I watched a Warframe (game) YouTube video on the Steam integrated browser, without beeing connected to my account and Holly s* it was horrible.
In a 14 minutes video, I got 5 ads. 1 (or more skippable once) at the beginning, 1 during the first half of the video, 2 during the second half, and 1 at the end.
All were skippable after 5 sec.
2 were close together at about 1 min interval during the second half of the video.
But that is not the only issue. 4 of those ads (not the last one at the end), were Israeli hate/war anti-hamas propaganda.
I consider these ads horrible and they should not be allowed in my opinion.
Ads are the reason I stopped listening to regular FM radio. I used to live in a more rural town and it was at least half an hour to get to any city I would have to go to for more than basic groceries. Once when I was coming back somewhere that takes a whole hour drive to get home, I heard nothing but commercials the entire drive. Not one fucking song (aside from ad jingles) for a whole fucking hour. Ridiculous.
I switched to Sirius. And it was great.... Until they got bought/merged with XM. Now they have a monopoly on satellite radio, they immediately cut features and jacked up prices. They also started playing ads. So I cancelled that.
I've been using Spotify Premium ever since. It started off pretty great; they've recently been cutting back features and jacking up the price tho. So I may end up cancelling Spotify, too, if shit keeps trending downhill. Especially if they put ads in the premium service I pay for specifically to not have ads.
I've been adding music to my mp3 collection since Napster got started. It feels old fashioned now but I have yet to see a reason to use an alternative method.
I actually have a lifetime subscription to SiriusXM. So I pay nothing, and I still don't listen to that shit.
Hearing new music is why I like Spotify. Sure, there are ways to find new music without streaming, but it takes actual effort, where Spotify can just make it happen.
I do have a little 1TB drive I got for 50 bucks on sale. It works great. The car software not so much. It picks up right where I left off in a song when I turned the car off but when the track finishes it skips to the first song of the next album then begins to play normally. Never had that issue with a CD player.
Idk I pay for Spotify family premium and it's only gone up $1 since their launch in 2011... I think that's pretty good. Now if it becomes and annual thing then fuck'em.
If you ever give up on spotify, ViMusic is an FOSS app on F-Droid that is compatible with androod auto (you have to enable developer options first for 3rd party apps but it is fairly easy and quick to do)
For me it was TV. I stopped watching TV when I became aware of the amount of ads for cars. There's at least one ad for a car in every "commercial break". So I just stopped about 15 years ago.
I filled the entertainment gap with internet and lately I've been using YouTube a lot. However it's also becoming annoying with the sponsors inside the videos as well. I was not using SponsorBlock before but I installed it a few days ago.
If I'm ever forced to watch the awful ads on YouTube, I'll quit too. My life is just gonna be better for it.