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Comment by cglong | Hacker News Reader

Some comment I read here the other day made me realize it feels like Spotify gets an unusually high share of negative news coverage. Despite this, I personally think it's a really great product and service.

Which makes me wonder: Could there be an ulterior motive driving this coverage?

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Two things that make me quite dislike Spotify (as a real actual human ;) is their attempt to monopolize and exclusive-ize podcasts, which I treasure as an open medium, and that they pay less money back to artists (I believe).

Perhaps it's my personal bias stemming from what I believe to be legitmate gripes with Spotify, but I feel like perhaps they get more negative coverage because they do negative things.

The way their apps are pushy about whatever tangentially-related audio product they’re decided to burn money on this month also isn’t great. If that stuff really has to be part of the main app, it should be sequestered to its own tab and not be seen unless sought out.

I think I read that the "pays less" thing was FUD, but am unable to find it now. Will share if I can dig it up later :)

Re podcasts: Very true, I didn't like that push either. FWIW, Spotify recently agreed to let Joe Rogan's podcast be distributed on multiple platforms again.

Spotify is the largest music streamer by far, being over twice as large as its next biggest competitor, Apple Music. It's natural that the company would be the biggest target for criticism, both for Spotify-specific problems and as a stand-in for the whole industry. Also, speaking as a mostly-satisfied subscriber, Spotify still has a lot of issues. The quality of the desktop client in particular is poor and it never seems to improve.

This is almost certainly confirmation bias, but I feel like mainstream publications write negatively about Spotify way more than they do iPhone or Google Search. We know both the latter have several issues of their own, but I feel like I learn about most of them via small blogs linked to from here.

I bet there’s also just selection bias: if you don’t use it, you’re more likely to skip a story about and if you use services like Twitter or Facebook they’ll stop suggesting things you don’t click on.

I use Spotify without issue except for one thing that really irks me:

Baked in advertisements in podcasts for which I PAY FOR. Like, I literally pay Spotify to not give me ads. And then podcasts come in and not only add in baked in ads at the beginning but also then the host of the show has to do an ad blurb every 20 minutes. Conan O'Brien I'm looking at you.

What's not to understand? Spotify doesn't control the ads baked into content. They control their ads. They can't remove the ads in podcasts. Paying for YouTube Premium doesn't remove ad reads from the creator.

Your options are to support the podcast directly for an ad free experience if it exists, listen to the podcast anyway, or stop supporting podcasts that do this by not listening to them.

One of the ads I mention are ones that are automatically added by Spotify to the front of the podcast that specifically target me. I've heard them mention where I live many times.

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