Discussion
pythonaut_16: 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.
sharkjacobs: Sometimes a bug is indistinguishable from AB testing
conradfr: That can't be ... "Spotify engineers haven't coded since December"
drcongo: PSA: Stop using Spotify, they're predatory scum.
halapro: I really don't understand the hate for Spotify. Been a paid member for a decade and Apple Music still sucks for me (particularly when internet is bad)
vpribish: they funnelled money and attention to joe rogan. I hate them - not as much as i hate microsoft or oracle - maybe about as much as adobe. but i'm using them because i have not found an acceptable alternative ... yet.
mholm: Agree with this; I want to cancel my spotify subscription so badly. I already have Apple One, which includes Apple Music. But the recommendations and UX are so incredibly bad that I still pay for Spotify.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.
vpribish: IF this is happening it's gotta be a mistake. Ads on paid spotify will be the end of my subscription.
lich_king: We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads.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.
happytoexplain: It's quite normal for consumers to be protected from the petty misery of natural market forces by legislation. We do it constantly.
sequin: 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.
kreyenborgi: Same, except moved to Qobuz. They have both streaming and you can buy downloads.
jbb67: It's very much easier to ignore ads in a newspaper. It's not so easy when you are forced to listen to them before the thing you paid for. It's not the same.
kleene_op: Same here!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.
cuuupid: 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."
Gormo: > Spotify famously claimed their best devs were no longer writing any of their own code:It seems almost criminal to hire Ludvig Strigeus and then not let him write code.
shimman: Spotify has always been garbage software long before LLMs. PM/devs like to justify their constant a/b testing to gamify metrics to curry raises/promotions but for end users all we're dealt with is a constantly broken/changing UI.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.
samuelg123: Try using apple music
fdghrtbrt: Keep doing. Hearing people complain about streaming software, when they could be playing their sounds locally with free software, makes my day every day.
lowenbjer: "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.
edoceo: More thing for Spotify is that their users are, more or less, locked in. That stickyness is what allows companies to try this dumb shit; management will hardly feel the impact of their bad choices - cause they are standing on many years of foundations.It's like when Homer Simpson was carried up the mountain by Sherpas and thought he owned the achievement.
lowenbjer: I get that it looks bad to have vibe coding bugs creeping into your codebase for such a big company, but isn't it common sense that owning your misstakes taking accountability for them generates respect?
Esophagus4: 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.
vpribish: maybe you did, but I did not. my attention is valuable to me and I do not pay people to waste it. i had tapes, CDs, mp3s, and paid spotify. this is a well-proven market.
petersellers: 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.
chucksta: And you wouldn't cancel if they said you were gonna get ads upfront?
