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

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

Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer.

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.

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/

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.

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. 😬

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.

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

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

Signs your business model has truly failed.

Why do people even use Spotify at this point?

Time to switch to Qobuz then. Goodbye Spotify.

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.

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.

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!

Ah no! The first company to play ads for paid subscribers

Again? Lol

Just a heads up, Deezer has been working hard to improve their UI a great deal. It is so much less stressful to navigate than Spotify. Sound quality is also better to me. And not being forced to mix music with ad-infused podcasts is so very nice.

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.

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 🤔

It's a bug, not a change of policy

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

Tidal is better