A recent IPO filing by Spotify states that about 2 million of their free subscription users have been dodging the app’s ads. This follows reports earlier this March of the streaming service cracking down on modded versions that offer the Premium subscription service free of charge.
First reported by Reuters, over 2 percent of their 88 million free users have been using ‘hacked’ accounts by downloading modded subscription files to access ad-free, if not Premium services. In the filing, Spotify had changed their number of subscription users from 159 million at the end of last year to 157 million. “Unauthorized access to our Service may cause us to misstate key performance indicators, which once discovered, corrected, and disclosed, could undermine investor confidence in the integrity of our key performance indicators and could cause our stock price to drop significantly,” the disclosure in the company’s filing reads.
At the beginning of the month, the company had sent emails to some users who they have detected to be possibly using a modded version of the service informing them that their account has been disabled.
