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Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#41

Post by surgical_fire »

edoceo wrote: post #33
lowenbjer wrote: post #30

"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.

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.

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#42

Post by vpribish »

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…

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.

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#44

Post by surgical_fire »

drcongo wrote: post #9

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

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.

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#45

Post by happymellon »

shimman wrote: post #28
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 control…

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

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#46

Post by j1elo »

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."

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)

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#48

Post by pwython »

mholm wrote: post #24
halapro wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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?

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#49

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

samuelg123 wrote: post #38
shimman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Re: Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

#50

Post by chucksta »

petersellers wrote: post #17

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.

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