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Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
Spotify forcing me to hear a bunch of ads on the desktop client today. I'm a paid subscriber.
Seems widespread, the spotify subreddit is actively removing discussion of the problem
- noemit 6mo agoI canceled my family subscription last month. We have Youtube Premium which I use to play music - Spotify was over 20/month and no longer made sense. We mostly used it to play music on our Google speakers for the kids. It's one of those products that used to make sense, but now just doesn't feel so critical. It's easy to replace and patch where I used it.
- cobertos 6mo agoI just migrated to Jellyfin and cancelled my Spotify subscription just last week (https://cobertos.com/blog/post/finally-cancelling-my-spotify https://cobertos.com/blog/post/finally-cancelling-my-spotify). Paying off even more than I predicted. So sick of everything getting in the way of just listening to my music.
- Festro 6mo agoI gave up on Spotify as I started to listen to more podcasts which had their own ads inside them let alone Spotify's. Now I'm paying for Youtube (never thought I'd be doing that) and using the new(ish) jump ahead feature to skip in-video ad segments including in video podcasts. Problem largely solved?
- raw_anon_1111 6mo agoJust the thought of using YouTube as a PINO (podcast in name only) player makes me throw up a little. If I can’t put an RSS feed in my podcast player of choice - it ain’t a podcast
- _DeadFred_ 6mo agoCheck out the Sponsor block browser plugin to auto skip that stuff.
- lschueller 6mo agoYeah.. They seem to speed up their entshittification game. I recently wrote a short piece about how Spotify is forcefully updating the app, and how to prevent it. For example, if you plan tonuse spicetify or something similar: https://duckass.bearblog.dev/how-spotify-silently-updates-itself-and-how-to-stop-it/ https://duckass.bearblog.dev/how-spotify-silently-updates-it... Spotify is losing ground after their last subscription fees increase, as far as I see it.
- wojciii 6mo agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ Once you see this its hard to unsee the pattern. Its happening to everything.
- sequin 6mo agoI left Spotify years ago. Youtube is so much nicer in terms of content alone. But Youtube, with its insane backlog of video's not available elsewhere, is straight up a monopoly, so they too will start squeezing customers at some point. In anticipation of that I've been collecting flacs again. It's actually kind of a nice hobby.
- kleene_op 6mo agoSame here! I found now was a good time to build that NAS I wanted to have a long time ago, and the first thing I installed on it was a Navidrome server so I could listen to my curated music everywhere. Hopefully we're entering the era of people ditching megacorp craps and switching to personal cloud solutions. YouTube will be very hard to replace though.
- kreyenborgi 6mo agoSame, except moved to Qobuz. They have both streaming and you can buy downloads.
- embedding-shape 6mo agoI tried YouTube for music a year ago or so, as it was included when I tried out a paid YouTube plan to remove the ads. Apparently (at least at that point) not all videos are available in "YouTube Music", so you can't just play back any of the videos from YouTube while using YouTube Music via Carplay, instead you need to then use YouTube itself, which of course you can't use via Carplay. After being disappointed again and again, I too moved back to collecting local files for my music instead, although bought rather than what.cd as I used in my early days. Tend to use Bandcamp mostly, they also waive their fee on purchases every first Friday of the month (https://isitbandcampfriday.com/ https://isitbandcampfriday.com/), so collecting a bunch of things to buy and listen to each first friday of month has become a nice little ritual :)
- al_borland 6mo agoYouTube’s commingling of playlists (and everything else) between music and videos made it completely unusable for me. I am a YouTube Premium subscriber, but ended up subscribing to Apple Music to get a service that works the way I want, without screwing up other things I use. YouTube has started screwing up as well. I was having a lot of issues with YouTube errors in Safari. Best I can tell it was due to uBlock Origin Lite. When I disabled content blockers on YouTube my error rate went down dramatically. If I’m paying for YouTube and shouldn’t see any ads, why does the site break itself when I have content blockers enabled? It seems the heavy handed measures to get free users to watch ads are also impacting Premium users. This feels wrong.
- vpribish 6mo agoIF this is happening it's gotta be a mistake. Ads on paid spotify will be the end of my subscription.
- lich_king 6mo agoWe paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads. Ad-free paid services were a brief aberration, essentially a bait-and-switch: "see how much nicer we are from the old-school competitors". Now that the competitors are gone, Netflix is doing ads, Amazon is doing ads... why wouldn't Spotify? I hate it, but the reality is that we groan on online forums but don't actually leave.
- jbb67 6mo agoIt's very much easier to ignore ads in a newspaper. It's not so easy when you are forced to listen to them before the thing you paid for. It's not the same.
- happytoexplain 6mo ago"But you don't leave" is an excuse the human-hating producers tell themselves. But it's normal for consumers to be protected from the petty misery of natural market forces by legislation. We have enacted many such controls.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads To be fair, ad-free options for each of these later emerged. I pay up for them.
- vpribish 6mo agomaybe you did, but I did not. my attention is valuable to me and I do not pay people to waste it. i had tapes, CDs, mp3s, and paid spotify. this is a well-proven market.
- drcongo 6mo agoPSA: Stop using Spotify, they're predatory scum.
- halapro 6mo agoI really don't understand the hate for Spotify. Been a paid member for a decade and Apple Music still sucks for me (particularly when internet is bad)
- vpribish 6mo agothey funnelled money and attention to joe rogan. I hate them - not as much as i hate microsoft or oracle - maybe about as much as adobe. but i'm using them because i have not found an acceptable alternative ... yet.
- petercooper 6mo agoI don’t know how their behavior differs but I live in a country with patchy mobile coverage and Spotify and Apple Music are night and day with how they cope with this. Spotify is far more robust and I assume prefetches more aggressively.
- mholm 6mo agoAgree with this; I want to cancel my spotify subscription so badly. I already have Apple One, which includes Apple Music. But the recommendations and UX are so incredibly bad that I still pay for Spotify. I was doing my yearly attempt at switching over to Apple Music and the 'similar music' radio had somehow saw fit to include Kendrick Lamar with my indie synth. Swapped back to spotify and immediately loved some of its similar suggestions.
- pythonaut_16 6mo agoSeems like a bug. I had it happen (ads were playing and UI showed the premium upgrade nudges), then my Spotify refreshed and it went away again. Annoying that it happened. Annoying that Reddit mods are aggressively removing the discussion. Annoying that HN comments here are immediately jumping to Spotify hate and the sky is falling. Imagine if we all assumed every AWS outage meant that AWS was cancelled. --- The responses in this thread are truly disappointing. Spotify can be bad and have vibecoding issues and we can still have a rational discussion rather than just jumping on the complaint bandwagon and panicking. I guess at least eventually real comments rose to the top.
- conradfr 6mo agoThat can't be ... "Spotify engineers haven't coded since December"
- mholm 6mo agoDoesn't even feel like they've committed code since December 2023
- sharkjacobs 6mo agoSometimes a bug is indistinguishable from AB testing
- petersellers 6mo agoThis seems very likely to be a mistake or bug. Spotify rolling this out without an announcement intentionally would be an incredible blunder. I'd cancel my membership immediately and I don't think I'd be alone in that decision.
- chucksta 6mo agoAnd you wouldn't cancel if they said you were gonna get ads upfront?
- petersellers 6mo agoI'd cancel either way, I'd just be less mad if they announced it ahead of time.
- wao0uuno 6mo agohttps://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Basic-plans-Users-are-getting-ads/idi-p/7378835 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Basic-plans-... So it was a bug. Tags under the post are kinda funny though.
- blakesterz 6mo agoYou're right, those tags are GREAT! Worth clicking through and having a look.
- wao0uuno 6mo agoLooks like they've cleaned them up already.
- cuuupid 6mo agoThis is just the latest in a series of vibe-coding caused bugs, Spotify famously claimed their best devs were no longer writing any of their own code: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-developers-havent-written-a-line-of-code-since-december-thanks-to-ai/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-deve... I don't understand enterprises who take this stance, there is tons of room between "don't utilize AI for coding" and "exclusively utilize AI for coding."
- shimman 6mo agoSpotify has always been garbage software long before LLMs. PM/devs like to justify their constant a/b testing to gamify metrics to curry raises/promotions but for end users all we're dealt with is a constantly broken/changing UI. My biggest peeve with Spotify UI is how hard it is to add something to your current playing queue, an action I would assume is quite common but you have to scroll down to hit several controls before you can do it.
- lowenbjer 6mo agoThree dots next to the song title, menu opens, "Add to Queue", done.
- shimman 6mo agoI click three dots, add to queue is at the bottom of the list, need to scroll, then click add to queue. Why do I have to do so many actions when adding an item (say a podcast) to my current playlist? Why can't there be a single button that says "add to queue," why hide an common workflow behind nested menus and actions? Wouldn't adding songs to your current queue be an extremely common action by users? Or at least power users? I think I might become one of those people that makes their own frontend music player for Jellyfin. Adding and modifying playlists are something I do often (wrote like 100s of collages on what.cd back in the day), but with Spotify these actions are so fucking painful.
- 6mo ago
- user3939382 6mo agoI once decided to try spotify, paid the fee. Listened to a podcast and ads came on. “Oh no those ads are embedded by the podcast themselves, we don’t control that.” Ok I don’t care what your back end financial models are, either I’m paying to remove ads or I’m not. Immediately canceled.
- lowenbjer 6mo ago"the spotify subreddit is actively removing discussion of the problem" This sounds like terribly bad form, won't buy them any goodwill down the line.
- edoceo 6mo agoMore thing for Spotify is that their users are, more or less, locked in. That stickyness is what allows companies to try this dumb shit; management will hardly feel the impact of their bad choices - cause they are standing on many years of foundations. It's like when Homer Simpson was carried up the mountain by Sherpas and thought he owned the achievement.
- lowenbjer 6mo agoI get that it looks bad to have vibe coding bugs creeping into your codebase for such a big company, but isn't it common sense that owning your misstakes taking accountability for them generates respect?
- Esophagus4 6mo agoI switched last year and discovered I wasn’t as locked in as I thought. SongShift moves your library from one app to another super easily. In 20 minutes my whole collection, playlists and all, moved from Spotify to Apple. And it was free. I encourage everyone who is dreading moving to a better app to try it… it’s pretty easy now. I’m tempted to try Tidal myself because Apple Music’s recommendations aren’t that great.
- surgical_fire 6mo agoHow so? Spotify can be switched for YT Music, or Apple Music, or Deezer without any issues. You can also just buy albums on Qobuz instead. You can, ultimately, resort to one of the best things the internet offered since its inception - piracy. If anything, Spotify is one of the easiest services to replace. And I say this as a paying customer.
- lowenbjer 6mo ago
- ladax72707 6mo agoHaven't used spotify in years, but they used to have programmed and live ads in podcasts, even for paying subscribers. That's one of the reasons I've gave up on them. Just insulting for consumers.
- Esophagus4 6mo agoI canceled Spotify when they started putting “commercially promoted” songs (lol) in stations generated for me. That’s an ad. I’m not paying for ads.
- totallygeeky 6mo agoFor anyone looking for a spotify alternative, please join me in making a better, self-hosted spotify! 1.) Buy music when you can, and when you can't, pirate! 2.) Run Gonic(1)! (or whatever you want, I'm not in charge of what you do at the end of the day, but Gonic is a.) very light, and b.) a subsonic(2) server, so it's compatible with anything that supports that family of services) 2a.) How you run it is up to preference, I have a NAS that runs mine, you can also run it off something like Pikapods(3), a VPS (you know what a VPS is), or off your own desktop/laptop/raspberry pi, who cares. 3.) Download a subsonic compatible player, which is much more open to preferences, but I highly suggest Symfonium(4) 4.) Enjoy music streaming without ads, limits, or artists you don't like! (1) https://github.com/sentriz/gonic https://github.com/sentriz/gonic (2) https://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp https://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp (3) https://www.pikapods.com/ https://www.pikapods.com/ (4) https://symfonium.app/ https://symfonium.app/ to be clear, i have no relation to any of these products, outside of supporting the development of gonic and donating to symfonium. if anyone is interested I can do a more in depth write up of how I personally manage my stuff, but it's not much more complicated than this, just with a TB+ of music in a folder.
- ireflect 6mo agoIs there a reason to use Gonic instead of Navidrome? I've been using the latter for hosting my music collection for over a year now and really like it. Good riddance Spotify. [1] Don't get me wrong, I'm all for more choices. But it seems like you have opinions on this topic and I'd like to hear them. [1] See my blog post from a while back: https://lukecyca.com/2025/listen-to-music-like-its-2005.html https://lukecyca.com/2025/listen-to-music-like-its-2005.html
- kyorochan 6mo ago> Is there a reason to use Gonic instead of Navidrome? Not really. Both are great! I moved to Gonic because it exposed full file paths which Navidrome didn't at the time, but it has since implemented that as well. Gonic doesn't come with a front end so it's a bit lighter if that's something you care about.
- 6mo ago
- arealaccount 6mo agoNot a single mention of Pandora in this thread? Do people really not use it? It’s so much better for just picking a song or musician or genre and having a never ending playlist
- Froedlich 6mo agoWe had two broadcast TV channels where we lived when I was growing up in the 1970s. My Dad signed up for cable TV. It ran 24/7 instead of 6AM-to-midnight (yes, broadcast TV went off the air at midnight in many areas) and it had no commercials. A few years after getting cable, they started running ads on it. Dad for furious. "No ads" was one of the things he was paying for, as he saw it. Ironically, half the ads - at least in the beginning - were urging people to sign up for cable TV. But people couldn't see the ads unless they already had cable TV...
- raw_anon_1111 6mo agoThis is completely untrue. Cable TV always had ads. 1. The first thing that cable was used for was to get over the air networks to rural areas that couldn’t get a signal - these always had ads 2. The second was “Superstations” that were former local independent stations that ran ads like TBS. They always had ads. 3. The third wave was MTV, USA, Lifetime, (or its precursor), ESPN etc - they always had ads The only reason you didn’t see many ads was because the cable native channels were still trying to convince companies to buy ads.
- icedchai 6mo agoNot entirely true. The "premium" channels (HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Bravo, The Movie Channel, etc.) never had ads. Then there were channels like Nickelodeon that originally had no ads, then added them in the mid 80's. I remember this distinctly because I was annoyed by it. My parents got cable in 1980 when it first came to our area.
- raw_anon_1111 6mo agoIt was only because they didn’t have enough viewers to convince companies to pay for ads.
- icedchai 6mo agoThe "premium" movie channels had tons of paying subscribers. They didn't need ads. It was very much a selling point for those channels.
- Good53139428015 6mo ago[flagged]
- adi_kurian 6mo agoAfter having, as a teenager, having been, unbeknownst to me, a bonafied in the flesh content marketing tool of Spotify, it was thrilling to cancel my subscription this year as I learned more about their advertising business and clients.
- ttbigroad94 6mo ago[dead]
- captain_coffee 6mo agoI was having ads played even with the most expensive Spotify subscription a few years ago because ... feel this: The ads were CHOSEN BY THE END CLIENT, not Spotify itself as a legal entity. Needless to say that I am no longer using Spotify for a few years now and I highly encourage a mass exodus from the platform.
- balinha_8864 6mo ago[dead]
- okr 6mo agoThe last straw was for me the ads on podcasts as a paid subscriber. I miss my playlists.
- e40 6mo agoI would love to cancel and move to something else. Recently tried Apple Music and I was appalled at how bad it was. The ui/ux of Spotify isn’t great, and has gotten worse over the years, but Apple Music’s was downright terrible. I stuck it out for a week and then deleted the app.
- jemmyw 6mo agoYouTube isn't too bad. I preferred it but moving the whole family over was too hard
- utdoctor 6mo agoCould you share what you didn’t like about Apple Music? As a previously long time Spotify user I initially was put off by Apple Music but have been using it for the past 5-6 years and have come to really enjoy it.
- e40 6mo agoI should have taken detailed notes, but I didn't. I was continuously frustrated when I wanted to do something I used to do in Spotify, but couldn't find a way to do it in Music. Also, in general, I just found the UI of Music really confusing, even after days of using it. The two features I use most on Spotify are "radio for a song" and "shuffle liked songs" (of which I have some 5k... and I moved them over to Music into a playlist). I'm pretty sure I had issues with both of these, but as I said, I don't remember. Had both of these gone well, I'd have stayed with it. Btw, I had the same reaction to the Podcasts app. Having used Pocket Casts for many years, I tried Podcasts and the UI is just terrible for the way I listen to podcasts. The only time I use it is when I need to look for some NYT thing that isn't still in the free feeds.
- ianschmitz 6mo agoI moved over to Tidal recently. Haven’t missed Spotify
- gaws 6mo ago> I would love to cancel and move to something else. What's the hold up?
- pjmlp 6mo agoMy MP3 "mix tape" doesn't play ads.
- anotherhadi 6mo agoSame thing as Netflix, Prime video and others, they will next offer a premium++ subscription without any ads..
- ryandvm 6mo agoAdvertising is always a race to the bottom and ads ruin everything. I feel like in a couple hundred years they're going to look back at our advertising encrusted existence like we look upon the pre-sewage-treatment era of humanity.
- okr 6mo agoI hope not. I am in general fine with Ads for content, even with profiling to what i listen and so on. But if you pay for subscription to get no Ads and still you get Ads from Spotify, then it is plain stupid.
- benjaminpark282 6mo ago[dead]
- veronicalin 6mo agoSo in Spotify, they have subscriber, vip and svip... We need to pay more and more to avoid ads.
- millereffect 6mo agoSounds like they need a better system to manage their entitlements!!!