alt.hn

3/18/2026 at 5:11:30 PM

Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

by IncandescentGas

3/18/2026 at 7:08:29 PM

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."

by cuuupid

3/18/2026 at 7:16:46 PM

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.

by shimman

3/18/2026 at 11:38:41 PM

Not to mention that, if there is a queue, clicking Play on an album will play only the first track and add the rest of the tracks to the bottom of the queue. Did the PM honestly think listeners wanted that?

by Starman_Jones

3/18/2026 at 11:03:26 PM

Sounds like they have the same problem all software companies have as soon as the MBAs took over.

Metrics, not for the purpose of making the software better, but to justify someone's existence in the company.

by OptionOfT

3/19/2026 at 12:00:22 AM

The MBAs work in the interests of the C-suite. It's their stat-padding that's made Daniel Ek a billionnaire despite running losses for 99% of the time he's led the company.

by rchaud

3/19/2026 at 2:21:47 PM

And the C-suite works for the shareholders. And the shareholders exploit the current economical system etc.

Most problems which keep cropping up are systemic. Learn about the system that produces the problem to find the root cause. Put the crowbar there.

by fainpul

3/19/2026 at 1:05:35 AM

[dead]

by AniseAbyss

3/19/2026 at 3:58:55 AM

The techcrunch article is my favorite piece on Spotify, and proves that LLMs will not save you from your own stupidity.

For years now the Spotify release team has been rotating their package signing key on every release. [0] This completely defeats the point of package signing, which is to assure you that the next release is coming from the same people as the last one. In Spotify's case this is impossible to ascertain, as one cannot easily distinguish a legit new signing key from Spotify, from a supply chain attack.

With all this extra "intelligence" and productivity you would think such long-standing trivialities and security flaws would have been addressed by now. Not so if the humans driving those agents don't understand basic concepts or recognize a problem even exists.

Instead, merely, "fuck the Linux users."

I cancelled my Spotify long ago when music started disappearing from my library. Pirated music does not disappear.

[0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/spotify#comment-1048914

by rdevilla

3/18/2026 at 7:44:22 PM

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

by happymellon

3/18/2026 at 8:43:49 PM

I wish! Just tried this on the iPhone app (sure it's all the same flavor of electron) but it doesn't work.

by shimman

3/18/2026 at 11:13:37 PM

It does work, I just did on my app, swiping right will show an icon to add to queue on the left side of the track, slide it until it's green.

The iPhone app is not Electron, it's a native app.

by piva00

3/18/2026 at 11:59:42 PM

This appears to only work for songs, this action does not work for podcasts or playlists. Wow! What bad engineering culture, likely only caring about what's in the ticket and not the feature overall. I guess this is what happens to a product after spending a decade only hiring people who can do leetcode.

by shimman

3/19/2026 at 12:11:22 PM

There's no leetcode interviewing at Spotify as far as I know.

by piva00

3/18/2026 at 9:21:46 PM

I mean Spotify sucks but Electron is a desktop framework, not what their iPhone app is built with, and you can queue by swiping right on their official app.

by cuuupid

3/18/2026 at 9:26:12 PM

Wow, this only works for songs (and it's left) but not podcast episodes (my main use case). I had no idea you could do this! If I have to blame someone, I blame snapchat for making "unknown UX controls as something for users to discover" as the main pusher of the UI trend.

Rather than sending me marketing materials, I wish companies would send power users tips/tricks. Would definitely read those emails.

by shimman

3/19/2026 at 5:33:48 AM

I don't use Spotify for anything other than music so wasn't aware of this limitation, but on Android it is definitely swiping right.

That rubbish that it's different per platform.

by happymellon

3/18/2026 at 7:31:50 PM

Keep doing. Hearing people complain about streaming software, when they could be playing their sounds locally with free software, makes my day every day.

by fdghrtbrt

3/18/2026 at 8:50:46 PM

I have been looking up DAP devices (digital audio players), anything you'd recommend that you know? Use to rock a Zune until the desktop software was unable to connect to it, loved that device.

Really tempted to buy this device:

https://store.hiby.com/pages/hiby-digital-miku

Because the color scheme and buttons look cool, not really aware of the waifu but she has good taste.

Do agree about local sounds, streaming audio sounds so compressed and awful. Very inefficient compared to the audio quality of locally hosted music.

by shimman

3/19/2026 at 12:30:58 PM

But Spotify is so much simpler.. And recommendations are great

by anotherhadi

3/18/2026 at 7:27:27 PM

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

by lowenbjer

3/18/2026 at 8:46:48 PM

I click three dots, add to queue is at the bottom of the list, need to scroll, then click add to queue.

Why do I have to do so many actions when adding an item (say a podcast) to my current playlist? Why can't there be a single button that says "add to queue," why hide an common workflow behind nested menus and actions?

Wouldn't adding songs to your current queue be an extremely common action by users? Or at least power users?

I think I might become one of those people that makes their own frontend music player for Jellyfin. Adding and modifying playlists are something I do often (wrote like 100s of collages on what.cd back in the day), but with Spotify these actions are so fucking painful.

by shimman

3/18/2026 at 10:07:04 PM

Fair point, for me there is no scrolling required though, its like nr 3 in the list.

I wonder how long it will take for AI to learn how we work with software on an individual level and adapt the UI to fit our usage patterns.

by lowenbjer

3/19/2026 at 3:29:58 AM

I disagree, Spotify has been very stable and performant for the last decade I’ve been using it. That speaks to decent software development. UI/product shifts are sometimes eh, but the core library has everything you expect from it. Music discovery tools are decent. I’ve tried Apple Music & YouTube Music on and off over the years and they aren’t better.

Adding a song to the queue on my phone is two taps away (3 dots > add to queue) or just swipe right on the list item. On desktop it’s one of the top options when you right click. It’s really not that bad.

The chief complaint is that the home page changes frequently and is hard to navigate, which is fair, and also pretty typical for tech companies. But all I really need is library & search, which are front & center without that.

by anon7000

3/20/2026 at 11:35:54 AM

I agree too, additionally to that, the whole API ecosystem is good enough to build alternative clients.

by pixel_popping

3/19/2026 at 3:22:18 AM

I recall it being crap back in 2009 when the mobile software was highly flakey: it would sync over 1Gb of my playlists but was really unreliable so every few days it would get corrupted and require to resync the data in its entirety. At the time this quickly added up to more than my broadband plan would allow and I was stuck without the music and without normal speed internet (it would revert to some super slow level) I complained and they didn't seem to care as it stayed unstable and they kept advising to try again when my data cap was removed, it would fail again and then I cancelled my subscription.

by nmstoker

3/18/2026 at 7:32:50 PM

Try using apple music

by samuelg123

3/18/2026 at 8:23:31 PM

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

by TYPE_FASTER

3/18/2026 at 8:00:19 PM

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)

by j1elo

3/18/2026 at 7:33:27 PM

> 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.

by Gormo

3/18/2026 at 10:09:22 PM

Spotify is a terribly run company. Zero innovation. Bugs. Frustrating interface design. It’s awful and they deserve to lose at this point. I’m surprised anyone ever praised their management techniques.

by SilverElfin

3/19/2026 at 9:11:31 AM

Heavily disagree. Good UI, lot of innovation, no bugs for me. Very pleasant to use. And totally free.

by rurban

3/19/2026 at 6:14:13 PM

What has Spotify done towards innovation for the end users? They definitely innovated by rat fucking musicians to earn more money, but that seems like a trait that hurts society and not uplifts it.

by shimman

3/18/2026 at 10:25:20 PM

[dead]

by useftmly

3/18/2026 at 6:46:17 PM

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.

by sequin

3/18/2026 at 11:51:21 PM

YouTube’s commingling of playlists (and everything else) between music and videos made it completely unusable for me.

I am a YouTube Premium subscriber, but ended up subscribing to Apple Music to get a service that works the way I want, without screwing up other things I use.

YouTube has started screwing up as well. I was having a lot of issues with YouTube errors in Safari. Best I can tell it was due to uBlock Origin Lite. When I disabled content blockers on YouTube my error rate went down dramatically. If I’m paying for YouTube and shouldn’t see any ads, why does the site break itself when I have content blockers enabled? It seems the heavy handed measures to get free users to watch ads are also impacting Premium users. This feels wrong.

by al_borland

3/18/2026 at 7:12:03 PM

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.

by kleene_op

3/19/2026 at 10:51:45 AM

I never used Spotify, get to use YouTube to find out about new artists, but what I get to play are plain old MP3, either bought directly as such, or taken from music albums that I still buy with some regularity, ideally directly from bands after attending their concert, if they happen to sell some afterwards.

by pjmlp

3/18/2026 at 7:18:52 PM

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 :)

by embedding-shape

3/18/2026 at 7:12:30 PM

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

by kreyenborgi

3/18/2026 at 7:08:15 PM

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Basic-plans-... So it was a bug. Tags under the post are kinda funny though.

by wao0uuno

3/18/2026 at 8:01:57 PM

You're right, those tags are GREAT! Worth clicking through and having a look.

by blakesterz

3/19/2026 at 7:49:13 AM

Looks like they've cleaned them up already.

by wao0uuno

3/18/2026 at 7:38:42 PM

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.

by Esophagus4

3/18/2026 at 5:25:50 PM

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.

by lschueller

3/19/2026 at 7:20:37 AM

I would love to cancel and move to something else. Recently tried Apple Music and I was appalled at how bad it was. The ui/ux of Spotify isn’t great, and has gotten worse over the years, but Apple Music’s was downright terrible. I stuck it out for a week and then deleted the app.

by e40

3/19/2026 at 1:26:37 PM

Could you share what you didn’t like about Apple Music? As a previously long time Spotify user I initially was put off by Apple Music but have been using it for the past 5-6 years and have come to really enjoy it.

by utdoctor

3/19/2026 at 3:12:29 PM

I should have taken detailed notes, but I didn't. I was continuously frustrated when I wanted to do something I used to do in Spotify, but couldn't find a way to do it in Music. Also, in general, I just found the UI of Music really confusing, even after days of using it.

The two features I use most on Spotify are "radio for a song" and "shuffle liked songs" (of which I have some 5k... and I moved them over to Music into a playlist). I'm pretty sure I had issues with both of these, but as I said, I don't remember. Had both of these gone well, I'd have stayed with it.

Btw, I had the same reaction to the Podcasts app. Having used Pocket Casts for many years, I tried Podcasts and the UI is just terrible for the way I listen to podcasts. The only time I use it is when I need to look for some NYT thing that isn't still in the free feeds.

by e40

3/19/2026 at 10:38:25 AM

YouTube isn't too bad. I preferred it but moving the whole family over was too hard

by jemmyw

3/19/2026 at 3:11:54 PM

> I would love to cancel and move to something else.

What's the hold up?

by gaws

3/19/2026 at 3:13:01 PM

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47440869

by e40

3/19/2026 at 3:14:59 PM

YouTube Music could work for you.

by gaws

3/19/2026 at 9:46:55 PM

Wow, installed YTM and my spotify playlists are already there. Including something I liked a couple of hours before I installed the app. When I did this in Apple Music I had to jump through simple hoops to allow the connection!

So far, looks very simple and easy to use. I will definitely give a try. Thanks!

EDIT: right off the bat, it's included all my likes from YT... which is very annoying. Those are videos. Hopefully that can be changed.

EDIT2: I didn't include my Spotify liked songs... it was coincidicence that I listened to something in YT and Spotify.

by e40

3/20/2026 at 12:47:23 AM

EDIT3: the process took a while, but it imported much better than Apple Music. A cursory look at the ui/ux... I can live with this, though I really need to test drive it for a while.

@gaws Really appreciate your suggestion.

by e40

3/19/2026 at 5:15:18 PM

I'll check it out. Thanks.

by e40

3/19/2026 at 2:25:38 PM

I moved over to Tidal recently. Haven’t missed Spotify

by ianschmitz

3/19/2026 at 12:24:13 AM

We had two broadcast TV channels where we lived when I was growing up in the 1970s. My Dad signed up for cable TV. It ran 24/7 instead of 6AM-to-midnight (yes, broadcast TV went off the air at midnight in many areas) and it had no commercials.

A few years after getting cable, they started running ads on it. Dad for furious. "No ads" was one of the things he was paying for, as he saw it.

Ironically, half the ads - at least in the beginning - were urging people to sign up for cable TV. But people couldn't see the ads unless they already had cable TV...

by Froedlich

3/19/2026 at 6:34:10 PM

This is completely untrue. Cable TV always had ads.

1. The first thing that cable was used for was to get over the air networks to rural areas that couldn’t get a signal - these always had ads

2. The second was “Superstations” that were former local independent stations that ran ads like TBS. They always had ads.

3. The third wave was MTV, USA, Lifetime, (or its precursor), ESPN etc - they always had ads

The only reason you didn’t see many ads was because the cable native channels were still trying to convince companies to buy ads.

by raw_anon_1111

3/19/2026 at 11:07:33 PM

Not entirely true. The "premium" channels (HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Bravo, The Movie Channel, etc.) never had ads.

Then there were channels like Nickelodeon that originally had no ads, then added them in the mid 80's. I remember this distinctly because I was annoyed by it. My parents got cable in 1980 when it first came to our area.

by icedchai

3/19/2026 at 11:21:15 PM

It was only because they didn’t have enough viewers to convince companies to pay for ads.

by raw_anon_1111

3/19/2026 at 11:33:32 PM

The "premium" movie channels had tons of paying subscribers. They didn't need ads. It was very much a selling point for those channels.

by icedchai

3/19/2026 at 11:48:47 PM

I was talking about Nickelodeon

by raw_anon_1111

3/18/2026 at 7:17:42 PM

"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.

by lowenbjer

3/18/2026 at 10:40:06 PM

> This subreddit is mainly for sharing Spotify playlists. We're not a support community, and we encourage users to use official support channels for most issues.

Literally the first line of the sub description.

by paxys

3/18/2026 at 11:37:25 PM

yes, the correct sub for this is r/truespotify, and there are a dozen discussions on the problem.

by RogerL

3/19/2026 at 12:08:52 AM

Fair enough! Can't argue with that

by lowenbjer

3/18/2026 at 7:24:34 PM

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.

by edoceo

3/18/2026 at 7:34:36 PM

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.

by Esophagus4

3/18/2026 at 7:35:01 PM

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.

by surgical_fire

3/18/2026 at 10:08:49 PM

I tried tidal for the Lossless (dont care about the 24bit, i care about no EQ and compression added to music) but i went back to spotify for their recommendation model. Its a moat for me.

by lowenbjer

3/18/2026 at 11:10:21 PM

I don't think lossless gives you anything other than, well, lossless compression. EQ or dynamic range compression don't really have anything to do with it.

by distances

3/18/2026 at 7:30:06 PM

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?

by lowenbjer

3/18/2026 at 7:08:10 PM

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.

by petersellers

3/18/2026 at 8:24:48 PM

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

by chucksta

3/19/2026 at 7:08:14 AM

I'd cancel either way, I'd just be less mad if they announced it ahead of time.

by petersellers

3/19/2026 at 4:23:12 PM

Advertising is always a race to the bottom and ads ruin everything.

I feel like in a couple hundred years they're going to look back at our advertising encrusted existence like we look upon the pre-sewage-treatment era of humanity.

by ryandvm

3/20/2026 at 3:22:55 AM

I hope not. I am in general fine with Ads for content, even with profiling to what i listen and so on. But if you pay for subscription to get no Ads and still you get Ads from Spotify, then it is plain stupid.

by okr

3/18/2026 at 10:14:02 PM

For anyone looking for a spotify alternative, please join me in making a better, self-hosted spotify!

1.) Buy music when you can, and when you can't, pirate!

2.) Run Gonic(1)! (or whatever you want, I'm not in charge of what you do at the end of the day, but Gonic is a.) very light, and b.) a subsonic(2) server, so it's compatible with anything that supports that family of services)

2a.) How you run it is up to preference, I have a NAS that runs mine, you can also run it off something like Pikapods(3), a VPS (you know what a VPS is), or off your own desktop/laptop/raspberry pi, who cares.

3.) Download a subsonic compatible player, which is much more open to preferences, but I highly suggest Symfonium(4)

4.) Enjoy music streaming without ads, limits, or artists you don't like!

(1) https://github.com/sentriz/gonic

(2) https://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

(3) https://www.pikapods.com/

(4) https://symfonium.app/

to be clear, i have no relation to any of these products, outside of supporting the development of gonic and donating to symfonium. if anyone is interested I can do a more in depth write up of how I personally manage my stuff, but it's not much more complicated than this, just with a TB+ of music in a folder.

by totallygeeky

3/19/2026 at 4:55:35 AM

Is there a reason to use Gonic instead of Navidrome? I've been using the latter for hosting my music collection for over a year now and really like it. Good riddance Spotify. [1]

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for more choices. But it seems like you have opinions on this topic and I'd like to hear them.

[1] See my blog post from a while back: https://lukecyca.com/2025/listen-to-music-like-its-2005.html

by ireflect

3/19/2026 at 8:37:28 AM

> Is there a reason to use Gonic instead of Navidrome?

Not really. Both are great! I moved to Gonic because it exposed full file paths which Navidrome didn't at the time, but it has since implemented that as well.

Gonic doesn't come with a front end so it's a bit lighter if that's something you care about.

by kyorochan

3/19/2026 at 10:13:41 AM

Thank you. Can you stream your songs from anywhere that you have a connection?

by kalx

3/19/2026 at 10:28:17 AM

1. Buy music when you can, and when you can't, listen to what you own, don't steal.

there, fixed it for you

by iamsaitam

3/19/2026 at 3:17:40 PM

Meh, its almost line taking money for music without ads and inserting ads and fake music/promo content.

To make it simpler: MANY countries have enacted a law where every storage device (disk, pendrive, dvd) has a special surcharge/levy added, that covers the coat of "piracy".

Levy is then distributed to the rights holders.

Its not stealing if I paid for it!

by subscribed

3/19/2026 at 2:01:53 AM

I was having ads played even with the most expensive Spotify subscription a few years ago because ... feel this: The ads were CHOSEN BY THE END CLIENT, not Spotify itself as a legal entity. Needless to say that I am no longer using Spotify for a few years now and I highly encourage a mass exodus from the platform.

by captain_coffee

3/18/2026 at 5:15:08 PM

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.

by noemit

3/20/2026 at 5:46:18 PM

Sounds like they need a better system to manage their entitlements!!!

by millereffect

3/19/2026 at 5:49:52 AM

The last straw was for me the ads on podcasts as a paid subscriber. I miss my playlists.

by okr

3/18/2026 at 6:55:15 PM

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

by vpribish

3/18/2026 at 7:08:06 PM

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.

by lich_king

3/18/2026 at 7:12:22 PM

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.

by jbb67

3/18/2026 at 7:13:10 PM

"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.

by happytoexplain

3/18/2026 at 7:25:33 PM

> 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.

by JumpCrisscross

3/18/2026 at 7:37:20 PM

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.

by vpribish

3/20/2026 at 12:53:47 PM

So in Spotify, they have subscriber, vip and svip...

We need to pay more and more to avoid ads.

by veronicalin

3/18/2026 at 5:23:38 PM

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?

by Festro

3/18/2026 at 6:12:03 PM

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

by raw_anon_1111

3/19/2026 at 1:53:09 AM

Check out the Sponsor block browser plugin to auto skip that stuff.

by _DeadFred_

3/18/2026 at 7:16:47 PM

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.

by user3939382

3/19/2026 at 12:51:16 AM

After having, as a teenager, having been, unbeknownst to me, a bonafied in the flesh content marketing tool of Spotify, it was thrilling to cancel my subscription this year as I learned more about their advertising business and clients.

by adi_kurian

3/19/2026 at 10:49:42 AM

My MP3 "mix tape" doesn't play ads.

by pjmlp

3/18/2026 at 7:18:51 PM

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.

by ladax72707

3/19/2026 at 12:29:54 PM

Same thing as Netflix, Prime video and others, they will next offer a premium++ subscription without any ads..

by anotherhadi

3/18/2026 at 11:58:34 PM

Not a single mention of Pandora in this thread? Do people really not use it?

It’s so much better for just picking a song or musician or genre and having a never ending playlist

by arealaccount

3/18/2026 at 6:56:31 PM

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.

by pythonaut_16

3/18/2026 at 7:03:02 PM

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

by conradfr

3/18/2026 at 7:14:23 PM

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

by mholm

3/18/2026 at 7:04:00 PM

Sometimes a bug is indistinguishable from AB testing

by sharkjacobs

3/18/2026 at 6:56:10 PM

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

by drcongo

3/18/2026 at 7:00:02 PM

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)

by halapro

3/18/2026 at 7:13:32 PM

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.

by mholm

3/18/2026 at 8:14:17 PM

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?

by pwython

3/18/2026 at 7:16:31 PM

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.

by some_random

3/19/2026 at 2:18:50 AM

Why take it on Spotify? YouTube Music pays even less and I've never heard anyone complain about that.

by halapro

3/18/2026 at 7:04:30 PM

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.

by petercooper

3/18/2026 at 7:14:39 PM

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

by thenthenthen

3/18/2026 at 7:02:55 PM

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.

by vpribish

3/19/2026 at 8:42:39 AM

There are lots of alternatives. What makes them all unacceptable?

by kyorochan

3/19/2026 at 9:57:45 PM

spotify's recommendation systems really work for me to discover new music i will enjoy, not just more music like what I already listen to

by vpribish

3/18/2026 at 10:41:13 PM

Well, for one thing there's that whole pushing their own AI generated slop music into electronica playlists so that actual artists get fewer plays.

by drcongo

3/19/2026 at 2:22:37 AM

That I'm starting to feel the pain myself, but the Spotify hate is way older than this phenomenon.

by halapro

3/19/2026 at 10:20:17 AM

Oh yeah, it's just the latest thing in a long line of nasty. I cancelled my Spotify way back when they decided to fund the rise of fascism by giving money to imbecilic ham hock Joe Rogan.

by drcongo

3/18/2026 at 11:22:19 PM

70% of their revenue goes straight into paying royalties, always, if the music labels don't pay their artists enough due to predatory contracts shouldn't some of the flak be focused there? Even more: they've always fleeced artists, even when physical media sales were the only market.

by piva00

3/18/2026 at 7:42:56 PM

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.

by surgical_fire

3/19/2026 at 5:55:03 AM

Piracy is also predatory, just saying.

by okr

3/19/2026 at 4:35:33 PM

It isn't when it's paid off in advance in a form of the predatory tax, also on people and items anywhere close to "piracy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

If someone lives in one of the countries where this tax is being levied, they're not "pirating", they're merely exercising their prepaid privilege.

by subscribed

3/19/2026 at 10:25:26 AM

Which is why I included the second paragraph.

by surgical_fire

3/19/2026 at 10:17:59 PM

[dead]

by benjaminpark282

3/19/2026 at 3:48:13 AM

[dead]

by balinha_8864

3/19/2026 at 12:58:27 AM

[dead]

by ttbigroad94

3/19/2026 at 12:34:52 AM

[flagged]

by Good53139428015