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

57 points

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IncandescentGas

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3 hours ago

49 comments

cuuupid ・ 2 hours 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."

  • shimman ・ an hour 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.

    • happymellon ・ an hour ago

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

    • lowenbjer ・ an hour ago

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

    • fdghrtbrt ・ an hour 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 ・ an hour ago

      Try using apple music

      • TYPE_FASTER ・ 17 minutes ago

        I bought another app to play Apple Music because that’s how much the Music app usability has decreased.

  • j1elo ・ 40 minutes 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)

  • Gormo ・ an hour 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.

sequin ・ 2 hours 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 ・ an hour 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.

  • embedding-shape ・ an hour 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 :)

  • kreyenborgi ・ an hour ago

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

Esophagus4 ・ an hour 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.

lschueller ・ 3 hours 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.

lowenbjer ・ an hour 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 ・ an hour 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.

    • Esophagus4 ・ an hour 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.

    • lowenbjer ・ an hour 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?

    • surgical_fire ・ an hour 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.

noemit ・ 3 hours 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.

ladax72707 ・ an hour 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.

petersellers ・ 2 hours 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 ・ 15 minutes ago

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

Festro ・ 3 hours 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_1111 ・ 2 hours 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

vpribish ・ 2 hours ago

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

  • lich_king ・ 2 hours 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 ・ an hour 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 ・ an hour 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 ・ an hour 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 ・ an hour 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.

user3939382 ・ an hour 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.

pythonaut_16 ・ 2 hours 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 ・ 2 hours ago

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

    • mholm ・ an hour ago

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

  • sharkjacobs ・ 2 hours ago

    Sometimes a bug is indistinguishable from AB testing

drcongo ・ 2 hours ago

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

  • halapro ・ 2 hours 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)

    • mholm ・ an hour 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.

      • pwython ・ 26 minutes ago

        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?

    • some_random ・ an hour 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.

    • petercooper ・ 2 hours 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.

    • thenthenthen ・ an hour ago

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

    • vpribish ・ 2 hours 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.

  • surgical_fire ・ an hour 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.