[probably_wrong]

If only it were the ads... I accidentally let my subscription lapse and the experience was so bad that it convinced me not to renew and leave the service altogether.

I mean yes, you get ads, but also your playlists get added random songs (which are pretty bad for my music), they play in shuffle only, and you can only skip a small number of songs per hour, turning the service into a radio you can sometimes fast-forward. I also had to reinstall the app because downgrading to free got it stuck - it wouldn't let me play my offline songs but it also wouldn't show me anything else. And for well over a year the only way to pay with a gift card on Android was exploiting a mild privilege escalation bug.

I imagine that there's someone at Spotify whose job is to identify how annoying your product can be before the number of lost ad plays surpasses the income from paid users, and I imagine their free tier is as close to that as possible. But that's a risky play considering they are not the only game in town.

[rchaud]

Spotify are pioneers in brazenly enshittifying free tiers to bully users into paying for Premium.

I remember them pausing ads when they detected I turned the computer volume down or muted it, and resumed the ad when I turned it back up. This was in 2015 or so.