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Stop operating dishonestly, either just have a pay wall, or offer a sincere free basic tier

I don't think there is anything intrinsically wrong with tiers of service. Quite the opposite, it is a way of making things economical for people.  Having a free tier and a paid tier is also fair, and clever.  You hook your customer, they love using the site, and eventually want more features unlocked.  You should do that, or just offer a paid service.  What you do right now is cruel and insulting.  I see sites and apps where you can use for free with advertising, or pay and have a cleaner experience, or with less delays.  Sometimes sites get greedy: I was at Youtube today and loaded a song.  I had to sit through two commercials, no skip function and then less than one minute into the song it switched to a commercial break.  That's disgusting. It's greedy and they wrecked the song--they wrecked my reason for coming to the site.  I didn't feel an urge to pay for ad free service, but to abandon the site.

Your site is completely blanketed in ads--and its not that your selling ad space, you're deliberately making the site difficult to use.  I came today and ads kept popping up, moving around, randomly playing loud video. I would attempt to click a link and an ad would have slid on in under my cursor. I couldn't read the contents of the page.  You made the site non-functional.  On the page where you can pay the ransom to have the site freed, you advertise much greater speed as a benefit because you've so completely glutted the free one under ads.  

So, what I get out of all that, is you think I'm stupid, you feel manipulating me is good business. You are fraudulently claiming to have a free basic tier, but what you provide is an unusable site designed to be frustrating and distressing.  I am autistic and ADHD and your website makes my heart race with confusion and panic.  There is a distinct difference, well familiar and recognisable by now, between websites with advertising and sites employing the ad bomb strategy in attempt to compel us to pay so we will actually be able to use the site.  This is not tiers.  The free tier is a slap in the face.  It tells me you don't respect me at all and your happy to mess with me and manipulate my money out of me.  What makes you think I would want to do business with people who treat me like this?

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A

i have to agree with ALL the users here of sidereel. the page is mostly unuseable with all the ads.  i am still debating whether to get a subscription - i've been on sidereel for years, but you've also greatly cut down on content and suggested shows and other readings.  all gone now.  so we're getting less and the ads, the way they are distributed on the page makes the page, at times, unreadable - and UNLOADABLE due to the massive content of the ads.  

i agree with the post above - make TIERS available.  

try it yourselves and you will see, the page doesn't load half the time and when it does it's blocking the content.

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T

Agreed. Sick of the excuses. You either offer a subscription model or ad model. You can’t do both. Stop being fucking greedy. 

TH

Personally I’m done supporting you guys. This site is a disaster and I’m tired of paying for something that only works half the time at most. The latest insult: “Looks like you’re using an adblocker”. Um, ok, so I’ll hit “log in” again…then hit “sign in with Google”—LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE USING AN ADBLOCKER. Caught in another Dark UI loop of hell. 

I am constantly kicked out, harassed, blocked from using the site I PAY FOR. Congrats on getting a second year sub from me, it will be my last. 

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CT

Zac, as always your explanation is clear and patient. I think idle primates initial complaint, while factually accurate, was perhaps a bit Harshly worded, in the way we do when we are not looking one another in the eye. I would say the same thing about Chris Kent’s  rebuttals. His are the only ones I disagree with.

I should not have to learn how to use what I regard as esoteric protection systems to obviate the burden and frustration of aggressive (i.e. poorly thought out) advertising schemes on websites. And I say poorly thought out because I have never, not even once, intentionally clicked on an ad link in your site. Nor will I ever.

I have a subscription. I enjoy my subscription. I enjoy and make good use of allmusic. It is entirely worth the cost for me. However there was a time when, for whatever reason, I was not being automatically logged into my account when I used your site. And the ads were impenetrable. I completely understand idle primates emotional reaction to that. It felt and worked as though… You didn’t really want it to work. And if that was the plan… Very disingenuous… And this, even though I had an account which had previously worked beautifully.

That situation seems somehow to have corrected. Additionally, you have updated the look and workings of your site a little bit – – I applaud that it was not a wholesale makeover, but instead incremental improvements – – and it is now more solid than ever. Kudos to you all

Comment

I'm not going to lie. We have a lot of advertisements on the site. The new design actually has fewer ads than before but it is still a very ad-heavy site.

We have the subscription model, and also we make a fraction of our revenue from affiliate links to Amazon, but 95% of the money we make comes from advertising.

I wish that we could have fewer ads and still keep the site running, but this is honestly the state of the industry now. Unless you are owned by a large company like Amazon (like IMDb) or Conde Nast (like Pitchfork), you need to have a huge number of ads on the site.

If we reduce the number of ads, we won't make enough to pay the writers, cover the server and hosting costs, the site will no longer be able to run.

MT

A dollar a month seems small but...I visit hundreds of web sites every week. A dollar here and a dollar there soon adds up - to an amount I cannot afford.

As a consumer I have a choice and I am making that choice.

adverts are fine, they are good, but if it makes the website unreadable, then people won't visit. 

And here is the REAL point I am trying to make: it must be possible to have adverts that fit the screen! 

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CK

You seem the confused kid; you want things but won't pay, but you call yourself a consumer when the term is freeloader. You approve of ads, but you want to complain about their presentation. I think you're in a self created strange world of both disliking corporate actions and being too weak to do anything proactive about it. And I doubt you know how to manage a browser. Hopefully you are young and can change. Beggars cannot be choosers.

Here's how we differ: I do not accept ads on any site, because they torture the mind and indoctrinate the user. So I use strong ad blockers and suffer no ads online (including Youtube). I pay for Allmusic gladly as a great cheap deal, because I use it every week to edit my vast music collection metadata. I pay monthly out of appreciation AS A CONSUMER, not in order to block ads. (For the same reason I donate a little every year to Wikipedia, because I use it so often I feel they earned it.)

In other words, I control what goes inside my head, and pay or donate our of conscience. I do not suffer what corporations demand I see, then beg or whine about it's negatives. Finally for anything that is against my values, I simply go without and feel great about that sacrifice. I threw out my TV ten years ago for the same reason, to control what information is allowed inside the head.

JH

I visit hundreds of sites a month, as many of us do. Allmusic.com is THE most intrusive of them all; no contest. In fact, in Safari I can't even click on anything, requiring multiple reloads until I finally can.

What a mess.

MT

Chris Kent: re-read my comment.

I am not a freeloader. Other (well designed) websites have adverts AND let you read the content. 

All music have so many ads I cannot read the content. 

As a consumer, I have the right not to visit a website. And that is what I did. They lost my custom becuase they couldn't get the website in a readable format. 

Their choice.

T

I agree. Chris Kent is being a dick. The site is illegible due to ad placement. Put a banner at the top and bottom. Embedding them under discography is shitty practice, folks. Stop forcing ads. Place them elegantly and let the ad do the rest. It feels like a pirate streaming site now. I sent links to friends who are not users, and they always send me a message "I left, all the ads made me think I was going to get malware on my phone." At what point to you listen to customer feedback over non-effective ad revenue? Seems like a no-brainer. I come back a few times a year. I miss the old days.

MT

I agree wholeheartenly. I visit less and less often because it is so hard with the screen jumping up and down with all the ads. 

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CK

Learn to manage a browser. I see no ads, none.

CK

It's a dollar a month, be real and get a minimal income to pay for what you want.

I appreciate your well-thought-out response and I am sorry that you feel as though we are deliberately forcing users to subscribe.

The truth of the matter is that it is incredibly difficult to operate and maintain an ad-supported website. If you are interested in the reasoning behind our admittedly aggressive ad layout, some details are available here: https://allmedianetwork.helprace.com/i8-support-allmusic-and-go-ad-free

In an effort to enable users to avoid these ads, we offer our subscription service which comes out to $1 a month over the year, which we felt was very affordable and allows us to keep the site running without burdening the user with ads.

It may seem like we have a sinister plan to bilk our users out of money, but honestly that isn't the case. In order to keep the site running, we need to have a lot of ads on the page. This leads to a slow and cluttered user experience so we offer users a way around it.

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TH

Zack, the problem isn’t the business model, it’s the website. Don’t knew how many times you guys have to be told this. 

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