Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47428391

151 128 4 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

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• 4 months ago

I 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• 4 months ago

I just migrated to Jellyfin and cancelled my Spotify subscription just last week (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• 4 months ago

I 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_11114• 4 months ago

Just 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_• 4 months ago

Check out the Sponsor block browser plugin to auto skip that stuff.

lschueller• 4 months ago

Yeah.. 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-it...

Spotify is losing ground after their last subscription fees increase, as far as I see it.

wojciii• 4 months ago

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

Once you see this its hard to unsee the pattern. Its happening to everything.

sequin• 4 months ago

I 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• 4 months ago

Same 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• 4 months ago

Same, except moved to Qobuz. They have both streaming and you can buy downloads.

embedding-shape• 4 months ago

I 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/), so collecting a bunch of things to buy and listen to each first friday of month has become a nice little ritual :)

al_borland• 4 months ago

YouTube’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.

pjmlp2• 4 months ago

I never used Spotify, get to use YouTube to find out about new artists, but what I get to play are plain old MP3, either bought directly as such, or taken from music albums that I still buy with some regularity, ideally directly from bands after attending their concert, if they happen to sell some afterwards.

vpribish4• 4 months ago

IF this is happening it's gotta be a mistake. Ads on paid spotify will be the end of my subscription.

lich_king• 4 months 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.

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• 4 months ago

It'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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

vpribish4• 4 months ago

maybe 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.

drcongo3• 4 months ago

PSA: Stop using Spotify, they're predatory scum.

halapro3• 4 months ago

I 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)

vpribish4• 4 months ago

they 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• 4 months ago

I 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.

mholm2• 4 months ago

Agree 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.

thenthenthen• 4 months ago

They started with a pirated set of music (sounds familiar?), they invest in the military industrial complex.

some_random• 4 months ago

Spotify sucks for artists because music isn't actually worth much and they don't like hearing that. A certain group of people, including some politicians, have concluded that it must mean that spotify is taking advantage of musicians despite spotify only reaching profitability in 2024.

drcongo3• 4 months ago

Well, for one thing there's that whole pushing their own AI generated slop music into electronica playlists so that actual artists get fewer plays.

surgical_fire3• 4 months ago

All streaming services are predatory scum. Piracy is the way, even though it is sometimes less convenient. I pay for Spotify because it is cheap and I'm lazy

If you want to support musicians buy their merch, go to concerts. If they are smalltime, find their patreon, or join their YouTube thing, or buy their music on Bandcamp, etc.

okr3• 4 months ago

Piracy is also predatory, just saying.

piva003• 4 months ago

70% of their revenue goes straight into paying royalties, always, if the music labels don't pay their artists enough due to predatory contracts shouldn't some of the flak be focused there? Even more: they've always fleeced artists, even when physical media sales were the only market.

pythonaut_16• 4 months ago

Seems 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• 4 months ago

That can't be ... "Spotify engineers haven't coded since December"

mholm2• 4 months ago

Doesn't even feel like they've committed code since December 2023

sharkjacobs• 4 months ago

Sometimes a bug is indistinguishable from AB testing

petersellers2• 4 months ago

This 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• 4 months ago

And you wouldn't cancel if they said you were gonna get ads upfront?

petersellers2• 4 months ago

I'd cancel either way, I'd just be less mad if they announced it ahead of time.

wao0uuno2• 4 months ago

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Basic-plans-... So it was a bug. Tags under the post are kinda funny though.

blakesterz• 4 months ago

You're right, those tags are GREAT! Worth clicking through and having a look.

wao0uuno2• 4 months ago

Looks like they've cleaned them up already.

cuuupid2• 4 months ago

This 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-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."

shimman7• 4 months ago

Spotify 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.

lowenbjer6• 4 months ago

Three dots next to the song title, menu opens, "Add to Queue", done.

fdghrtbrt• 4 months ago

Keep doing. Hearing people complain about streaming software, when they could be playing their sounds locally with free software, makes my day every day.

samuelg123• 4 months ago

Try using apple music

happymellon2• 4 months ago

Don't you just swipe right on a song to add it to the queue?

OptionOfT• 4 months ago

Sounds like they have the same problem all software companies have as soon as the MBAs took over.

Metrics, not for the purpose of making the software better, but to justify someone's existence in the company.

Starman_Jones• 4 months ago

Not to mention that, if there is a queue, clicking Play on an album will play only the first track and add the rest of the tracks to the bottom of the queue. Did the PM honestly think listeners wanted that?

nmstoker• 4 months ago

I recall it being crap back in 2009 when the mobile software was highly flakey: it would sync over 1Gb of my playlists but was really unreliable so every few days it would get corrupted and require to resync the data in its entirety. At the time this quickly added up to more than my broadband plan would allow and I was stuck without the music and without normal speed internet (it would revert to some super slow level) I complained and they didn't seem to care as it stayed unstable and they kept advising to try again when my data cap was removed, it would fail again and then I cancelled my subscription.

anon7000• 4 months ago

I disagree, Spotify has been very stable and performant for the last decade I’ve been using it. That speaks to decent software development. UI/product shifts are sometimes eh, but the core library has everything you expect from it. Music discovery tools are decent. I’ve tried Apple Music & YouTube Music on and off over the years and they aren’t better.

Adding a song to the queue on my phone is two taps away (3 dots > add to queue) or just swipe right on the list item. On desktop it’s one of the top options when you right click. It’s really not that bad.

The chief complaint is that the home page changes frequently and is hard to navigate, which is fair, and also pretty typical for tech companies. But all I really need is library & search, which are front & center without that.

rdevilla• 4 months ago

The techcrunch article is my favorite piece on Spotify, and proves that LLMs will not save you from your own stupidity.

For years now the Spotify release team has been rotating their package signing key on every release. [0] This completely defeats the point of package signing, which is to assure you that the next release is coming from the same people as the last one. In Spotify's case this is impossible to ascertain, as one cannot easily distinguish a legit new signing key from Spotify, from a supply chain attack.

With all this extra "intelligence" and productivity you would think such long-standing trivialities and security flaws would have been addressed by now. Not so if the humans driving those agents don't understand basic concepts or recognize a problem even exists.

Instead, merely, "fuck the Linux users."

I cancelled my Spotify long ago when music started disappearing from my library. Pirated music does not disappear.

[0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/spotify#comment-1048914

omosubi• 4 months ago

The Spotify hate is so forced. Everyone's complaints boil down to "the UX doesn't work exactly like I want". I find these changes mildly annoying like anyone else, but Spotify is miles ahead of everyone else in terms of discovery and it's not even close. It's not perfect but no service is.

Gormo• 4 months ago

Spotify famously claimed their best devs were no longer writing any of their own code:

It seems almost criminal to hire Ludvig Strigeus and then not let him write code.

j1elo• 4 months ago

It's fully caused by management mindset. There are companies that are investing hard on the AI trend, but the message is clear: all code pushed is your ultimate responsonsibility, and if it lacks quality or causes problems, you're on the hook for it; using AI hasn't changed that.

So if Spotify had a modicum of AI usage hygiene, plus accountability expectations for code quality, this would still mean a bad performance review for whoever introduced this issue (person or team; poor results and mistakes are never something that come from a single source)

dominotw• 4 months ago

spotify has no performance review process or any sort of performance management. Never heard of anyone getting piped there for many years i was there.

SilverElfin• 4 months ago

Spotify is a terribly run company. Zero innovation. Bugs. Frustrating interface design. It’s awful and they deserve to lose at this point. I’m surprised anyone ever praised their management techniques.

rurban• 4 months ago

Heavily disagree. Good UI, lot of innovation, no bugs for me. Very pleasant to use. And totally free.

user3939382• 4 months ago

I 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.

lowenbjer6• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

More 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.

lowenbjer6• 4 months ago

I 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?

Esophagus42• 4 months ago

I 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_fire3• 4 months ago

How 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.

paxys• 4 months ago

This subreddit is mainly for sharing Spotify playlists. We're not a support community, and we encourage users to use official support channels for most issues.

Literally the first line of the sub description.

RogerL• 4 months ago

yes, the correct sub for this is r/truespotify, and there are a dozen discussions on the problem.

lowenbjer6• 4 months ago

Fair enough! Can't argue with that

ladax72707• 4 months ago

Haven'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.

Esophagus42• 4 months ago

I 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• 4 months ago

For 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

(2) https://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

(3) https://www.pikapods.com/

(4) 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• 4 months ago

Is 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

kyorochan2• 4 months 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.

kalx• 4 months ago

Thank you. Can you stream your songs from anywhere that you have a connection?

iamsaitam• 4 months ago

1. Buy music when you can, and when you can't, listen to what you own, don't steal.

there, fixed it for you

subscribed2• 4 months ago

Meh, its almost line taking money for music without ads and inserting ads and fake music/promo content.

To make it simpler: MANY countries have enacted a law where every storage device (disk, pendrive, dvd) has a special surcharge/levy added, that covers the coat of "piracy".

Levy is then distributed to the rights holders.

Its not stealing if I paid for it!

arealaccount• 4 months ago

Not 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• 4 months ago

We 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_11114• 4 months ago

This 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.

icedchai2• 4 months ago

Not 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.

adi_kurian• 4 months ago

After 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.

captain_coffee• 4 months ago

I 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.

okr3• 4 months ago

The last straw was for me the ads on podcasts as a paid subscriber. I miss my playlists.

e406• 4 months ago

I 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• 4 months ago

YouTube isn't too bad. I preferred it but moving the whole family over was too hard

utdoctor• 4 months ago

Could 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.

e406• 4 months ago

I 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• 4 months ago

I moved over to Tidal recently. Haven’t missed Spotify

gaws2• 4 months ago

I would love to cancel and move to something else.

What's the hold up?

e406• 4 months ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47440869

pjmlp2• 4 months ago

My MP3 "mix tape" doesn't play ads.

anotherhadi2• 4 months ago

Same thing as Netflix, Prime video and others, they will next offer a premium++ subscription without any ads..

ryandvm• 4 months ago

Advertising 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.

okr3• 4 months ago

I 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.

veronicalin• 4 months ago

So in Spotify, they have subscriber, vip and svip...

We need to pay more and more to avoid ads.

millereffect• 4 months ago

Sounds like they need a better system to manage their entitlements!!!

Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

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