Photo Credit: Bill Eccles
That Spotify outage last week you may have heard about? It was all a ploy to out pirates who use Spotify’s premium service without paying for it.
Reports last week that Spotify was down may have been severely overestimated. It seems that those affected were not legitimate users of Spotify’s premium service—and the outage may have been intentionally planned to catch those users in the act.
Reports of Spotify’s downtime actually started to surface around March 3, with more discussions popping up about the perceived issue last week. However, it became increasingly apparent that this wasn’t a global outage. And no evidence suggests that any Spotify subscribers were impacted.
Speculation points to an international Spotify campaign to make its platform inaccessible to users who were enjoying the streaming service’s “premium” ad-free experience without paying for it. The apps targeted appear to have been primarily Android versions either “modded” or “cracked” to allow for paid features to be used for free.
Google Trends search data, (which is available for periods of up to seven days before jumping to 30 days or more), shows a search for Spotify outages peaked last week. That’s higher than any other Spotify-related search in the last 90 days.
Users who pirate Spotify content are much more likely to employ a modded version of the official Spotify app—instead of a third-party app that pulls content (illegally) from Spotify’s servers. Some of these apps signal to Spotify that the user has a premium subscription by intercepting the platform’s requests to load user data and modifying the response.
When a user of a pirated Spotify instance goes online to see if others are experiencing the same outage, they’re effectively outing themselves as a pirate. That’s because the issue is only impacting cracked apps who modify responses between the app and Spotify’s servers. Searches of this nature that blew up over the past 90 days came primarily from Ukraine, Belarus, Italy, Poland, and Moldova, with France and the UK not far behind.
Whether Spotify can or will actually do anything with the data it may have gleaned from this potential experiment remains to be seen. At the least, the company managed to thwart a swathe of pirates over the past month — but combating piracy is like playing a game of whack-a-mole. Newly modded APKs (Android app files) appear on the internet just as quickly as they’re intercepted. But the outage indicates Spotify is working on ways to easily identify bad actors.
Content shared from www.digitalmusicnews.com.