Client stops working after playing ads

[P3rH]

Plan

Free

Country

Norway

Device

Generic PC

Operating System

Ubuntu Linux (Ubuntu Studio)

My Question or Issue

Initially the Spotify desktop client works fine, but after playing the first ads it never returns to normal playing mode. Any attempt to start playing something results in a message saying: "The selected song will be played after the ads". Sometimes the client also stops before playing any ads, just displaying "A brief message from our sponsors". I've heard others complain about the same thing on other platforms so I don't think the issue is specific to linux. It's more like the list of ads to play is messed up never giving the client an option to continue.

After exiting and restarting the applicaition one can again listen to music until the application again stops before, during or after the first batch of ads being played.

[ArtGravity]

Do you happen to be running any host level (e.g. hosts file) or network level (e.g. PiHole) ad blocking system that could be interfering with the connection to the ads?

If so, have you tested with it disabled?

[P3rH]

My resolver does not intercept anything other than hosts with no doamin that are treated as local and FQDNs matching my local domain. Everything else is handled via DNS with a local resolver with no filtering at all. There is no DNS or network-level ad-blocking. Those services are isolated to MTAs, mail and web-clients. The Spotify desktop-client sits behind NAT (handled by a router under my own control), but is otherwise not subject to any filtering (network, protocol or application).

I should also say that the client behave the same on my Mac (10.14.6) as it does on Linux. The behaviour also varies a bit. At times there is no problem for hours, but at other times the client fail to return to regular playing every time it tries to play a set of ads.

[ArtGravity]

Are any of the affected devices mobile? Can you test them on another internet connection to see if the problem follows the device versus stays with the interet circuit?

[P3rH]

I don't really use Spotify on any smartphone or tablet. It's on my Mac if that is mobile enough for you. Wheter Spotify successfully gets throuh a batch of ads or not is hit or miss regardless of where I use my Mac. 

Being a network engineer I sort of supect there could be packet-loss involved here, if there are connectionless (UDP) protocols involved. I haven't analysed packet-flows yet so this is just pure speculation. Could there be something in the implementation of communication between the client and the ad-servers that isn't robust enough?

[alex22p22]

I've had an interesting problem in the past which might be similar, where I found that Spotify was using a huge range of sites and ip addresses to deliver it's content. The problem appeared to be the weak DNS relay in my home router and this caused problems for Spotify not resolving all those addresses.

The solution was to reconfigure the home router so that when a DHCP address was supplied to the client, it told the client to use an external DNS server for the resolver.

You can check which DNS is being used as follows:

    cat /etc/resolv.conf

This command should work for Mac and Linux (or other *nix based os). If the result is the ip address of your home router, you can try changing it to see if it helps.

Note: editing /etc/resolv.conf is not the solution if your client uses dhcp to obtain it's ip address. There should be a DNS setting in the DHCP configuration in your home router.

Some months later, I purchased a new home router and the problem never came back.

[P3rH]

DNS-settings make no difference. When monitoring all network activity associated with the spotify client there are no DNS-requests that get negative or no response. The client app does however try to establish connections to servers that do not respond every now and then. It frequently sits with sockets with status "SYN SENT", where the corresponding address does not respond to anything from my location. Looking at routing tables it seems as if address-blocks containing elements of Spotify infrastructure (servers) may not be visible everywhere. I do expect a service such as Spotify to be organised as a CDN, but there may be parts of this that the client doesn't fully handle .

[KiwiPaul123]

I run Mint Linux (19.2) . I have run it thought two different service providers/connections and also have the same problem... Not every ad but now and then requiring a restart of Spotify. I have also had issues on previous releases of Mint.

[hyvens]

I have the very same issue on Mint 18.1.

Client somethimes stops working after the ads are played, and needs to restarted.

This is a somewhat new issue, like two weeks or so. Is has worked fine before.