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.
Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
31–40 of 136 posts
Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
#32I 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.
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 :)
Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
#33"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.
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.
Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
#34IF 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…
> 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.
Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
#35This 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 control…
Three dots next to the song title, menu opens, "Add to Queue", done.
Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
#36"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.
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.
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?
Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
#37This 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 control…
Keep doing. Hearing people complain about streaming software, when they could be playing their sounds locally with free software, makes my day every day.
Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
#38This 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 control…
Try using apple music
Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
#39This 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 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.
Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
#40"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.
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.
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.