Spotify To Brick ‘Car Thing’ Hardware People Bought Without Refund
from the poof-it's-gone dept
And here we go again. It used to be that when you bought a thing, you owned the thing. You could do whatever you wanted with the thing, so long as you didn’t violate the law with the thing, because you owned the thing. And I recognize I’m using the word “thing” a lot here, but it’s with good reason. See, Spotify recently announced that it would be unilaterally bricking every “Car Thing” product it ever sold to customers. Yes, bricking them.
Spotify announced today that it’s bricking all purchased Car Things on December 9 and not offering refunds or trade-in options. On a support page, Spotify says:
“We’re discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our product offerings. We understand it may be disappointing, but this decision allows us to focus on developing new features and enhancements that will ultimately provide a better experience to all Spotify users.”
Spotify has no further guidance for device owners beyond asking them to reset the device to factory settings and “safely” get rid of the bricked gadget by “following local electronic waste guidelines.”
Now, it’s not like there are a metric ton of these things out there. The Car Thing never really took off and mostly served as a niche product. Spotify stopped manufacturing them a year after they launched in late 2021, but it did continue to sell them for much longer than that. In fact, at the time Spotify ceased production, it slashed the price of the Car Thing almost in half, in theory to spur adoption. Adoption of a product that, barely two years later, will result in many more people having a relatively expensive paperweight for their troubles.
And as the quote above mentions, Spotify is not offering any kind of refund for the devices that they’re about to choose to break. If you bought a Car Thing a year or so ago for $50, you just lose out on that money and the product. And those who bought it are wondering why in the world these things are fit only for the landfill instead of Spotify opening the platform up to keep them useful.
A Spotify Community member going by AaronMickDee, for example, said:
“I’d rather not just dispose of the device. I think there is a community that would love the idea of having a device we can customize and use for other uses other than a song playback device.
Would Spotify be willing to maybe unlock the system and allow users to write/flash 3rd party firmware to the device?”
Worse yet, Spotify informed Ars Technica in a response to an inquiry that the whole point of the Car Thing was to “learn more about how people listen in the car.” If that’s the case, the company is essentially suggesting that it duped customers into paying for the pleasure of performing Spotify’s market research for it and then bricked those paying customers’ devices once the company was done with that whole thing.
So you don’t own what you’ve bought yet again. And not just for digital products, but for hardware too, apparently.
Filed Under: bricked, car thing, ownership
Companies: spotify
Comments on “Spotify To Brick ‘Car Thing’ Hardware People Bought Without Refund”
But remember, it’s those dastardly people who download music without paying that are the real thieves…
Yep.
I’ll say it. If you are so fucking stupid that you keep doing this, then you fucking deserve it.
I’ve given up on viewing people who keep throwing money at these companies or even attempting to hold them accountable as anything but the suckers they are.
Fun idea, every owner should mail back their unit to spotify and force them to deal with disposing of it.
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yep .. blame the victim, it so much easier than giving a shit.
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I personally accept full responsibility for my own security. But, and it’s a big but, most people don’t even know what that means, let alone try to practice Safe Hex. So let’s shift gears and look at cars for a moment….
I drive like my life depends on my skills. Do others do likewise? I can’t answer that, so I drive like my life depends on others doing stupid things all the time…. it’s called defensive driving. But governments help me out a little bit by requiring certain things from all drivers, like a competency test covering both driving skills and basic knowledge of the motoring laws. That helps me somewhat in my quest for a peaceful sojourn.
The same thing should be happening for actions taken by a company that tells people to fuck off, no recourse for you. That’s outright theft, subterfuge need not be considered. If I buy a stove at the local appliance outlet, and the maker decides that they don’t have to honor any warranty (I’m looking at you, LG), should I be left holding the bag when the thing poops out? No, of course not. In fact we have the Magnuson-Moss act (1972, amended 1974) to thank for that king of thing. To be sure, the government used its power to keep things on an even keel between the manufacturer and the customer.
That should be happening here, and I daresay that lawyers will be lining up by the carload to file suit against Spotify for converting a device they sold from one purpose to another – i.e. from a thing we wanted to another thing we neither want nor need. That’s the bottom line, a bit of equity for all concerned.
To put the period on the whole thing, if we were submitting data for “Market Research”, shouldn’t we be compensated for doing so? And with something just a little bit more equitable in value than a shiny new doorstop?
Wrap it in used cat litter. When they just throw it away in the garbage, raise a stink that they aren’t recycling. Should be interesting.
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King Charles of Things?
Posted with comment.
Shitty security by the devs, FTW.
https://www.xda-developers.com/spotify-car-thing-root/
Market Research?
No, it was personal data hoovering, period. What music you listened too was only the smoke screen, the unit also snatched everything your Bluetooth car-phone connection could lay its figurative hands on.
I don’t use Spotify, so I don’t know what the documentation said about this thing at the time of sale, there might be a fine-print clause that specifically states “Market Research is the reason we’re selling this thing to you”, or words to that effect. If such a clause was not in there, then look for lawyers to start filing lawsuits over both the bricking-with-no-recourse, and also for the invasion of privacy without notice.
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We may be about to find out what it was hoovering.
XDA getting root & the revelation of “market research” means things might be about to get very very warm for Spotify.
Consider car makers decided to make large bank off of the data they hoovered up from the public, what could Spotify have been gathering??
Lets find out…
Useless Spotify Things
Send them all to Spotify headquarters — postage due.
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Apparently, refunds are now available. For some people, anyway—it’s unclear what the requirements are. It’s kind of bizarre that Spotify would rather refund millions of dollars than unlock the hardware, but they’re probably hoping most purchasers will consider this normal breakage per the “new world order” (“you’ll no longer own anything” [nor have any privacy in music-listening] is kind of the premise of their service) and won’t bother asking for their money back.