[HN Gopher] Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
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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
Author : IncandescentGas
Score : 75 points
Date : 2026-03-18 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago)
| noemit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_1111 wrote:
| 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
| lschueller wrote:
| 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.
| sequin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Same, except moved to Qobuz. They have both streaming and you
| can buy downloads.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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 :)
| vpribish wrote:
| IF this is happening it's gotta be a mistake. Ads on paid spotify
| will be the end of my subscription.
| lich_king wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| PSA: Stop using Spotify, they're predatory scum.
| halapro wrote:
| 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)
| vpribish wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mholm wrote:
| 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.
| pwython wrote:
| My biggest gripe with Apple Music is shuffling. When I
| shuffle my entire library of thousands of songs, I'm
| hearing the same ~50 songs over and over UNTIL I add a new
| song to my library. Then suddenly I'm hearing songs I
| haven't heard in years. How does one screw up randomization
| that bad, and how has it not been fixed over the past
| several years?
| thenthenthen wrote:
| They started with a pirated set of music (sounds familiar?),
| they invest in the military industrial complex.
| some_random wrote:
| 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| 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_fire wrote:
| 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.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That can't be ... "Spotify engineers haven't coded since
| December"
| mholm wrote:
| Doesn't even feel like they've committed code since December
| 2023
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| Sometimes a bug is indistinguishable from AB testing
| petersellers wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And you wouldn't cancel if they said you were gonna get ads
| upfront?
| wao0uuno wrote:
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Basic-plans-...
| So it was a bug. Tags under the post are kinda funny though.
| blakesterz wrote:
| You're right, those tags are GREAT! Worth clicking through and
| having a look.
| cuuupid wrote:
| 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."
| shimman wrote:
| 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.
| lowenbjer wrote:
| Three dots next to the song title, menu opens, "Add to
| Queue", done.
| shimman wrote:
| I 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.
| lowenbjer wrote:
| Fair point, for me there is no scrolling required though,
| its like nr 3 in the list.
|
| I wonder how long it will take for AI to learn how we
| work with software on an individual level and adapt the
| UI to fit our usage patterns.
| fdghrtbrt wrote:
| Keep doing. Hearing people complain about streaming software,
| when they could be playing their sounds locally with free
| software, makes my day every day.
| shimman wrote:
| I have been looking up DAP devices (digital audio players),
| anything you'd recommend that you know? Use to rock a Zune
| until the desktop software was unable to connect to it,
| loved that device.
|
| Really tempted to buy this device:
|
| https://store.hiby.com/pages/hiby-digital-miku
|
| Because the color scheme and buttons look cool, not really
| aware of the waifu but she has good taste.
|
| Do agree about local sounds, streaming audio sounds so
| compressed and awful. Very inefficient compared to the
| audio quality of locally hosted music.
| samuelg123 wrote:
| Try using apple music
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| I bought another app to play Apple Music because that's how
| much the Music app usability has decreased.
| happymellon wrote:
| Don't you just swipe right on a song to add it to the queue?
| shimman wrote:
| I wish! Just tried this on the iPhone app (sure it's all
| the same flavor of electron) but it doesn't work.
| cuuupid wrote:
| I mean Spotify sucks but Electron is a desktop framework,
| not what their iPhone app is built with, and you can
| queue by swiping right on their official app.
| shimman wrote:
| Wow, this only works for songs (and it's left) but not
| podcast episodes (my main use case). I had no idea you
| could do this! If I have to blame someone, I blame
| snapchat for making "unknown UX controls as something for
| users to discover" as the main pusher of the UI trend.
|
| Rather than sending me marketing materials, I wish
| companies would send power users tips/tricks. Would
| definitely read those emails.
| Gormo wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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)
| SilverElfin wrote:
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| lowenbjer wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| lowenbjer wrote:
| 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?
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| 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_fire wrote:
| 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.
| lowenbjer wrote:
| I tried tidal for the Lossless (dont care about the 24bit,
| i care about no EQ and compression added to music) but i
| went back to spotify for their recommendation model. Its a
| moat for me.
| paxys wrote:
| > 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.
| ladax72707 wrote:
| 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.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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