Spotify Terminating Free User Accounts With Ad Blockers

The new Spotify update is a crackdown on free users who take advantage of third-party apps and workarounds to block ads. Apparently, the new rule immediately suspends the account upon detection of these ad-block users. Here’s what we know about this update.

According to Techspot, Spotify has updated their Terms of Service rules to deal with users who bypass the app’s free version ad breaks in between songs. To rid the free Spotify version of ads, these users would often have to rely on third-party apps to bypass the ads and make the app work similar to its paid subscription version. Both using and creating these bypass tools would get these users' accounts banned. We’ve yet to know if Spotify will IP block these music listeners.

Previously, the Terms of Use would send a warning to users upon their first offense. After the warning, users can access the app again after re-installing or upgrading to the paid version of Spotify. If the offense is repeated, Spotify would send a ban notification to their emails and take down the users' accounts. However, Spotify won’t play nice with these users anymore after the new terms are enforced in the app.

The new terms immediately ban these users upon detection. The strict crackdown could prevent revenue losses for Spotify. At the moment, most of Spotify’s revenue comes from their subscription fees and a few of it come from their ads. Moreover, Spotify ads on the free version are still mostly about promotion for their subscription version and rarely of any other product.

Nevertheless, the crackdown on these third-party app users not only protects their revenue, but also their overall security, just in case the third-party apps extend beyond app features, such as accessing user data and other important account details.

The new, strict terms of use will become active starting March 1. Free version users are heavily discouraged from trying out ways to bypass the ads through third-party app means as the ban will surely find them. We’ve yet to know what security measures the Spotify app will have next month.