[Updated] Spotify playing ads after every song? Issue acknowledged and fix incoming

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….

Original story (published on July 27, 2021) follows:

Spotify is the most popular music streaming service on the planet, eating around a third of the total market.

It is followed by Apple Music with only around half of the number of subscribers as Spotify. So yeah, the competition doesn’t even come close.

The streaming service’s popularity can be owed to an extremely slick user interface and one of the smartest music discovery algorithms around.

Of course, like every other service, the larger part of Spotify’s revenues comes from its Premium service, which provides online and offline ad-free music and podcast to paying subscribers, at quite a reasonable rate.

But obviously, not every active user is a Premium subscriber. Such users contribute to Spotify revenue by listening to ads that pop up between every few songs or so.

Lately though, the free-tier userbase has taken to social media to complain that Spotify is forcing them to listen to ads after EVERY song.

Seriously what’s going on, I’m being punished with like 3-5 ads after each song. it used to be that I could get like around 5 songs in before the next ad but this is ridiculous. Is this like a cache thing or did they just amp the ads up to 100% in the last update to get all the spotify free users to upgrade or leave?
Source

im not sure if this a bug or not or a cruel update to spite free spotify users, but ive been getting an ad after every song i listen to. song finishes, boom, ads. also ads after i skip a song
Source

And no, it’s not just a single ad that plays after every song as users say that they’re having to put up with multiple ads, sometimes as high as 5 of them back to back. These play even when skipping songs so there’s no respite.

FYI, the usual behavior is an ad or two between every 2-5 songs, which isn’t too good either. However, multiple ads between every single song are, to be honest, quite overkill.

Thankfully, Spotify has now acknowledged the issues saying that their developers are working on the case as we speak. A fix should thus hopefully be out soon.

At least we now know that Spotify playing ads after every song is in fact a bug and not something deliberate as many had fearfully suspected. This comes following customer chat support’s vague responses which had caused further confusion.

In the meantime, you can try clearing the Spotify app’s cache or performing a re-install, just as support has been asking facers of the issue to do so.

Support has also asked affected users to try logging in and out of the app, although we doubt that will be of any help. After all, the issue is likely a server-side thingy and no amount of workarounds will be fixing it.

That said, we will continue tracking the matter and will be updating this article with new developments so stay tuned.

01:05 pm (IST): Another workaround that you can try out to solve the problem is to log out and log in twice according to Spotify support.

PiunikaWeb started purely as an investigative tech journalism website with a main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Fox News, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, MacRumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.