Free Account

[wishface]

I'm afraid your free account completely dissuades me from subscribing. Any attempt to manipulate the customer in such a way shows so little respect that I cannot trust that the full service won't be equally poor. Why do you include advertising and then limit the customer to a feeble ten hour montly limit? Both functions work against each other. If you can't listen often then you generate too little in terms of ad revenue, so have one or the other. The ten hour limit doesn't work properly either. For example, I ran the programme this morning having exceeded my limit for June (it's now the 1st of July for those that don't know) and it had reset. After listening to about one album's worth of music I have again reached the ten hour limit. How can that make sense? If you can't get your system to work for free customers I simply cannot trust it will work if I pay. This is such blatant money grubbing. Your organisation system is dreadful. Song after song, album after album is categorised under the wrong artist. This is just basic functionality for this kind of service and you have failed. It has been like this for years and you have failed to rectify this. That demonstrates to me that you are lazy. Not only that but the five plays of a given song limit is just utterly stupid. If I have to listen to ads AND have a ten hour limit, why on earth further restrict my access? You aren't giving me a free ride, I am generating ad revenue for you. Finally, and with respect to those ads, noone likes ads, that's fine, but when you plaster ad images all over your browser and make it impossible to remove them, despite clicking, scrolling or doing anything, then you have a problem. You have made the browser completely dysfunctional and user friendly in this way, to say nothing of the stupid STUPID idea to have the ads pop up in the sidebar forcing the main window that I'm looking at to automatically resize itself just to accomodate the advert. In conclusion, your service is amateurish and grotesequely overpriced for nothing more than streaming. If I pay £10 (which is the only way to get the full bit rate, for some bizarre reason) a month and I can't keep any of the songs I'm listening to, then I'm losing money and getting nothing. That's a terrible service to sign up for in my opinion. thank you.

[licenced]

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@wishface wrote:
I'm afraid your free account completely dissuades me from subscribing. Any attempt to manipulate the customer in such a way shows so little respect that I cannot trust that the full service won't be equally poor. Why do you include advertising and then limit the customer to a feeble ten hour montly limit? <snip>

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You wall wall of text dissuades me from reading it all, so apologies if there are more points further down ...

The adverts are there for revenue - without them there would be no free service at all.

The 10 hour limit is there because that's the only way Spotify could get the dinosaur rights-holders to agree to license the music. The ten hours is split into 2.5 a week so that's why you might have hit the limit so quickly already this week.

Also, the five track play limit is also at the behest of the rights-holders.

It's the rights-holders that still (STILL!!) haven't figured out how best to get their music out there in the borderless internet age.

[wishface]

That wall of text is certainly not what I posted. So there's another problem: this forum ignores traditional formatting and paragraph breaks. I shouldn't have to double enter paragraph breaks to have it show up clearly. Whatever the reasons (and 2.5 a week is not the same thing as advertising 10 hours a month), the service for me is poor. The browser is unable to process advertising effectively and most of the ads come from Spotify; three in a row all telling me how great it is to subscribe because i don't get advertising. That's a total lack of respect.

[Stupify]

The reason you keep getting ads for premium subscriptions is because nobody is advertising in your country. That's understandable considering the 5 play limit in your country. Spotify Free is completely worthless in the UK with the 5 play limit which means only subscribers are using Spotify in the first place -> nobody wants to advertise for zero listeners.

[wishface]

I can tolerate ads, but they are implemented poorly. As i said the policies are contradictory.