Discontinued

Spotify Sold a $90 Dashboard Player, Discontinued It Five Months Later, and Said It Would Keep Supporting the Ones People Owned. In December 2024 It Switched Every One of Them Off.

Spotify released Car Thing in February 2022. It was a small screen that mounted on a dashboard and controlled Spotify, aimed at drivers whose cars were too old to have an infotainment system. It cost about ninety dollars, and it required an active Spotify Premium subscription to do anything at all, so every buyer was already a paying customer before the hardware arrived.

Spotify discontinued it in July 2022, five months after launch. At the time, the company said it would continue to support the units already sold, which is the ordinary assurance offered when a product line is retired and the ordinary reason customers accept the news calmly.

The Support Ends

In May 2024, Spotify announced that Car Thing would stop working entirely on 9 December 2024. Not degrade, not lose features — stop. On that date the devices were remotely disabled and became inert plastic.

This was possible because Car Thing had never been a music player. It held no files and decoded nothing. It was a remote control with a screen, wholly dependent on a phone and a server, and when the server declined to answer there was no residual function left to fall back on. A device that does nothing locally can be switched off from somewhere else, and the ninety dollars bought the object rather than the arrangement that made it work.

The Refund

Spotify's initial position was that owners should dispose of the hardware responsibly. There was no offer of compensation, no trade-in, and no replacement, because the product had no successor.

Customers objected, loudly and at length, and a lawsuit was filed alleging the company had sold a product it knew would be rendered useless. Spotify then confirmed it would issue refunds. Owners had until 14 January 2025 to apply, with proof of purchase — a receipt for a discontinued accessory bought up to three years earlier.

The Request That Was Declined

The most common suggestion from owners was that Spotify release the firmware, or unlock the bootloader, so the hardware could be repurposed. The device was a capable little screen with buttons and a dial. A community would have found uses for it within a fortnight, and several developers said so publicly.

Spotify declined. The units stayed locked, which meant the only lawful destination for several hundred thousand functioning screens was a bin. The company that had asked customers to dispose of them responsibly retained the one piece of code that would have made disposal unnecessary.

What Was Actually Sold

Nothing here required a change of heart or a policy reversal. Car Thing was built from the outset as a terminal for a service, and a terminal for a service lasts exactly as long as the service chooses to answer it. The December shutdown was not a betrayal of the product's design. It was the product's design, arriving on schedule.

The refund is the unusual part, and it happened because the objection was loud and a lawsuit had been filed. The device is the ordinary part. It was sold as hardware, priced as hardware, and shipped in a box like hardware, and it turned out to have been a subscription with a dial on it.

Filed from public reporting:

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