This is how I perceive Spotify. I can't sign up for it because I deleted my FB account. FB as the only option makes me think they must want to datamine me as hard as possible.
I don't really understand what Spotify is thinking with the FB-only login. I get that it's free advertising and data for them, but it seems like there's probably a very large percentage of potential users who are uncomfortable with spamming each one of their FB friends every time they listen to a song (not to mention "guilty pleasure songs" that people would be embarrassed to listen to knowing that everyone will see it).
Spotify and Facebook partnership pre-dated the ticker and timeline. I don't think that at the time they decided to work together, they knew how or if Timeline/Ticker posting would be perceived as spam (Facebook didn't even know that). Probably just seemed like a good opportunity to partner with Facebook to increase visibility and virality during their US launch.
I was under the impression that you could turn this off; and that the people who actually care whether they're spamming their friends or not would go to the trouble of doing so.
Ah, if that's true I didn't know. I think I sort of assumed that if it could be turned off, pretty much everyone would (and I've only ever seen technologically competent people posting these ticker stories), but I guess not.
> I think I sort of assumed that if it could be turned off, pretty much everyone would
There's no incentive for me, as a college derp, to turn it off - after all, it's not impacting my experience on Facebook. Sure, everyone else's feeds are annoying, but it's like a mix of the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons.
Not to mention, you can hide truly annoying feeds - but again, most people don't care.
My solution is no longer visiting Facebook. I keep my account because it's still the least inconvenient way to plan events.
You can choose not to grant Open Graph permissions to Spotify or revoke them at any point. Publish permissions are completely separate from authentication. Publishing can also be disabled from Spotify and there is also a private session mode that you can enable if you want to not publish one or two songs.
Disclaimer: FB engineer who uses Spotify all day every day.