I've paid for Spotify for a while, so its been some time since I've heard an ad. But from what I remember, if you put the volume below ~30%, the ad pauses.
Buy headphones with their own thumbwheel attenuator and/or mute button, or plug your corded headphones into an extension cord or dongle that has them.
Traditional broadcast radio gets zero feedback from most receivers. Spotify is already a step ahead of that by preventing users from avoiding ads just by changing the radio station, and I think that the clever tricks with the volume are really pushing it in terms of user hostility.
I pay to not get ads, so I'm not really motivated to explore avoiding them.
But if you try to advertise at me no matter what I do, or overestimate what I would pay, I will join in the arms race against your advertisers. I'll block the ads, and block the ad-blocker detectors, and block the ad-blocker-detector-blocker detectors. I'll crunch your cookies, and squash your pixel, and firewall your home-phoner.
Maybe I put a 30-minute buffering program on the audio stream that the music program is allowed to use, and tell that program to skip ahead during the ads. Maybe I also train another program to recognize the ads, and tell the first program exactly how far to skip ahead. Maybe I lock the music program in the matrix, and control all the data it tries to get from the system, to the point that it cannot ever say what reality truly is.
There's something to be said for just playing the ad audio without trying to ensure someone is listening, or identifying who it might be. After all, Spotify could be playing music to a cat in an otherwise empty house, with the mobile device quietly displaying "Now playing 'Meow Mix Theme - Metal Version' on device 'Bluetooth speaker'."
(If that song actually exists, I cannot attest to its quality, because I swear I thought I was making it up.)
Payments to artists are based on total listens, not who is paying or who you listen to. So your money goes to the artists listened to by others :(
They are also shockingly bad with snooping on you and sharing data.
Ads that come from third parties are open to exploitation and not properly vetted, not to mention may be jarring to your experience.
I was a paying customer for a long time but i dont like basically anything about how they work. I quit after the privacy policy got repeatedly worse and given that i was paying more than it cost to just buy all the music i listened to (when taken over years assuming youtube is as good when you are just showing someone a song not listening for quality). And they were still insisting on spying on me and keeping the data, wanting to know as much as possible about what i was doing! Even though i was paying for the service :(
And to top it all the money was going to effectively top playing radio artists :( direct purchase of flacs from the artist FTW. If you are going to pay for a service make it dropbox or something else more agnostic / flexible.
sometimes annoying UX can turn users away instead of leading the users to give them money.
They know the ads are annoying and can turn users away. So they nudge the users with one of those "hey, these ads suck don't they? pay us for an ad-free experience" during ad spots or in place of ad spots.
I don't think I've used another service that uses so many of their prime ad spots to try to advertise getting rid of ads.
This may also suggest that Spotify makes muchmuchmuch less than $10/user/month on ads. So much less that they can afford not to show paid ads in an ad spot if it'll lead to more paying users. Which I'd agree. Or maybe supply and demand kicks in and they just up their ads pricing as a result of showing less ads. But I don't think the ad-buying market can bear increases in ad pricing, otherwise facebook could just up their ads pricing instead of destroying the newsfeed with so many ads, which hurts user retention.
I've never had issues on Mac, Windows, or Linux with the operating system's mute stopping ad playback.
On a related note, Spotify's volume controls should never be touched, because no matter what you set the music volume to, ads will play at full volume. It's usually louder than the music anyway, but the damage to your ears can be minimized.
I haven't ever used spotify, so forgive my ignorance. How are they measuring the system volume from inside a webapp? Shouldn't that information not be visible to them?
It pauses it if you put the in-app volume too low. I think the desktop client also reacts to the system volume setting, but it's been a while since I had the free plan.
I have this issue with the NPR One web player on Windows7. When the laptop is muted and I press the physical button to unmute it, the mute light goes off, but the web player soft-mutes. Argh.
Why can’t the mute button just be a physical switch!?!?!?
You could try getting a 3.5mm stereo cable, cutting the end off and using that as your physical mute button. Not sure if that routes audio to the "headphones" at the software or firmware level, but anything reading volume levels would still see it set to whatever level the OS is at.
That was one of the annoyances that finally made me pay for the service. The other one was that they were constantly changing what the free plan allows you to do back then.
Traditional broadcast radio gets zero feedback from most receivers. Spotify is already a step ahead of that by preventing users from avoiding ads just by changing the radio station, and I think that the clever tricks with the volume are really pushing it in terms of user hostility.
I pay to not get ads, so I'm not really motivated to explore avoiding them.
But if you try to advertise at me no matter what I do, or overestimate what I would pay, I will join in the arms race against your advertisers. I'll block the ads, and block the ad-blocker detectors, and block the ad-blocker-detector-blocker detectors. I'll crunch your cookies, and squash your pixel, and firewall your home-phoner.
Maybe I put a 30-minute buffering program on the audio stream that the music program is allowed to use, and tell that program to skip ahead during the ads. Maybe I also train another program to recognize the ads, and tell the first program exactly how far to skip ahead. Maybe I lock the music program in the matrix, and control all the data it tries to get from the system, to the point that it cannot ever say what reality truly is.
There's something to be said for just playing the ad audio without trying to ensure someone is listening, or identifying who it might be. After all, Spotify could be playing music to a cat in an otherwise empty house, with the mobile device quietly displaying "Now playing 'Meow Mix Theme - Metal Version' on device 'Bluetooth speaker'."
(If that song actually exists, I cannot attest to its quality, because I swear I thought I was making it up.)