To me it always seemed like Linus Torvalds is mostly a pragmatist.

Richard M Stallman on the other hand…

If there is any company that can do personalized ads for music then it is Spotify. It’s what they are best at, why would they skip that opportunity?

Most ads are terrible because they are annoying and advertise bad products. I think that’s less likely to be a problem here because your music is the ad, if it is annoying and bad you will simply stop listening and they lose money on the ad.

If it would be ads for podcasts for example, it would be much much worse for me.

Of course they don’t care about small artists. That’s my point, if you pay for ads you have an option to be less dependent on the platform to make you famous by paying for it. Simply waiting for people to find your music is unlikely to be succesful.

It seems relatively harmless as long as they don’t overdo it though. The only incentive for someone to pay for this is that that you might like their music and will listen to it more in the future, which would be a win for you as well.

Maybe it also allows smaller artists to gain momentum without only depending on the magic recommendation algorithm.