Premium is not free from adds?

[Vedsegaard]

I pay for premium because I got tired for listening to between songs.

But I have just now discovered, that when I listen to specific Podcasts, Spotify starts up adds before each of my shows.
I tried to contact Spotify, but I cannot find a way to talk to a human - only AI bots.

Are you guys also experiencing paying for an add free membership, while now suddenly listening to adds?

[Maxim · Accepted solution]

Hey @Vedsegaard,

Thanks for coming to the Community.

Spotify advertises that a Premium user can listen to music without ad interruptions (as can be seen here), which is one of the key benefits of a Premium subscription. However, podcasts for both free and Premium users may include ads, and they can be either host-read endorsements, sponsorships or audio adverts within the podcast track itself.

A special feature is available that can dynamically insert ads within a podcast stream. This can be enabled or disabled by the podcast publishers. The desire here is to provide some added value for those who want to host their podcasts on Spotify.

The teams at Spotify understand that there might be some confusion on the fact that Premium comes with ad free music listening, but doesn't cover podcasts.

Hopefully this explanation provides you with a better understanding of the Premium subscription and the ads that you listened to. Apologies if this was not made sufficiently clear before.

Spotify cares about their users' opinion and they're doing their best to expand on the information sources available to be more transparent 🙂

[izhoffmn]

Also suddenly getting ads between podcasts as a Premium member. This is clearly a new feature and is unacceptable. I cannot stand that we can't get away from ads anywhere anymore. When buying is not owning and an ad-free subscription includes ads, piracy is no longer theft.

[Vedsegaard]

Precisely!