EDIT: The only reason why I still had it at this point was because I could use it with other apps. However, now that my Spotify Subscription is cancelled, it doesn’t work with anything. It’s mildly infuriating because today, I can’t still use it with other apps like I was able to yesterday.
Please don’t make the same mistake I made. No one should buy this.
The system working as intended. Now you’re “locked in”.
Something tells me they just didn’t realize someone would buy a Spotify car play without already having a subscription.
I mean really, you’re too cheap for 9.99/m but you’ll drop 100 bucks for something your phone already does?
Seems like OP is just in a very unique situation that Spotify didn’t expect anyone to be in.
They say never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence. But with a corporations I’m pretty sure its the other way around.
I’d usually agree but this product seems exclusively intended for someone who’s heavily into Spotify, and the marketing clearly states you need a subscription.
I mean, on all the purchase advertisements they said you must have Spotify premium to use this.
They subsidized the price the device based on the expected return from convincing people to keep their subscriptions. Since it supports other clients they probably also have to manage software updates.
Spotify is a bag of dicks for a lot of other reasons but this really doesn’t seem to be one of them.
9.99/m is 119.88/y and it doesn’t stop. Maybe OP thought that the purchase was a one time purchase, and I don’t really blame him, since why would the thing exist if phones with a subscription can already do that it does?
I don’t really blame him
He bought a piece of convenience tech designed for a specific piece of software, when said convenience tech is totally unnecessary to the function of that software, then got mad that he needed the software
I am shocked that everyone in this thread isn’t roasting this dude nonstop. He’s an idiot.
Doesn’t stop? You sign on the dotted line for a lifetime of payments? You can’t cancel your subscription?
since why would the thing exist if phones with a subscription can already do that it does?
That’s the exact logic that would lead someone with an ounce of intelligence to go “oh yeah, this product is a completely stupid piece of shit that’s marketed toward people with more money than brain cells.”
Did it say anywhere on the package that it gets you a lifetime subscription to Spotify? No. Does OP understand that Spotify works on a subscription model? Probably, Saas isnt fucking new.
This is the kind of boy-who-cried-wolf bullshit that keeps corporations from actually being held accountable, because people who want better worker’s rights and taxes on corporations look like idiots when lumped in with children like you who consider personal responsibility and thinking for yourself to be too scawy.
I cancelled my paid Spotify account because I can’t get them to stop fucking recommending Joe Rogan to me.
I’m moments away from canceling. Splash screens of some bullshit podcast or something I don’t want to see. Getting fed up.
Search for Github SpotDL And Navidrome
No need to sail them seas, but maybe still use a vpn, just on case. Fun fact i heard from a friend of a friend: Youtube starts rate limiting after 50,000 audio-only video downloads, until you have a new IP.
I have hundreds upon hundreds of songs in my Spotify music library. Downloading them one by one sounds like hell. And then I wouldn’t be discovering new music either.
leave em sail the seas or tidal for the same price you get better audio so win win in my book either way
Allegedly, YouTube Music is about to shove podcasts in our faces with a soon to come update.
I’m leaving YTM if they do that. I’ll go back to ☠️⚓⛵ and using locally available music.
If you have an android, just download blackplayer and use a YT link to mp3 site to get whatever music you want.
I’ve been pretty happy with YouTube music. I got legacied in due to Google Music shutting down and thought I would hate it, but I’ve had zero complaints. Plus, it comes with free YouTube Premium, so I haven’t seen an ad in years.
I have so many complaints, Google Play music was fine. It did exactly what I wanted it to.
YouTube music is like an alien looked at that app, and tried to recreate it exclusively by smashing it’s forehead against a keyboard until an app that started most of the time came out.
I would actually argue that Google Play Music was the best music streaming app that I’ve used. It was great being able to upload music from CDs of small local bands and have it right in there with the other streaming music.
Just today I had a hankering to listen to a specific song through my android auto, and instead of just being able to verbally ask the unit for that song, or even being able to search through the atrocity that is the YouTube Music interface on my head unit, I had to pull over, pull out my phone, search for the band, then click the uploads tab (because uploaded music does not show with the regular search results) and then click the song to get it to play.
YouTube music is like an alien looked at that app, and tried to recreate it exclusively by smashing it’s forehead against a keyboard until an app that started most of the time came out.
You think they that much care and attention into the app?
But seriously, yeah, I had pretty much the same experience -Google Play Music just worked beautifully, whereas YouTube Music was a steaming turd on Android. I gave up after six months and two phones and went to Deezer, never looked back
I would say the same myself. They don’t do the worst job for music discovery either which is important to me. Amazon Music drove me nuts constantly recommending Cage the Elephant and other well-known (profitable) artists instead of obscure music similar to my tastes.
Same. Honestly, I expected YTM to make things worse. That’s usually how those kinda things go. But it actually did get better for me. I jumped to Google Play Music because it had better selection than Spotify (at least back then). YTM kept that, but fixed the issues I was having with the desktop browser player sometimes getting stuck. And the more recent support for lyrics that are synced to the music is great.
Their queueing system sucks. All I want to do is queue up some songs but instead YTM fills my queue with tons of crap I’ve never listened to before because that’s how they make money. They put my manually queued songs at the END of the queue so I have to move them up 20+ spaces. There’s literally no way to do it other than creating a custom playlist every time I listen to music, and they intentionally made that take more clicks/taps than queuing. I don’t get how people are ok with the YTM app, it’s terrible.
I hate YTM and I hate that I can’t cancel it because they bundle it with YouTube premium, which my partner uses every day. Screw Google and they anti-consumer manipulative bs.
Their queueing system sucks. All I want to do is queue up some songs but instead YTM fills my queue with tons of crap I’ve never listened to before because that’s how they make money. They put my manually queued songs at the END of the queue so I have to move them up 20+ spaces. There’s literally no way to do it other than creating a custom playlist every time I listen to music, and they intentionally made that take more clicks/taps than queuing. I don’t get how people are ok with the YTM app, it’s terrible.
wrong.
- you can disable automatic queuing by hitting the ‘auto-play’ switch in UP NEXT
- you can queue songs by long-pressing and hitting ‘play next’ (which will put it in front of the queue) or ‘add to queue’ (which will put it in my the end
No but direct downloads are all the rage. Here are my two favorite sites for free music. Every track is available in either 320k MP3, or FLAC lossless. So they’re even better than Limewire ever was:
https://slavart.gamesdrive.net/tracks
https://free-mp3-download.net/ (FYI don’t use punctuation in your queries or it breaks the search on this one)
Not as the software it was, but frostwire is still kicking
EDIT: correction, frostwire is now a BitTorrent client
Looks like there are still Gnutella clients out there though
If you want a virus and to not be able to download anything, sure. https://fmhy.net/unsafesites#software--apps
Never had issues with that either tbh. I guess the algo just picked up on something for you. That’s annoying.
That’s really dissapointing, did Spotify seriously release a hardware device that expensive, and mandates a subscription to operate?
It’s a shame because it looks quite nice too, and is sadly guaranteed to be e-waste at some point
Are you kidding me? It’s been par for the course as far as car assessors go. Sirus radio was like 100 and still required a subscription. A lot of GPS were that price and most had subscriptions.
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted - enshittification as a viable consumer business model was pretty much proven in the auto space.
Just like they want to charge you to use the heated seats you’re paying the gas to lug around anyway
Just like they want to charge you to use the heated seats you’re paying the gas to lug around anyway
That’s not the same thing at all. As bad as e.g. Sirius or GPS subscription might be, at least with those the subscription is for ongoing access to new data being transmitted to you. In contrast, a subscription purely for the use of hardware already included in the car is literally theft.
Just because it’s percieved as normal doesn’t mean it’s something we should put up with though.
With GPS subscriptions (the ones I’m aware of anyway) they will still navigate you from A to B when you stop paying the subscription, you usually just miss out on traffic updates, map updates and other localized enhancements. If there are any that deny you navigation outside the subscription that’s plain scummy IMO.
I’m not familiar with Sirius Radio but from what I can see online, it’s a satellite radio subscription service that seems to bring new things to the table (like starting a radio station at the beginning of a last song etc). The hardware appears to actually serve a purpose, i.e. it’s the satellite receiver for the radio service subscription. I believe we could compare this to buying a Starlink dish for internet access, and paying the monthly subscription. The spotify device shown here is not a standalone device and is only fitted with bluetooth IIRC, requiring a phone for operation.
In comparison to Spotify, Sirius does not appear to have ever had a free plan - whereas Spotify does… I see is no reason why Spotify could not make their free plan usable on this device.
Edit: fix typo
The device is free to premium users. It’s a marketing device for the premium subscription.
The box clearly states that a premium subscription is required.
Those I don’t fault. Sirius has satellites to maintain and they don’t get ad revenue.
GPS makers, well making maps on that scale is very expensive. Not everyone can be google and give it away to end consumers by harvesting user data and selling ads to businessplaces.
Spotify though, fair enough to charge for the hardware but once bought should work with the ad-supported version of their product…
I think I got an Echo Auto for $25 (during the public tests). It doesn’t need any kind of a subscription to use as far as I’m aware. It only does streaming still, but there are Alexa skills that let you stream from your Plex or Jellyfin server.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2022/11/01/spotify-car-thing-root-achieved/
You can root it. Didn’t look too much into it but you might be able to do something with that.
Also failing that, get a short range radio transmitter. They’re cheap and the audio ain’t great but you can plug your phone in and get audio on your car.
I mean, it’s basically a cheap smartphone or computer tablet, with a lower resolution, but nice quality screen, and a giant volume spinner. $100 does not get you much at all in the phone and tablet space. I don’t think there’s much of any profit margin, if at all for it.
I just saw another comment mentioning it can be rooted: https://lemmy.world/comment/2904183
you can try this
https://github.com/williamtcastro/carthing-non-premium-spotify
the whole ui/dashboard is just a web app, so it’s pretty easy to “jailbreak” or modify
Why would you even buy this? Literally just buy a phone mount and use your phone. This thing was a textbook example of a useless product.
Seriously, what does this do that a phone doesn’t? Am I missing something? Even early Android/iOS devices could run Spotify in their time (although not always anymore). What does this do?
Whenever I’m driving, my phone is almost permanently mounted as a GPS. I also own the car thingy, it has very intuitive hardware buttons and a dial on top of being touch screen. This way I can leave my phone on the GPS screen and adjust Spotify controls on the car thingy without taking attention of the road.
The only real shitty thing I would argue is that you NEED Spotify premium not just to control your Spotify, but also to control youtube/mp3 player/ any other media that you would want to play through your phone.
very intuitive hardware buttons
Now there is an actually sensible product: A phone holder with nice hardware buttons, exposed to the phone as a USB keyboard.
