Following a noyb complaint and litigation over inactivity, the Swedish Data Protection Authoirty (IMY) has issued a fine of about € 5 million against Spotify.
What alternatives are there to spotify? Ive been using them years, I need to change! The fucking ads on podcasts are awful, I pay not to have ads & then they pull this shit!
For podcasts? Any open podcast app (read not Apple Podcasts). Podcasts are built on an old as fuck tech (RSS) and making an app to play them is stupid simple and there are many great ones. I use pocket casts on my iPhone mostly.
I have a rule that any app must let me export my podcasts and listen history so that I can move it to a different app. Neither Apple nor Spotify do this and I had to run a third party script on my MacBook to get some of my Apple podcast data.
Music is a little trickier due to the anti competitive flywheel that is music licensing but band camp and deezer are better than Spotify, Apple, and Amazon