Spotify Blocks the Subscribers who used the Hacked app to Access Premium Features

Spotify is a popular streaming service for music with over 159 million users. Most of the users are free account holders who get only limited Spotify experience. To overcome the interruptions and to download and play the music offline many users use the rigged Spotify app to enjoy the services freely.

Spotify is now blocking such subscribers who are making use of the “unauthorized” apps to freely enjoy the premium features. This news was first reported by TorrentFreak. According to them, Spotify is sending an email mentioning about the “abnormal activity” to the users. TorrentFreak has also made public a screenshot of the email.

Which apps are being targeted is not yet clear but according to TorrentFreak, there are several versions of Spotify which enables the non-paying user to avoid certain inconveniences like, shuffle-only play and limits on the number of tracks you are allowed to skip. Spotify has announced that it was going public and the very next day Spotify had sent a takedown notice to GitHub for the mod version of Spotify app called “Dogfood“. It has also requested to remove several projects that forks DogFood’s code.

There was a mixed response from the users who got the email from Spotify. Some among them claimed that they were still able to use the apps and listen to music while some said that the email was accurate and they could not access the app anymore. The current email was a friendly type mail from Spotify but if you are continuing to access the unauthorized apps, you may need to double check with your decision to get yourself locked out of the app.

A spokesperson has clarified that “the users in question were accessing Spotify through an unauthorized app, so we have disabled access to such apps.” It is clear from the mail that those user accounts which got locked out, are safe and to access their Spotify account; they need to simply uninstall any unauthorized or modified version of Spotify. Then they need to download and install the Spotify app from the official Google Play Store. But Spotify has also warned in the mail that if they are detecting any further use of unauthorized apps in violation of their terms, they have got all the rights to suspend or terminate such user accounts.