Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

I canceled my family subscription last month. We have Youtube Premium which I use to play music - Spotify was over 20/month and no longer made sense. We mostly used it to play music on our Google speakers for the kids. It's one of those products that used to make sense, but now just doesn't feel so critical. It's easy to replace and patch where I used it.

I just migrated to Jellyfin and cancelled my Spotify subscription just last week (https://cobertos.com/blog/post/finally-cancelling-my-spotify). Paying off even more than I predicted. So sick of everything getting in the way of just listening to my music.

I gave up on Spotify as I started to listen to more podcasts which had their own ads inside them let alone Spotify's. Now I'm paying for Youtube (never thought I'd be doing that) and using the new(ish) jump ahead feature to skip in-video ad segments including in video podcasts. Problem largely solved?

Yeah.. They seem to speed up their entshittification game. I recently wrote a short piece about how Spotify is forcefully updating the app, and how to prevent it. For example, if you plan tonuse spicetify or something similar: https://duckass.bearblog.dev/how-spotify-silently-updates-it...

Spotify is losing ground after their last subscription fees increase, as far as I see it.

I left Spotify years ago. Youtube is so much nicer in terms of content alone. But Youtube, with its insane backlog of video's not available elsewhere, is straight up a monopoly, so they too will start squeezing customers at some point. In anticipation of that I've been collecting flacs again. It's actually kind of a nice hobby.

IF this is happening it's gotta be a mistake. Ads on paid spotify will be the end of my subscription.

PSA: Stop using Spotify, they're predatory scum.

Seems like a bug. I had it happen (ads were playing and UI showed the premium upgrade nudges), then my Spotify refreshed and it went away again.

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.

This seems very likely to be a mistake or bug.

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.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Basic-plans-... So it was a bug. Tags under the post are kinda funny though.

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-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."

I once decided to try spotify, paid the fee. Listened to a podcast and ads came on. “Oh no those ads are embedded by the podcast themselves, we don’t control that.” Ok I don’t care what your back end financial models are, either I’m paying to remove ads or I’m not. Immediately canceled.

"the spotify subreddit is actively removing discussion of the problem"

This sounds like terribly bad form, won't buy them any goodwill down the line.

Haven't used spotify in years, but they used to have programmed and live ads in podcasts, even for paying subscribers. That's one of the reasons I've gave up on them. Just insulting for consumers.

I canceled Spotify when they started putting “commercially promoted” songs (lol) in stations generated for me.

That’s an ad. I’m not paying for ads.

For anyone looking for a spotify alternative, please join me in making a better, self-hosted spotify!

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

(3) https://www.pikapods.com/

(4) https://symfonium.app/

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.

Not a single mention of Pandora in this thread? Do people really not use it?

It’s so much better for just picking a song or musician or genre and having a never ending playlist

We had two broadcast TV channels where we lived when I was growing up in the 1970s. My Dad signed up for cable TV. It ran 24/7 instead of 6AM-to-midnight (yes, broadcast TV went off the air at midnight in many areas) and it had no commercials.

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...

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After having, as a teenager, having been, unbeknownst to me, a bonafied in the flesh content marketing tool of Spotify, it was thrilling to cancel my subscription this year as I learned more about their advertising business and clients.

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I was having ads played even with the most expensive Spotify subscription a few years ago because ... feel this: The ads were CHOSEN BY THE END CLIENT, not Spotify itself as a legal entity. Needless to say that I am no longer using Spotify for a few years now and I highly encourage a mass exodus from the platform.

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The last straw was for me the ads on podcasts as a paid subscriber. I miss my playlists.

I would love to cancel and move to something else. Recently tried Apple Music and I was appalled at how bad it was. The ui/ux of Spotify isn’t great, and has gotten worse over the years, but Apple Music’s was downright terrible. I stuck it out for a week and then deleted the app.