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Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#12

Post by vpribish »

halapro wrote: post #11
drcongo wrote: post #9

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

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)

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.

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#13

Post by conradfr »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #10

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 resp…

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

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#14

Post by sharkjacobs »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #10

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 resp…

Sometimes a bug is indistinguishable from AB testing

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#15

Post by petercooper »

halapro wrote: post #11
drcongo wrote: post #9

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

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)

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.

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#16

Post by lich_king »

vpribish wrote: post #8

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

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.

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#19

Post by cuuupid »

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."

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#20

Post by kleene_op »

sequin wrote: post #7

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.

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.

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