My Premium subscription happened to end the day of Dolly Parton's passing, as I was trying to revisit her discography. No issue, I thought, as I'll just get another gift card -- this method is the only reason I ever got into Premium at all in the first place. Alas, this is how I've discovered that gift cards have been officially discontinued.
I never post on things like this. But like me, I fear a lot of people are probably in the middle of their gift card subscription still, and haven't even realized there had been a change. I think a subscription service as widely used as Spotify, especially given that it doesn't pay artists as much as other platforms, suddenly forcing its users to put a card on file during one of our worst online security periods in recent history is a shocking decision. We're like two mega-lobbyist data breaches away from making 3FA a thing, for crying out loud lol.
This obviously isn't the fault of any individual employees who are relegated to moderating and replying in this forum, but it is still worth making a stink because otherwise . I can think of two other services off the top of my head that are not only cheaper, but provide gift card options and even have functionality to transfer your Spotify library into their platform's library directly. I will not be naming them here, in order to keep to community guidelines, and I am an advocate for people more than I am for corporations.
Majorly bad move from Spotify. It's insulting to the intelligence of its consumers to think that it isn't incredibly transparent how this decision was made of nothing but corporate greed. They want to be able to force users to abide by price hikes as soon as they are available, rather than let them have a couple extra months of a barely-cheaper membership because a gift card happened to overlap with the timing of a membership cost increase.
Now, for the "help - subscriptions" of it all. While I know that the department heading these forums is not responsible for such an insanely poor decision, I urge its moderators and staff to help and convey how despised this decision is to their higher-ups lol. This is the "technical support"/"help" that is needed -- please advocate for the customers you are being actively paid (even though it's not enough) to care about. I already know eight people who have ended their subscription in the last two weeks alone just because the ability to redeem gift cards has been removed.
