[lich_king]

We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads.

Ad-free paid services were a brief aberration, essentially a bait-and-switch: "see how much nicer we are from the old-school competitors". Now that the competitors are gone, Netflix is doing ads, Amazon is doing ads... why wouldn't Spotify?

I hate it, but the reality is that we groan on online forums but don't actually leave.

[jbb67]

It's very much easier to ignore ads in a newspaper. It's not so easy when you are forced to listen to them before the thing you paid for. It's not the same.

[happytoexplain]

"But you don't leave" is an excuse the human-hating producers tell themselves. But it's normal for consumers to be protected from the petty misery of natural market forces by legislation. We have enacted many such controls.

[JumpCrisscross]

> We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads

To be fair, ad-free options for each of these later emerged. I pay up for them.

[vpribish]

maybe you did, but I did not. my attention is valuable to me and I do not pay people to waste it. i had tapes, CDs, mp3s, and paid spotify. this is a well-proven market.