I have a few things to say to Spotify.
I've recently tried to get student premium service on my account. "Recently" meaning I've been trying for the past few weeks. At first I figured it might just be that the system hadn't picked me up as enrolled in my respective college yet, but of course, I checked again and they still hadn't weeks later - so it was time to submit "documents". First of all, I despise the fact that Spotify expects us to just trust that this random all-knowing company, "SheerID", is guaranteed to know that we're enrolled in a certain college. There are tons of college students out there. How are they supposed to know? I don't want to send my personal information to this company I'd never heard of before, but I had to today. And of course they rejected it. I'm an incoming freshman with no ID and no class schedule yet, but I'm enrolled, so it's not my fault your program didn't detect it. I was verified by UniDays, who had me log into my school portal as their form of verification. It was extremely efficient and quick - why can't Spotify be like that? After ages of arguing and sending more and more documents to try and find something that would work, they finally approved me.
And - of course - what happens next? My card is turned down.
So, having reached an impatient state after the last lovely experience I had with this verification service, I looked for a phone number to contact Spotify, only to find that there was no phone number. So I sent an email, expecting a speedy answer (because at least SheerID answered very quickly and got this done for me ASAP). It's been several hours and still no reply. I failed to mention at the beginning of this article that I'm leaving on a flight at the wee hours of the morning tomorrow, so I wanted my premium pretty urgently so that I could have something to do on my 5 hour flight. But no. I'm still here, with 4 pending charges to my credit card for premium services that I do not have, and probably the worst attitude that Spotify is going to have to deal with as soon as I land tomorrow, because that's most likely when they will have *finally* answered my email.
I highly recommend Spotify gets a phone line. It will improve the quality of your customer service tenfold, because email takes too long to answer. You can't help people as well over email as you can over the phone. It's just not possible. You also can't hide from angry customers behind a computer screen. If someone needs help troubleshooting a problem, most of the time they don't want to wait.
I want my money back and some sort of compensation, because I'm sick of what I've had to deal with today. I've been forced out of my comfort zone by sending personal documents with my private information on them just so that I could get a reasonable price to listen to music. Not to mention I'm not even allowed to do those 3 months for 99c promotions either because I've already done it once (which you failed to mention is a condition in your advertisements for it, thanks for getting our hopes up and letting me down when I go to pay). I'm totally willing to give my money but apparently no one at Spotify wants it because every time I go to pay, something goes wrong. I hope someone addresses this problem here faster than my email, because I'm waiting (im)patiently for any sort of response from someone who can help me with this awful experience.
TL;DR: I want my student Spotify price and I want my money back.
