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Tell HN: Spotify Premium is full of Ads

79 pointsushakov94 comments

Have you listened to German Rap yet?

Why don't you upgrade to Spotify Duo?

You're a top fan of Chainsmokers (am I?). Listen to this random playlist that we added to your Library without your consent

Is this really the "Ad-free" listening experience I'm paying for? Or are these not ads?

Reference for all above: https://imgur.com/a/OA7UM6w

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Your also missing the ads in podcast content too. Its the curse that youtube now has as well. You pay for advert free content yet its embedded in the content anyway.

Atleast you can easily skip the ones embedded by the creators.

SmartTubeNext (ShieldTV, FireTv, any android tv), SponsorBlock (ios, firefox, chrome, etc.) - basically whatever client that makes use of https://sponsor.ajay.app/

It’s a crowd sourced database of timecodes for videos on YouTube that categorises segments so you can choose what to skip.

These clients also block pre-roll ad’s as well as in-stream ad’s.

In the past I've had some success with the SponsorBlock extension [1] available for Chrome, Firefox, iOS/Android, etc. It's a crowd-sourced list of videos and timestamps of sponsor shoutouts, and it will skip the video ahead past the ad for you. It implements some methods to keep your privacy so you're not just uploading a list of every watched video to their servers.

It's not perfect, being crowd-sourced it won't have brand-new videos in its database. It would be interesting to see if some ML/algorithm could buffer your video and detect the ad and skip it.

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

I disagree -- it is perfect.

On a channel with 100k+ subscribers, the segments to be skipped appear almost instantly after the video is posted.

A bonus is that it skips repetitive content, not necessarily just ads.

By its design it cannot be perfect. You are getting lucky that someone else with SponsorBlock watched the video before you and recorded the timestamp in the database.

That’s great, but I can’t help cringe at the “yet another extension”. I have so many for each little thing to block.

I wonder if Firefox can make the premise of these things “block X or Y or Z” and bake it into Firefox directly and then you subscribe to lists of them

pair this with newpipe+sponsorblock on android at least and you have a "decent" youtube frontend that lets you watch without

1. getting sucked into the recomendations blackhole 2. stop getting used to in-video adverts and sponsorships

I'm honestly surprised Spotify and YouTube haven't come down on "sponsored" content - they're the platform, if you want to advertise on the platform, you're supposed to go through them, and they distribute some of it back to the content providers. (Love it or hate it, that is the business model).

Given a between the peanuts YouTube gives creators and what sponsored content gives them, they might leave?

YouTube could do it. They have a monopoly pretty much.

Seems pretty obvious that record labels can give Spotify money to promote specific tracks into people's Discovery Mode and other playlists. Aka Payola.

https://www.unionofmusicians.org/justice-at-spotify-demands

Spotify ended up just remaking the old music industry where the musicians get screwed from licensing music, only more so now.

These wouldnt be so bad if they weren't fullscreen modals that interfere with your usage. My phone tries to give spotify a play command when it connects to my car's bluetooth but sometimes it just isnt gonna play anything until I drink the verification can. On a good day I do not even need to take my phone out of my pocket.

I have Spotify Premium and I'm okay with any promotions/recommendations as long as I don't get interrupted with actual ads in between 2-3 songs on my playlists.

i'm not okay with any promotions/recommendations as long as I'm paying for Premium

Correct. Is any Spotify user seriously going to maintain that "Premium" does not mean "no ads"?

Honestly, the only thing I care about is audio interruptions to my music. If a record label wants to pay spotify to place a text widget on my screen that says "check out this new album", I am OK with that because it's very ignorable.

That is, what I'm paying for is "no audio interruptions".

Definitely don’t sign up for Hulu then. Even worse

You're not okay with recommendations? That's 80% of why many of us use Spotify in the first place.

if that's what Spotify considers a recommendation, then I don't want any

Consider canceling Spotify then.

80%? That doesn't include me. I'm a reluctant payer to avoid ads, and so I can play my choice of music anywhere.

Do you feel the same way about Netflix recommendations? I'm curious where you draw the line.

Or YouTube? The homepage and literally every video are full of recommendations.

Thanks to various plugins for Firefox, my experience of the YouTube homepage is a blank page apart from the search bar.

That's so much worse than actually YouTube though. If I've been watching programming, physics, or history YouTube it absolutely surfaces excellent creators I'd have no other means of discovering.

YouTube isn't Wikipedia. I don't go into it wanting a specific narrow thing. Like how do you even find content you'd like otherwise?

I do use it like Wikipedia, I guess. Or actually more like Google.

I'm really not into doomscrolling "content". Life's too short.

Absolutely. I've found probably 20-30 great channels thanks to YouTube's recommendations successfully recommending me stuff I actually enjoy.

I can't stand Netflix's interface, and it's recommendations are absolutely terrible.

We're approaching the One True User Interface: search bar and recommendations. And it's awful.

Netflix never gave me a popup or played recommendation of anything between two episodes of a series.

I think that's what most people mean. They want to listen to an album/several/playlist and not hear anything else. (should add: and also not see any popups. Netflix doesn't give me popups, the only place I see stuff I do not want to see is the landing page)

The recommendations were nice because it meant you didn't have to manually curate playlists while you're out and about (but you could still search out a specific track if you want to). I viewed them as part of the value of a subscription and didn't mind if they were promoting artists via homepage links and such.

However, in just the last few weeks I've noticed the recommendations have gone from surfacing old favorites and interesting new (to me) music and is instead pushing stuff like that big podcast guy they signed.

One could argue these modals would be considered promotional / recommendation of content rather than an advertisement. That aside, the Spotify ToS states "In any part of the Spotify Service, the Content that you access, including its selection and placement, may be influenced by commercial considerations, including Spotify's agreements with third parties." which I suspect covers recommendations.

The "it is not ad, it is recommendation" thing is just pissing me off even more. A lot of companies now pulling that stunt.

For example I bought a TV that has a good OLED panel. That TV outright had shown me popups while I am using it, "recommending" I install specific apps or watch new season of a specific TV show. And it is "recommendations" because on the EULA I said I don't agree with ads.

Jeez that's hideous.

A tip I've picked up from HN: buy a monitor to use for visual media instead of a "TV". Set-top boxes and PVRs should plug straight in. I've not actually done this yet, but when my old TV dies I'll either live without, or follow this tip.

Problem is they charge through the nose for these. I looked into it, the price was just ridiculous and unrealistic.

This is one of the weird differences between say, the Apple Music client and the Spotify client where the Music one has essentially the 'player' and 'library' parts separate from the 'store' and 'recommendations' part. In Spotify it's all just mixed together making for a bit of a weird YouTube-ish experience.

I used Spotify for a brief period of time when I was away from home and my local music library. While I do miss having an bottomless pit of music to explore, and also not having to manually download new releases, the experience paled in comparison to having local music files and using foobar2000. Call me antiquated, but to this day I still prefer using a native music player on my desktop, and something like Shuttle+ on my mobile device.

foobar was the best software i ever used for music in my experience. it makes sense to have local music files if you're going to listen to the same song 1000 times. i remember having hard time using my offline music files in spotify. horrible UI/UX compared to f2k.

I don't have all this even though I'm subscribed to Spotify Premium and I use the mobile app. Since when did you start seeing those? May it be that it only appears in some regions? I live in Europe FWIW.

I've also never seen / heard a single ad or promo - NZ based

I've had Spotify for 10+ years and have no ads. The link you're pasting looks like random popups suggesting similar artists or bands you've listened to in the past notifying you of stuff you may like. This doesn't seem like it should be considered an ad.

> random popups

that's the whole point, I wasn't seeking any suggestions

on top of that, the artists "suggested" were not relevant at all

It says right in the popup they're suggesting artists based on who you've listened to, so it is relevant based on the number crunching they've done from millions of listeners and billions of datapoints.

To be frank, that's indicative of a gulf between what the user wants from the product, and how the provider views the user.

User: This item isn't relevant for me.

Provider: Yes it is.

See the problem? :)

That is the op's argument. That he considers those ads.

I generally found those popups reasonable, usually they were new releases from artists that I follow. And they happened 3-5 times a year. That's actually cool in my books.

I know there are some other banner ads to playlists in the desktop app. If memory serves me you can actually disable those in settings. I know I haven't seen a banner like that in months if not years.

Meh. I think this happens to me and I get one once every 4 months or so, either way seems like just non issue to complain about, especially when it rarely even happens.

Yeah this trend by Spotify / Amazon Music / YouTube Music is why I switched to Apple Music a while back, and never regretted my decision.

Podcasts are in a completely different app, and don't intersect with my music search & discovery experience.

You need consent for Spotify to generate a customized playlist based on your listening habits? That's a little precious. Most people, including myself, enjoy this feature.

I personally don’t like these customized playlists but make no claim to whether I’m in the minority/majority. It’d be great if one could toggle the feature but it’s at most an annoyance

My Spotify shows me on the top the following podcasts:

- GUYS, WE FUCKED (something about relationships)

- Very eye catching image of a dude (I heard he's popular podcaster, no wonder with such image)

- something from audible #1 series (obviously an ad).

I don't listen to podcasts, and certainly never listened to a single podcast on Spotify, so not sure it's personalized.

Yeah, I think they a-b test that shit. I got ads like that too, but non of my friends get it. Plenty of ppl complaining on their support forum, get referred to the suggestions box where they close the suggestions for lack of intrest...

I stopped using spotify over this bs.

I know what you mean. However, I can’t tell whether recommendations are ads or just very bad recommendations.

But there are plenty alternatives, so you just should switch services.

I went for Tidal, which also supports better bandwidth (HiFi and Master) and Apple Podcasts. I’m actually very happy with both services. You will find tools online to migrate your Spotify playlists to Tidal and when it comes to higher bandwidth: trust me, you will hear the difference and when you did, you will not want to switch back to lousy 320kbps MP3s.

There are "Notifications" settings buried in the app which might help.

just checked my Notifications settings in the app

everything is "Off"

Are you mad about the content or the way it was shown (interfering)? I get these things every couple weeks it's usually pretty targeted/relevant. If it's not incredibly relevant to me it's usually culturally pretty important.

Personally I think spotify is the best content provider to give me good recommendations. Compared to netflix, youtube and other media source they dont show the same 10 items mixed into other topics.

The unfortunate thing about the insane amount of tests that spotify runs to make their platform more engaging is some people will have bad experiences.

I don't mind recommendations but the popup crosses a line. It's a first-party ad; no doubt Spotify get paid to promote certain music. If you're paying for an ad free experience, I can understand why it'd be frustrating.

I think a good rule of thumb is that if a recommendation format can not be deactivated it's probably an ad.

these don't seem like genuine recommendations, they are promotional (ads)

and each of them is totally unrelevant:

1. I don't care about German rap, full miss

2. I don't have anybody to share a Spotify Duo subscription with (that's depressing, I know)

3. I've heard of Chainsmokers, but I don't care how your music taste matches with these guys

above all of that, I'm paying for my premium subscription for 6 years now

Even if the popup is extremely relevant to me it will have two problems:

1. if I am opening the app I probably have a destination in mind, and a surprise popup isnt what I was thinking about.

2. After I decline the popup whatever content it was trying to hawk at me, no matter how appealing, is now lost to the aether. Who got value from that? Not me, not spotify, not the content owner.

Discover Weekly and Release Radar are really good, so good that I cant seem to stay with any competitor for very long. I'm not sure why popups are seen as a good idea by anyone. Why cant it just put he promo content in those? They know I use them.

It's kinda like how any software eventually tries to emulate email. Every marketing department eventually turns into a spammer, no matter how well intentioned they were in the beginning.

Part of the problem is that the fact that you have the money and inclination to pay for Premium makes you that much more attractive to advertisers. That goes for just about any medium, not just Spotify.

Not the same issue but my Spotify experience has seriously degraded where I'll be leaving next month. Songs constantly stop, freeze, and refuse to play. Clearing the cache kinda works, for about 2 hours then the issue persists. IDK if it's an update clashing on iOS with Spotify, but all it does is reinforce the idea of thrusting updates on users is an extremely poor UX. Especially when my flow slightly breaks with every update.

Never ever had even one single ad, on Android and on Windows, and this is why I have been paying for years.

Sometimes it bothers me to turn on Bluetooth and that's it.

> Or are these not ads?

You can pick whatever definitions work for you, but it's reasonable to define those as not-ads, to say that "ads" are audio that interrupts your music.

I don't love the other things you talk about, but I can listen to a pretty wide variety of music without interruption, offline, and the other BS bothers me very little and not too often. For 2022 that's pretty good.

"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."

Yes, those are advertisements.

Circular logic. You're already assuming your broader definition of quacking like an ad in your "quacks like a duck" speech.

back in '95 I decided to not use spotify or apple music or any of that stuff and just store my music locally, never looked back..

In 1995, 4 years before Napster, you decided not to use spotify?

a true visionary if I've seen one

Word marking aside:

In '97 I joined this ubergeeky little company for what initially was thought to be a summer job.

They had something homebrew they called a jukebox that they had gotten running around '94/'95, consisting of a distributed client/server system where you could queue songs from a shared library of MPEG layer 2 audio files that would be played back on a Sun Sparcstation, iirc.

In short: It's not that crazy of a timeline. They were just ~2 years ahead of the curve, by '97 local MP3 playback was mainstream on Windows-based PCs at my university.

Exactly, 1995, there was in fact no spotify, so I simply decided not to use it, granted it was an easy decision since it was not there, but that's beside the point. Thing is, the solution that I did chose to use is still working perfectly today and I see absolutely no better alternative in the likes of spotify.

Stuff like Spotify trying to ram their podcast platform down my throat is pretty obnoxious. I wish I could turn off podcasts.

It looks especially bad when some of the podcasts are unofficial audiobooks releasing for instance a person reading a chapter of Harry Potter every day.

I've never seen any of these on mobile or desktop, and I use spotify a lot. Is it a setting? The most annoying thing they've done for me on mobile is blend 'your library' with songs and artists ive recently listened to.

I subscribed to appletv again for For All Mankind season 3. Really anoyed by not one, but two, adverts before each episode (one for something else, one for a podcast)

I'll be cancelling after the final episode next week because of these adverts.

The worst one for me was when I was listening to a podcast in the bath and adverts started playing at random intervals. Very, very close to dropping premium. Can't see me having it by the time 2023 rolls around.

Please for the love of God start using a real podcast player and not the Podcast in name only monstrosity that is built into Spotify. There are much better podcast players for both iOS and Android.

Open Source ones too, built on good, decentralised feeds.

It was a Joe Rogan episode so there was no other way unfortunately.

Ads? I go out of my way to avoid ads completely. As soon as I hear the hint of an advertisement I mute. I refuse to even consider advertisements.

How far away are we from an open-source AI that can detect ad-like content in an audio/video stream and mute/blank it?

Can you turn these off on mobile? You can on the desktop. It'll still suggest things, but not in an obtrusive manner.

Plex is pretty decent these days, the official plexamp client has carplay integration, a decent ui and offline playback.

I never bothered to subscribe when their free version is not usable.

If I want some music I buy CD and convert them to mp3.

I wouldn’t call them ads at all.

The Spotify Duo notification comes up whenever handoff between two devices doesn’t work. I assume Spotify thinks I’m sharing an account or something. Quite unlike YT serving YT premium ads right after an ad break.

The “new release” notifications have always been spot on for me. Possible that some artists pay to be extra prominent. Unless their recommendation engine is misbehaving again.

>Possible that some artists pay to be extra prominent.

So it's paid-for advertising?

potato - potato

Some people say Microsoft doesn't have ads in Windows. Which is technically correct based on your reasoning - they only promote their own products and services (haven't seen a "meet singles in your area" ad in the Windows Start menu yet).

They put random games full of IAPs on the search bar, so I wouldn't say it's that comparable.

Not the same.

Their recommendation engine is part of core offering. When system tries to learn what you like more to offer similar music - this is by all means not an ad.

A car seat is not an ad for seats.

these are not notifications for artists I genuinely care about

these are popup advertisements to nag me into listening to music I don't care about only so that record labels can make more money

I use a cracked Spotify apk. no ads.

and probably a very bad privacy practice but whatever I do on my phone is the business of Google, my Chinese overlords and the guy who made the Spotify cracked apk don't tell me what to do

You can turn off most notifications in settings.

I have all notifciations toggled off and still receive these marketing popups.

I've cancelled my Spotify premium sub years ago because in truth they've always had ads: the Dashboard always had artists that I had zero interest in listening to, that were not part of or related in any way to the music in my library, and that big labels wanted to push my way. There was no way to turn this off, so after a month or so I just cancelled my sub.

So, Google-account-cancellation phobias aside, I went to Youtube Music where I still am. No bullshit.

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