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Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers (news.ycombinator.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 102 points 7 months ago (13 children)

The minute I have ads in my paid subscription it's a cancel

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago* (10 children)

    Likewise. I've been putting off setting up a Soulseek+Navidrome stack on my home server. I'm sure there's a way to integrate ListenBrainz suggestions too. First ad I hear, I'm doing it.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Soulseek for the win what is navidrome, i'm unfamiliar.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I use Navidrome and scrobble to ListenBrainz and Last.fm for suggestions. I've recently learnt about Sonobarr but haven't tried it yet.

    It's not as seamless as playing a song/artist station on spotify or just letting it decide what to continue with at the end of a playlist, but it's also free (in both ways!).

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Can't talk about navidrome, but jellyfin has a listenbrainz plugin :)

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I use Jellyfin for video but it doesn't strike me as the best for audio...

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    • [–] 78 points 7 months ago

    I buy my music from the artists as directly as possible via Band Camp.

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    [–] 66 points 7 months ago (13 children)

    Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer.

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  • [–] 28 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Just recently signed up for Qobuz. I'm planning on purchasing albums as I go along so at least I'm left with something the day I decide to quit.

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  • [–] 24 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Fun fact, there are tools to rip FLAC files of music you stream on qobuz so you can build up your music hoard

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I would prefer they just make their apps good.

    But it’s kind of bizarre that daily/weekly playlists are only in app.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    I'm using Tidal, but i can't say i really like it. They seem to randomly decide what songs and artists are not available, and their search function is really bad.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    That's not up to the streaming service but the record company.

    Personally I switched from Tidal to Qobuz this year and I like it much better.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    That's not up to the streaming service but the record company.

    That doesn't really matter for the end user as they're in a relationship with the streamer not the record companies. I hate this drive to obfuscate responsibility in corporate America.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    Dude, you are the one obfuscating.

    Qobuz and Deezer are French, Tidal was originally Norwegian, Spotify was originally Swedish and record companies are from all over the world.

    If record companies make exclusive deals with platforms for some releases and pull distribution for others, then blaming the streaming services excluded is just plain fucking stupid.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    I used Tidal for a few months, then found out it had silently removed ~10% of my music from my “liked” list. Completely unacceptable. They should at least keep a list of titles so I can go back and fix it. People say all services do this, but I’ve been keeping an eye on it and Spotify hasn’t done it since I hopped back.

    Qobuz was painful to use and new music discovery was hopeless. No idea if they were removing tracks too.

    Bandcamp seems cool, but I prefer to listen to music via song-based-radios, so that’s a no go.

    Not sure what I’ll do if I have to drop Spotify again over ads.

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    • [+] 172 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (15 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 19 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I've been saying that for years. Now I have about 250 albums drm-free on Bandcamp. A good chunk of that money went to the people making the music, too.

    I know there are people out there paying a subscription to Spotify who listen to the same dozen albums over and over, too.

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  • [–] 28 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    Or self hosting their own Jellyfin

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    It's the same thing.

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    A music collection on your harddive is a joy for you personally for ever

    A music collection on a VPS hosting a Jellyfin with accounts for your family and friends is a joy forever for all your family and friends (as long as you pay the hosting fees)

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    A music collection on your harddive is a joy for you personally for ever

    As long as you take care of backups

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    1.: I divide the payment of Family across 3 members.
    2.: I listen to so many songs individually, it would bankrupt me to buy every single song individually or the full album.
    3.: I'll buy an album (2nd hand discogs (so good)/ebay, digitally on wherever or bandcamp). If I don't like the music as much or the buying process is annoying, I'll pirate the song.

    So yeah. It depends.

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    • [–] 50 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    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-developers-havent-written-a-line-of-code-since-december-thanks-to-ai/

    I don't know if this makes it better or worse.

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    • [–] 38 points 7 months ago*

    From HN comments:

    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-developers-havent-written-a-line-of-code-since-december-thanks-to-ai/

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    [–] 37 points 7 months ago*

    I posted this when Youtube was doing it by 'mistake' too...

    If you are paying to not receive ads, and you receive an ad by mistake, they should pay you whatever they earned on the ad. Now... I doubt they'll actually pay you dollars, but lets say at minimum 1 day of free extended service per ad, but if they earn more than 1 days worth via the ad, then it should be whatever that is.

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    [–] 27 points 7 months ago

    It's telling of this era that it's impossible to initially know if this is corporate greed or vibe goonery.

    So... intentional or unintentional enshittification, I guess. 😬

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    [–] 25 points 7 months ago (8 children)

    I have heard this before from rando Reddit posts where it turns out they were listening to podcasts that just had the ads baked into the broadcast.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Nope. Had it happen to me: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/25040771

    TLDR: I know it because the ads were German but the podcast is in English.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    TLDR: I know it because the ads were German but the podcast is in English.

    That can still happen and happens to me too, despite using a no-ad FOSS player, so the ads are definitely from the podcast, not the player.
    Dynamic ad insertion is absolutely a thing in podcasts. If you access/download the MP3 file on the server from a German IP address, a German ad will be put in at the specified ad break before you/your player downloads the file.

    So a different language ad doesn't mean it's from Spotify.

    (PS: By the way, using a VPN connected to a country where not many companies make podcast ads works basically like a podcast ad blocker. I route my podcast player through an Albania VPN and have like 80% less ads than before. The remainder is "classic" podcast ads that are inserted as a static part of the MP3 file, no way to get rid of those.)

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    No.
    It was literally an ad break done into the stream.
    The WAN show does not speak German. And they have their own sponsor section. So no way for anyone other than the creator deciding to insert a ad-break during upload of an episode (or getting it suggested by Spotify).
    This is assumedly exactly as YT does it.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Yeah I get that but the way I experienced it is that ads can appear in a podcast in any of the following three instances:

    • Podcaster themselves record the podcast, may or may not add advertisement (self-spoken in their language)
    • Podcast network which the podcaster is a member of adds ad break time codes, in which later ads are inserted, dynamically based on the listener's location (pre-spoken, usually in the local language of the listener's location, sometimes personalized)
    • The podcast player/platform (Spotify, Pocket casts, antennapod etc) adds advertisements (also pre-spoken and in local or app language, more often personalized)

    The podcast player's ads can not be distinguished from the podcast network's ads, except that they have a higher tendency for personalized ads (given that personalization is enabled in the privacy settings) or if the player declares it as an advertisement in a place where the podcast can't. Or if you know that a podcast is on an ad free network. Other than that, you don't really know if it's an ad by Spotify or the podcast's network.

    My point is that, unless your player is explicitly declaring an ad as such, you cannot diatinguish a podcast network's ad from a player ad. The only proof I have to know it's a network's ad in my case is that my player is open source and ad free. If I used a closed source commercial player, I wouldn't know from who the ad is coming when it's in my local language.
    I'm German too and got German ads on english podcasts, but I know that the player didn't insert it, so you can never be too sure if it's Spotify adding them either.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    They do serve ads on podcasts. Not all of them though. It used to be that they were separate, so that you were shown a different "now playing" screen. I first noticed when it happened on otherwise ad free shows, like Lateral. Not sure if that's the case now? Some of the podcasts I listen to jump in length from the episode list to the "now playing" screen, which is weird. Don't know if it's because injected ads or not though, or if they're even from Spotify. I haven't seen those ads that are on a new "now playing" screen in a while.

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    • [–] 24 points 7 months ago

    If I didn't already cancel them, this would make me cancel them again.

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    [–] 22 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    I went back to Winamp last year and don’t regret it at all.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Where do you get the media from, though

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    • [–] 19 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Signs your business model has truly failed.

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    • [–] 15 points 7 months ago

    Time to switch to Qobuz then. Goodbye Spotify.

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    [–] 15 points 7 months ago

    I would have to go and download an ad, and then upload it, and then select it from new additions in order to hear an ad on Plexamp.

    But the subscription model is the framework for fuckery here.

    It wasn’t long ago that subscribing to something, implied a consistent (usually periodical) delivery of actual goods or services that were in some way distinct from the previous periods good or services. Issue #33 is different from #32. March’s soup of the month is different than February’s.

    And you could hold issue #33 in one hand and #32 in another hand and directly interact with two months worth of that subscription.

    The tech bro idea of innovation is to get two revenue streams from each customer; keep us paying for the same thing over and over but never owning it, and sell our data to advertisers. The fact that they are also showing ads to subscribers is just dripping lemon juice in the paper cut because they can. They were already making money off that data.

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    [–] 11 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    I've been using YT music anyway, but I recently started using my Navidrome server by just yt-dlp'ing albums + tag with MusicBrainz picard and boom. A bunch of songs I can own until my server burns down.

    I feel a little bad about pirating, but I'm a college student who hasn't even gotten a job yet... But I will be buying merch or music off bandcamp in the future when I know I have the budget for it!

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    I will never give YT music money since they killed off Google Play Music (a far superior music app) to make it. I told them during the switchover the only way they would keep getting money from me was to not kill GPM, and so far, I've kept my word.

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    • [–] 9 points 7 months ago

    Spotify has ads? I've never paid, I thought it just had to take little breaks after some songs because they were harder to play 🤔

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    [–] 9 points 7 months ago

    It’s why I cancelled SiriusXM a while back. I’m paying for the service so atop playing ads. And at the time it was like the same ad over and over. God it was infuriating.

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    [–] 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

    Now I have a problem with this statement in a vacuum.

    Zero: I am based in Germany. So not as many dystopian laws and decisions as in the USA

    First: Yes, Spotify bad, Hooray Jellyfin, ripping CDs and owning the media you have. Also good for the artists.

    Second: I had ads played to me. But it only happened on podcasts.

    Third: I had talked to the Spotify support: https://imgur.com/a/Ulis7Oe
    (TLDR: Podcast publishers (e.g. LTT with their WANshow or Dallas Taylor with 20 Thousand Hertz) can decide if they want to play ads. They happened to me inbetween episodes)

    So yeah. Now it would be very interesting what this random person encountered where.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    My wife and daughter had heard ads sparingly and they only listen to music. I assumed it was some sort of bug because it is very infrequent, but with today's corps I should probably invoke the inverse of Hanlon's Razor and just assume malice.

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    • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (8 children)

    Is that confirmed? My whole family use Spotify and we didn’t have such issue..

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

    I'm guessing it impacted some people for there to be a Hacker News (a fairly respectable news outlet) article about it. I was just listening earlier today and didn't have any ads. Same with my wife on her account (family plan).

    Edit: wow, I'm a dumbass. Nevermind.

    But yeah, I still haven't had any ads after listening all evening while cooking dinner and what kt.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Heads up, Hacker News is a social media site like here or reddit, it's not a news outlet. It's run by Y Combinator, a huge venture capital firm in the SF Bay area, and the users tend to be tech bros or aspiring ones. Many attach their user accounts to their github and professional identity. I think there's only one admin and they tend to be heavy handed.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    The commentariat at HN was anti-DEI before anyone knew what "DEI" even was.

    Garry Tan, tech [Y Combinator] CEO & campaign donor, wishes death upon San Francisco politicians

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    Great callout!

    I participate in the techtakes community on awful.systems, which is devoted to laughing at tech bro "takes". HN posts and comments are almost too easy as targets for derision and are common topics for meta-discussion of the reprehensible opinions.

    I was just trying to have a light touch here. Start with the facts. We can talk about the literal cults spun off from it later.

    The site's one of the clearest windows into the myriad and shockingly widespread ghoulish opinions that seem to fester in places that consider themselves important to the tech industry or attract people who think they are.

    I really should start keeping a tally on shit like "how many times have I seen eugenics suggested on HN this month".

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    • [–] 7 points 7 months ago

    It's a bug, not a change of policy

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    [–] 15 points 7 months ago (10 children)

    Why do people even use Spotify at this point?

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Convenience of instant access to gazillion songs, though i'm not sure if the average spotify user even listens to anything other than top-lists

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I used to use Spotify but got sick of their recommendations. Vastly different genre playlists would still get top100 songs recommended. Sabrina Carpenter in all my playlists.

    I moved to Pandora, their recommendation engine is way less biased. Fewer features in the app, tho

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Song-based radios for new music discovery on a service where they don’t silently drop huge swaths of music from my curated “liked” list. Tidal, Qobuz, and Bandcamp failed to meet this requirement in different ways.

    Spotify isn’t even good, but I don’t have another real option yet.

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    [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Is this news site Peter Thiels?

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    It's like reddit for techbros that gush about the latest fads and startups. Not sure who owns it, but it's probably the worst venture capitalists. The moderation is very heavy against anyone that becomes even slightly politically aware.

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