Advertising with podcasts more often

[Alswizz]

Plan

Premium

Country

SG

Device

iPhone14

Operating System

iOS

My Question or Issue

I have noticed out stream advertising on some podcast while I am a premium member.

I am not talking about plugs read by the podcast host, but commercials before, during and after the podcast. The fair value exchange between spotify and premium members is now challenged.

Have rules recently been changed? Why pay for adfree experience if podcasts now include many of them?

[Maxim]

Hey @Alswizz,

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 🙂