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Tell HN: Spotify Premium is full of Ads

79 points by ushakov ↗ HN
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

97 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] thread
boesboes
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.

kpierce
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.

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

jabroni_salad
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.

jbrins1
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.
speeder
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.

austinjp
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.

speeder
Problem is they charge through the nose for these. I looked into it, the price was just ridiculous and unrealistic.
felixnm
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.
ushakov
i'm not okay with any promotions/recommendations as long as I'm paying for Premium
wyclif
Correct. Is any Spotify user seriously going to maintain that "Premium" does not mean "no ads"?
eminence32
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".

rschachte
Definitely don’t sign up for Hulu then. Even worse
kixiQu
You're not okay with recommendations? That's 80% of why many of us use Spotify in the first place.
ushakov
if that's what Spotify considers a recommendation, then I don't want any
gaws
Consider canceling Spotify then.
austinjp
80%? That doesn't include me. I'm a reluctant payer to avoid ads, and so I can play my choice of music anywhere.
dahdum
Do you feel the same way about Netflix recommendations? I'm curious where you draw the line.
gsk22
Or YouTube? The homepage and literally every video are full of recommendations.
austinjp
Thanks to various plugins for Firefox, my experience of the YouTube homepage is a blank page apart from the search bar.
kjeetgill
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?

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

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

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

wink
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)

jrumbut
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.

nkohari
Can you turn these off on mobile? You can on the desktop. It'll still suggest things, but not in an obtrusive manner.
nix0n
There are "Notifications" settings buried in the app which might help.
ushakov
just checked my Notifications settings in the app

everything is "Off"

oneplane
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.
AtNightWeCode
You can turn off most notifications in settings.
jabroni_salad
I have all notifciations toggled off and still receive these marketing popups.
gbtw
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.
deadmutex
Atleast you can easily skip the ones embedded by the creators.
CraigJPerry
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.

treesknees
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/

lajosbacs
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.

treesknees
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.
throwoutway
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

2Gkashmiri
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

commandlinefan
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).
MonkeyMalarky
Given a between the peanuts YouTube gives creators and what sponsored content gives them, they might leave?
sebazzz
YouTube could do it. They have a monopoly pretty much.
markus_zhang
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.

antiverse
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.

JamesBaxter
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.

dusted
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..
iso1631
In 1995, 4 years before Napster, you decided not to use spotify?
intelVISA
a true visionary if I've seen one
tpmx
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.

dusted
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.
jabroni_salad
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.
s3r3nity
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.

spidersouris
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.
davesmylie
I've also never seen / heard a single ad or promo - NZ based
rcarr
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.
scarface_74
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.
RealStickman_
Open Source ones too, built on good, decentralised feeds.
rcarr
It was a Joe Rogan episode so there was no other way unfortunately.
res0nat0r
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.
ushakov
> 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

res0nat0r
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.
austinjp
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? :)

laserbeam
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.

res0nat0r
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.
iso1631
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.

thefz
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.

shreyshnaccount
I use a cracked Spotify apk. no ads.
shreyshnaccount
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
CraigJPerry
Plex is pretty decent these days, the official plexamp client has carplay integration, a decent ui and offline playback.
gherkinnn
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.

TremendousJudge
>Possible that some artists pay to be extra prominent.

So it's paid-for advertising?

gigel82
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).

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

ushakov
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

azemetre
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.