To tell Spotify “I’d use your service if you added an option where the ads didn’t give 3rd parties the ability to run JS on my system” is different from “I picked your current ad-supported option and then prevented the ads from running”.

Other services like twitch have done what you said and users are equally irate about ads they can't skip and are completely embedded.

Basically it sucks for all parties involved. But at the end of the day you have to monetize or die.

Also I feel a lot of users are voting that 2 coffees a month is too much for music. I'm an old so... but for most of my life music just came out of a box for free. Sure I didn't have much control over it. But when I use spotify I just or pandora or amazon I tend to just get a genre based station going and just let it roll. Just like radio. I don't have time to be futzing around with optimizing playlists and that, I literally just don't care about music very much. Hell one of my friends, when he wants to concentrate, just puts the same song on repeat all day long (8+ hours).

That used to cost: cost free, price of tape/cd ($16 / year way over priced), free(napster,piracy), free with ads (pandora)...

Hell I can't even stomach paying $12 / month to xm when I'm going to drive cross country with no coverage.

And "acceptable ads" policies of blockers could require those properties. They wouldn't even need a fixed whitelist or cooperate with specific companies for that, all they have to do is allow iframes with appropriate CSP rules. I.e. it's a vendor-agnostic approach.

I myself is skeptical about advertisements having future as such. In the age of the Internet, ads are the least useful method to discover product info.

The analogy for Internet ads today is like if modern cars were propelled by horses - an unviable arrangement. I know many online only companies making good money and spending literally zero on ads. The industry will eventually follow that path.

All true and all irrelevant to his point.

If no, then the loading of JavaScript isn't really the issue, isn't it?

In practice the second group is miniscule. There is zero incentive for companies to improve their practices and grow their market by targeting those people. Instead the only path to maximising profit is to increase the value they can get from people without ad blockers.

I find this rationale, while likely true for many readers on Hacker News, unlikely to generalize to overall population fo Spotify ad blockers.

What popular belief is this? The ready counterexample is the delivery of an ad to a vaccuum-tube TV in 1950.