The bigger you get, the harder people try to do naughty things on your platform. Spotify certainly understands that: having whacked one set of moles scamming royalties with their own tracks and a warehouse full of 24-7 streaming accounts (aka the ‘Bulgarian scam’), the company now appears to be cracking down on people using modified apps to access its premium tier without paying.
TorrentFreak reported that a number of Spotify’s Android users have been emailed by the company saying that “We detected abnormal activity on the app you are using so we have disabled it… To access your Spotify account, simply uninstall any unauthorised or modified version of Spotify and download and install the Spotify app from the official Google Play Store”.
Spotify is reserving the right to suspend or terminate the accounts of people who continue using the mods to go premium for free. More moles whacked, but there’ll be more to wave a hammer at soon, no doubt.
TorrentFreak had a good day with Spotify news, as the first western site to pick up on a Swedish story about early employee Ludvig Strigeus, and the revelation that (seemingly) in order to hire him in 2006, Spotify acquired his uTorrent BitTorrent client, before selling it on to BitTorrent (the company) a few months later.
Spotify’s early use of P2P technology to deliver music-streams is no secret, but you can imagine how the labels licensing it in the early days might have responded to the news that it actually owned a torrent client.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…