Spotify is blocking people who have pirated Premium accounts

"Paying Premium at that price to choose music is a scam, and now you even removed the cracked versions, sorry."

Since the beginning of March, the Spotify music streaming platform has launched a crackdown against those who own and use a cracked Premium account, which allows them to take advantage of Spotify's Premium services (absence of advertising and infinite 'skips' for songs) without paying a dime.

Spotify, after having detected the accounts that were making use of hacks or external tools capable of guaranteeing them access to Premium for free, such as Spotify Dogfood, is proceeding to send an email to these people notifying the detection of suspicious activity and the user is asked to uninstall any external app capable of bypassing the Premium payment to regain access to his account.

The platform also reserves the right to permanently cancel any account that continues to use this type of hack.

"We have detected abnormal activity on the app you are using, and for this reason, we have disabled it," reads the email. "Don't worry - your Spotify account is safe; if you want to regain access to your account, uninstall any unofficial Spotify apps from your device and download the official one from the Google Play Store."

The news comes just a week after Spotify officially applied to start its $1 billion IPO (initial public offering), which will launch the platform into the stock market, and it's easy to see that disabling cracked accounts is an operation designed to get the platform as clean as possible in front of investors.

While the controversy surrounding Spotify's relationship with the artists who create the music it hosts is far more than legitimate, so is the idea that a company blocks users who try to access its services without paying. It's a fairly obvious premise but one that needs to be clarified to those who have recently flooded Spotify's page on the Google Play Store.

The extent of Spotify's Premium account cracking phenomenon still needs to be clarified, and this roundup could return figures that could be interesting given the IPO of the streaming service.