Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 136 posts

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#21

Post by jbb67 »

lich_king wrote: post #16
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 b…

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.

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#22

Post by kreyenborgi »

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

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#23

Post by happytoexplain »

lich_king wrote: post #16
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 b…

"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.

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#24

Post by mholm »

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)

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.

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#25

Post by mholm »

conradfr wrote: post #13
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"

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

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#26

Post by thenthenthen »

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

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#27

Post by some_random »

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)

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.

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#28

Post by shimman »

cuuupid wrote: post #19

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."

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.

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#29

Post by user3939382 »

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.
Post reply on HN