Recently, Spotify has been cracking down on people that are using hacked versions of its apps. Through the hacked versions, users with free accounts are allowed to suppress advertising and use the paid features. Now, Spotify appears to have an idea of how many people took advantage of hacked apps: around 2 million users.
That’s a lot of users that took advantage of hacked apps to gain access to premium features and suppress ads, and understandable why the company is cracking down on them. In its amended F1 filing with the SEC this week, these users forced the company to adjust its metrics and key performance indicators. According to the disclosure notes, “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.”
Due to this, Spotify had to adjust its monthly active users from 159 million at the end of 2017 to 157 million users. The company has filed for a direct listing to go public, having the right figures for everyone is crucial for the company. Spotify has been sending emails to users it thinks are using hacked apps, and suspending or terminating their accounts if they don’t stop using those apps.
