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!? 😑

  • MetalAirship@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • jpeps@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • akulium@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • akulium@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            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.

          • akulium@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            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.

    • Chetzemoka@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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

    • Monkeytennis@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • traveler@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      The entire point of Spotify being so popular. The algorithm learns what you like to listen and presents you with new music of the genre you probably were unaware about. This ad is just one more way of they doing that (but now artists who pay the ad can push it faster).

        • akulium@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          If there is any company that can do personalized ads for music then it is Spotify. It’s what they are best at, why would they skip that opportunity?

        • traveler@lemdro.id
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          1 year ago

          It’s both, it’s an ad plus a since you like X, try Y.

          One thing very harmful that may come from this, is that they can use this system as well in the auto-play feature, so artists who pay more to Spotify will be auto-played more when you’re listening to music.

          Afaik is not happening yet, but it will.