Richard Stallman's personal site.

https://stallman.org

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Out, out, damned Spotify!

Spotify is a music-screaming online dis-service. Those are generally unjust, and Spotify has particular injustices of its own. Both general injustices and the ones are described below.

If you have the strength of will to reject streaming dis-services, you can proudly say,

Any song I listen to,
I can share a copy too.

If someone chides you by saying that sharing is illegal, you can respond with, "The music companies have bought the law, but they can't make sharing wrong."

Can you sugggest other sharing slogans?

Any system of publication that is based on discouraging or impeding people from keeping their own copies, and making and sharing copies, is a scheme to divide people, and thereby subjugate them. Spotify is one such.

Spotify requires its useds to run nonfree client software. Nonfree programs are is always unjust because they deny essential freedoms to whoever runs them.

Nonfree software tends to have malicious features; one malicious feature in the Spotify client software is Digital Restrictions Management, or "DRM" for short; DRM blocks Spotify's useds from sharing copies.

Spotify keeps track of what each used listsns to, and it has so much market power that it can impose increased surveillance on its useds by threatening to cut them off.

Spotify flaunts how it tracks what each used listens to, and invites useds to boast about how much Spotify knows about them. This devious scheme operates at an emotional level which most of the useds don't recognize as manipulation.

If you can't yet stop Spotify from using you, at least stop yourself from promoting it.

Spotify manipulates songs' popularity in various ways that are the moral equivalent of payola. This article shows the twisted ways that Spotify presents snooping as a way to serve useds better — not that it gives useds any choice about the snooping.

It does similar things to musicians. Spotify collects money in the name of the musicians, and imposes those injustices in their name too, but pays them some of that money only if they reach a fairly high level of popularity. In addition, Spotify invites musicians to compete for publicity by cutting their tiny share of the company's income.

Spotify can tell whether useds are happy or sad, based on what they listen to. It can use that data to manipulate them. The data will sooner or later be combined with other personal data, to control people according to the corporate will.

To protect yourself from maltreatment, do as I do: get an actual copy of the song, store it on your local hard disk, and listen to it with free software. Then no company will know what you are listening to.

A CD is a fine way to get a copy of a song. I have no reluctance about buying them, when I find interesting music in stores where I can pay with cash.

Out, out, damned Spotify!