Spotify, when they made the insane decision to pivot to podcasts, revealed a deep misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of audio. Or perhaps it would be clearer to say: music is not just “audio” and podcasts are not just “audio” and you can’t pretend they are equivalent.

I recently had to drop Spotify because it was showing advertisements for gay fetish podcasts on my work computer. In large size, with graphic illustration, above the fold, with no way to disable. I never used Spotify for podcasts.

I was a loyal subscriber for years but I had to drop them. This is one specific example, but there are many other consequences for a company that forgets what it’s product is - or perhaps hallucinates some connection between completely unrelated product categories, and tries to shove it down their customers’ throats; ironically reminiscent of some extreme BDSM content they advertise on my screen share-prone work computer.

Spotify has been actively wasting money on a massive blunder in search of growth and it is going to backfire even more than it already has. And they still haven’t done the bare-minimum work to make a good podcast client.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8...

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmZlZWRidXJ...

(Notice how Google is smart enough to put an ‘E’ for explicit tag on the podcasts)

Podcasts are not fucking music, but they are of course happy to fuck their users, the open podcast ecosystem, and in the long run their investors with them. Maybe they’ve been listening to too much https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmxpYnN5bi5...

You can take a principled stand by dropping your subscription and blocking them with pihole, as I have. Be careful though, they’re sneaky with their domains.