[beefman]

> What's fascinating to me is the length people go to in order to justify freeloading.

I agree. For the past two decades, companies have privatized immense swaths of the digital commons and paid nothing for it, freeloading on the work of the countless public institutions and hobbyists who both created it, and created the culture which attracted billions of "users" to it.

With Spotify it is even worse. They have taken music, a prehistoric participatory artform and characteristic behavior of our species, and are trying to gamify it into a product that is no longer just music and which they own.

For the record I am a musician, and I'm pleasantly well-off so I have a paid Spotify subscription though I rarely use it. I held out until mid-2018, and didn't listen to even a single track on the service before then. Not that there is the slightest moral issue with using an adblocker while consuming broadcasts that contain ads, which I also do.