3rd party advertisement in podcasts

[Leamuran]

Plan

Premium

Country

Denmark

Device

Huawei phone, desktop computer, laptop, TV.

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

Hi
I am an insomniac who uses podcasts with rainsounds to sleep. This has worked fine, up until 3rd party advertisement started breaking the 8 hour thunderstorm with very loud commercials that are more or less unrelated to the podcast.

This is of course extremely frustrating for me, so I would like to find a good solution. So I would like to ask if:

1) I can do anything about it myself and keep my spotify account on premium and ad-free?

2) Is it something Spotify have talked about? I bought premium to avoid advertisement. I do not mean podcasters sponsorships, I mean 30-90sec babbles about food.
Thank you and kind regards.

[Maxim]

Hey @Leamuran,

Thanks for coming to the Community.

Spotify advertises that a Premium user can listen to music without ad interruptions, 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. 🙂

[#3]

I'm used to ads within podcasts but recently when listening to The Journal podcast there is a separate window and a 15-second advertisement comes up. I already checked that my Spotify Premium plan is still active. If this is happening to certain podcasts I will unfollow them..

[Leamuran]

There should be a VERY CLEAR stamp of "ADs included in podcast" then. I have paid my way out of listening to propaganda and then you still play it for me? Stop yourself.