Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers
Spotify forcing me to hear a bunch of ads on the desktop client today. I'm a paid subscriber.
Seems widespread, the spotify subreddit is actively removing discussion of the problem
Seems widespread, the spotify subreddit is actively removing discussion of the problem
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rather than sending me marketing materials, I wish companies would send power users tips/tricks. Would definitely read those emails.
That rubbish that it's different per platform.
The iPhone app is not Electron, it's a native app.
Metrics, not for the purpose of making the software better, but to justify someone's existence in the company.
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.
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.
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
I left years ago when their "discoverability" started forcing random Nordic music into my Spotify Weekly. Support basically told me to accept it or go away, so I did, and never looked back.
It seems almost criminal to hire Ludvig Strigeus and then not let him write code.
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)
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.
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 :)
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.
That’s an ad. I’m not paying for ads.
Spotify is losing ground after their last subscription fees increase, as far as I see it.
Once you see this its hard to unsee the pattern. Its happening to everything.
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.
What's the hold up?
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.
@gaws Really appreciate your suggestion.
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...
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.
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.
This sounds like terribly bad form, won't buy them any goodwill down the line.
It's like when Homer Simpson was carried up the mountain by Sherpas and thought he owned the achievement.
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.
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.
Literally the first line of the sub description.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
there, fixed it for you
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!
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.
To be fair, ad-free options for each of these later emerged. I pay up for them.
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.
If I can’t put an RSS feed in my podcast player of choice - it ain’t a podcast
It’s so much better for just picking a song or musician or genre and having a never ending playlist
We need to pay more and more to avoid ads.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.