify seems to have really good recommendations sometimes. Sure they collect a lot of listening data - but how else could they give good recommendations if they don't know what you like?
I agree with you, but you may be missing the point - this recommendation is sponsored, so likely it wouldn't have been recommended unless the artist paid.
It seems relatively harmless as long as they don't overdo it though. The only incentive for someone to pay for this is that that you might like their music and will listen to it more in the future, which would be a win for you as well.
Maybe it also allows smaller artists to gain momentum without only depending on the magic recommendation algorithm.
Thats how all advertisements started. Small, not overdone. Then people became okay with paying and receiving ads. So they slowly increase the amount until you have what cable has become.
Most ads are terrible because they are annoying and advertise bad products. I think that's less likely to be a problem here because your music is the ad, if it is annoying and bad you will simply stop listening and they lose money on the ad.
If it would be ads for podcasts for example, it would be much much worse for me.
If Spotify cared about smaller artists they wouldn't pay them the least.
If Spotify cared about artist they would pay any of them even remotely fair!
Of course they don't care about small artists. That's my point, if you pay for ads you have an option to be less dependent on the platform to make you famous by paying for it. Simply waiting for people to find your music is unlikely to be succesful.
I still don't want to see ads. One of many reasons I don't use spotify.
The recommendations will likely become worse over time, because they want you to listen to whatever makes them the most money and that might not be the same stuff you want to listen to. The same happened to tiktok recommendations and youtube subscriptions (people stopped getting notifications on creators they subscribed to).
Without this feature, I wouldn't have known that Yeah Yeah Yeahs and PJ Harvey released new albums. So I'm torn. On the one hand, I'm happy artists I already love can still reach me; on the other hand, I hate that smaller artists I don't know about yet still have to pay to play
It's the least offensive type of advertising I see day to day. I couldn't care less how my listening data is shared, and I don't understand the zero tolerance some people have for adverts - it's not all bad.
If they ramp up the adverts, people will vote with their feet.