Spotify Premium has always had ads in podcasts. This isn't new or news. It's because podcasts have always had ads in them, very often baked right into the audio. That's just how podcasts are.
Not really defending it, but with Spotify you're paying for the music. Podcasts are just there as an extra, unaffected by whether you're paying or not.
The good thing is that when they're actual Spotify platform ads instead of baked in, they're much easier to fast forward without accidentally skipping podcast content as well. So they're kind of an improvement.
Please don't support or frequent Spotify podcasts. Podcasts should not be walled-garden, they should monetize directly and publicly by having the ads at the start or end or sometimes I guess interspersed.
Truth be told, I'm starting to review my default "hatred" of ads. I hate ads for terrible Hard-R random shit. I can live with my podcasts advertising at least closer to being intelligent products but not personalised stuff. /Comment
Because im complicated I will now argue the opposing position.
One thing I really DO like about it is it does corden off a certain population of listeners that I'm happy to have set aside—although there's guests that I would appreciate listening to so I don't have to leave it to the news to engage with purely on the level of ideas rather than boosting their following or "stats" independant of their performance or empirically-demonstrated views...
Edit: its hilarious how even today, the truly undesirebles will pay to self-segrate. Im alrightwith that, as long as evil has to work and pay to survive, there's hope for a free and liber(al|ty)-based society since rhe default is wanting something good thats also free ;)
I wonder if this has any currency as the genesis of the "private school" obsession
Podcasts have always had ads on Spotify (used to be baked into the mp3) but now they change tracks / insert the latest ad when they play — it's more intrusive as it's a noticeable skip, and you're not allowed to fast forward anymore (ugh I don't need to hear the same ad every single time)
Spotify has always included ads on podcasts because podcasts had already normalized that before Spotify took interest in them. As a result, they pivoted the value prop of Premium from “no ads” to “no ads on your _music_”.
The middleman already serves music, so it's convenient instead of "just setting up an rss reader". That's an extra app/site to keep checking instead of just opening the one you already use for audio-related entertainment.
Listening to podcasts on my computer, I want to go and do some cleaning, so I switch it over to playing on my phone seamlessly so I can walk around the house listening. Spotify is the only solution that I know of for this.
Apple Music definitely has podcasts. They are exclusive podcasts only available on Apple Music.
There’s The Zane Lowe Show, The Ebro Show, The Kelleigh Bannen Show, etc. There’s also After School Radio hosted by Mark Hoppus, and those kind of “artist-hosted” shows.
Technically they’re called “shows”, not “podcasts”, but they definitely seem like they’re following the format. These “shows” do not have ads.
Maybe it’s a location thing? Until very recently I used the free version of Spotify and never experienced any ads in podcasts (which surprised me considering the amount of ads when listening to music).
Since I have premium I didn’t listen to podcasts a lot, so I can’t tell if it behaves differently
Even DJ seems to have ads in the form of "this viral track has been blowing up all over". The giveaway is the 30 sec description and the fact that it's usually not even my vibe.
I'd like to take this opportunity to lament Spotify's UX. It's my music streaming app of choice, but I'm hoping against hope that Tidal et all can eventually provide meaningful competition, because their UI, which was never exactly great to begin with, has done nothing but stagnate for 10 years. And in some cases it has been actively worsened, like when they removed Hold-To-Preview. I have a bunch of local mp3s on my computer of songs that never made their way to the streaming services for whatever reason from wayyyyyy back in the day and I use Foobar2000 to manage and play them. The experience is just night and day. I don't want Spotify to become Foobar, but it's criminal how much room there is to improve the music listening, library managing, and general app experience that Spotify just refuses to take.
tl;dr, I wish Spotify liked their app as much as I like their app.
Literally just cancelled mine today a couple of hours before reading this. It's great for music discovery but when already paying for YouTube premium which includes YouTube Music, which although has a much worse UX ultimately has the same content. Even if I wasn't getting music with the YouTube subscription when I added up the 50 odd tracks I regularly listen to on playlists and divided that by the cost of a yearly subscription, the economics make no sense.
Personally, I find YT Music's UX much better than Spotify's. Especially when I'm listening to something and browsing for something to add as the next track.
Not really defending it, but with Spotify you're paying for the music. Podcasts are just there as an extra, unaffected by whether you're paying or not.
The good thing is that when they're actual Spotify platform ads instead of baked in, they're much easier to fast forward without accidentally skipping podcast content as well. So they're kind of an improvement.