Spotify threatens industry with ad-skipping tool: "Skip Ahead" is available for Premium users in selected markets, and enables them to skip entire ad breaks, intros, sponsorship messages.
https://podnews.net/article/spotify-threat-ad-skipping
check post at origin
This feels like a move against the open RSS based podcasting system we fortunately have at the moment. Instead of getting money from sponsor deals, creators will have to join Spotify as their main platform to get revenue and continue podcasting. Then Spotify can further lock down their content and we get a closed ecosystem.
I use Pocket Cast. Just sayin…
Wait - they pay . . . for “Premium” . . . and still have fucking ads?
lol
I have Spotify premium (the one single subscription habit I allow myself) and haven’t heard an ad for years. But that is for music.
They are talking about when Spotify is used for podcasts and long form content, where creators often insert sponsored sections by themselves.
I mean they already have a 5 second skip button. I just hit it a few times and podcaster ad is over.
I cancelled because Spotify was injecting their own ads in my podcasts. Like clearly injected ads and not the podcasters’ embedded ones. Not sure if they are still doing it but that was the last straw for me as a long time premium member.
Out of all the subscriptions you picked the one
which makes one person richer on basis of other peoples media.
[removed]
Which are always less obnoxious, or obnoxious in the house style.
“obnoxious in the house style” is hilarious to me, but I know exactly what you’re talking about.
I have premium family, but the only ads I hear are the ones that creaters put in themselves. I don’t mind those as much.
Edit: what joe said
Its akin to paying for a movie and being pissed off that Mercedes paid to have their car in it.
The people we are listening to have sponsors and deals. I would prefer they didnt but it is what it is.
A character simply driving a Mercedes car is one thing. But podcast ads are more akin to a movie character entirely interrupting the flow of the film to stop and talk for two minutes straight about how great Mercedes is and to recite a series of specifications about that model car and gush at what a low price it is.
Transformers did it bud lite. The difference is one if meant to have a fourth wall.
I’m not defending ads, I hate them and block them almost entirely. And fuck spotify, their product gets worse every year. But its not spotify being shite to premium subs that podcasters have sponsors.
Like stranger things did with new coke
Or Bones with the Prius. Several episodes where the character brags about the GPS and the parking assist at length.
Since when does Premium even have ads? 🤨
Podcasts have ads directly in the audio, similar to sponsorship ads in YouTube videos and on other platforms directly in the video the creator uploads. I was wondering when an open source solution to that would come out, similar to sponsorblock for YouTube, but I guess Spotify is first.
Podcasts are still slightly different, as the easy pliability of audio means podcast hosts inject ads based on your location and other factors into the audio stream instead of just going with one single global ad for everyone. But you still only get the audio stream from the regular podcast host, which is why classic ad blockers don’t work. A community-run solution might be "for podcast id 123 skip from audio fragment “sponsor” to “welcome back”. Just purely going by time (skip from 10:00 to 10:30) wouldn’t work, as ads can be longer or shorter. There can also be multiple ads back to back even if they’re a standard length.
A service like Spotify at least partially hosts its own podcasts and probably does the ads for those podcasts itself, so it can just leave them out. If Spotify proxies podcasts from elsewhere, it can detect (via querying the podcast multiple times from different locations) where the dynamic bits of the podcasts are and cut them out. That could also be a community solution, though it would require more computational resources. A centralized service like Spotify makes it easier. Spotify is also AI-happy, and what they’ve actually done might be to just train an AI on ad segments, and let the AI cut those segments out.
By the way, YouTube already skips some creator sponsorships with their premium service.
In my experience, Spotify also adds extra ads in top of what you can hear if you listen to the same podcast using a different app.
spotsponsorblock.org :)
Huh
I guess podcasts do.
I cannot think of a single good podcast. I say that, then someone recommends six. I listen to a few, each just as insufferable as the next. Same shit each and every one. Some twatwaffle just blathering about nonsense.
I don’t know a single intelligent person who listens to them.
If you get blasted with boner pill ads during a podcast, you deserve it.
I wish Spotify would make the default view music and not books and podcasts.
The only podcast I actually got into was the Always Sunny podcast, which kinda ended abruptly when their schedules got too hectic. I tried Dropping Names with Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner but after a few episodes it got kinda dull with their mostly posting demeanor and them trying to just shoehorn as many names into stories as possible.
I’m not listening to any of those. They’re bad.
Podcasts are just people bullshitting. It’s a replacement for friends or something. I don’t get it. There’s basically no content.
There’s plenty podcasts where university professors explain their discipline.
I’ve been listening to the various microbe.tv podcasts for probably 15 years at this point, This Week in Virology and This Week in Parasitism being my favorites (RIP Dickson Despommier). Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe even longer. Some people seem to only be aware of hollywood celebrity podcasts.
What I liked about Always Sunny podcast was it was the guys watching the episodes for the first time and would usually share a lot of great behind the scenes content while also BSing. If you’ve watched the whole series multiple times it’s really entertaining.
Does not compute. Wtf is the point of paying for premium when you still get ads? Podcasts should automatically have the ads skipped if you’re paying for them.
Baked in adds in podcasts etc
I have it, it skips podcast intros and the podcast baked in sponsors.
I would do it anyway with the 15 second button but this is fairly accurate and a single press.
Spotify doesn’t put those in, the content creator does. And I suspect they won’t be happy about this tool.
The content creator won’t care but the sponsors might. YouTube has a similar system that skips over “commonly skipped segments” when you’re fast forwarding. In practice it just means you skip past the section of the video where whoever it is reads the sponsors ad copy. It would have gotten skipped anyway, this feature just saves you a few seconds of putzing around trying to find the exact spot where the ad ends.
If the sponsor cares, the content creator soon will, because that sponsor spot is now worth a whole lot less.
So they can say they listened to users when they launch premium super plus without ads. Repeat ad infinitum (pun intended i suppose).
I have discontinued many subscription based services due to all the price hiking and/or changing features I originally paid for.
Reading headlines like this always reassures me I’ve made the right choice. I used to pay for Amazon Prime (and the other sub channels that had content I enjoyed), Netflix, Spotify, Crave+Sportsnet. All of it replaced by YouTube Premium which I do get most of my money out of with its features including ad free music.
It’s been a couple years since I closed all my premium subscriptions and every so often I’ll get an email asking me to rejoin for 5.99 for 3 months and regular pricing thereafter (or similar price points), which only tells me the price hiking isn’t at all vital, it’s having your credit card information. It’s simple greed.
There’s a german proverb “vom Regen in die Traufe”. From the price-gouging service to the price-gouging service of the analytics giant.
Licking boot.
I think Spotify are just leeching them.
Don’t listen to podcasts on Spotify. You’ll be happier for it.
Spotify is terrible for artists and pays peanuts compared to other services like Tidal. I understand the app is great, but it is not worth it. Spotify is all in on AI music to save even more money. Terrible company.
It’s not even that great anymore. In the recent years the app got bigger and bigger, the UI more confusing, it got intrusive features that are impossible to disable while not adding anything of value.
For example, it started playing distracting, ugly. looped videos by default with no clear way to disable this. At the same time it became impossible to say “don’t play this song even again”.
The app is a bloated piece of garbage and was one of the main reasons I cancelled my subscription lmao
Not to mention weapons.
YouTube is doing the same thing.
I noticed my Android TV, with the built in YouTube app, auto skips the YouTuber’s sponsor segment.
It’s not SponsorBlock, just plain YouTube.
It’s about control.
Google/Spotify don’t get a cut from direct sponsorships. They can’t have that.
lucky adblock skips their ads too
I think the larger point is they’re squeezing the content creators, though.
Most YT/Spotify users don’t use adblock, but this effectively kills creator revenue if they do this by default.
Eh, maybe. First for existing content it makes no difference, the creator already got paid to read the ad so whether you skip it or not doesn’t change the money that’s already in their account. The argument would be if people are regularly skipping the sponsored ads then companies might stop offering sponsorships. Considering this is currently limited to premium customers which a) tend to be the minority, b) still need to manually trigger a fast forward to skip the ad, and c) would likely fast forward through it anyway because they’ve already shown they’re willing to pay money to avoid ads, I don’t think this will actually make much difference. Worst case scenario it drives down the amount being offered for sponsorships a little.
Nothing good survives capitalism. Profit motive grey goo.
Then, in a few years, they’ll offer advertisers super premium ads. Users will be able to buy ultra premium tier subscriptions to skip those.
Ad skipping sounds wonderfully pro consumer until you remember somebody has to pay for the podcast: If listeners skip every ad, block tracking and still expect endless free shows, the economics eventually stop working. You can’t demand independent media while systematically deleting the mechanism that funds it.
Short, non-intrusive ads sounds tolerable, until you remember these fuckers will enshittify everything they touch and make the experience forever degrading and worse to increase their profit. It is never enough.
Maybe just me but I’d rather the industry just evolve or die than be forced to listen to ads.
“premium users”
It’ll probably work like YouTube premium, a cut of that users sub will go to the artist
Anecdotally, creators seem to make more from premium viewers than ad supported ones
That could be the preface to internet overall…
Another shit take from the resident LLM adbot.
You’re already paying for premium. You shouldn’t have to listen to ads.
Edit: in case anyone is wondering, yes, the account I am replying to is a bot that in a few months time will likely start promoting the stuff it’s already promoing on its profile (which is a website that advertises via bots) or it will advertise a product that paid for this bot to do deceptive marketing.
This is only the case if these changes actually cause a dip in sponsor revenue.
Personally, I like the ones that mimic old-school TV and radio, where the product/service placement is woven right into the show, and there’s a direct relationship between the presenter and the advertiser.
The entire ad brokerage ecosystem could vanish tomorrow and I’d be very happy.
What the actual fuck is going on when you put the fast forward button behind a paywall??
Is already standard for companies to further ‘optimize’ by creating problems that they can charge extra to solve.
I mean, advertising to begin with is just a way for people with existing capital to make themselves more salient regardless of their product quality.
But if you don’t even need a product and can charge people for the right not to have every experience made worse, or more annoying or time consuming, the whole point of the market has lost the plot at the expense of the people.
Like paying rent on features that have traditionally just been available after purchasing a thing, like vehicle seat heating.
Only going to get worse unless we change out of a system built entirely around individualized extraction and competition.
It’s not the regular Fast Forward button.
So it’s Sponsorblock for Spotify?
Pretty much. YouTube has something similar for premium users in their app.
Spotify has too many users and control over the industry, nothing good can come from that. Do your part and stop using it.
so how do we get musicians put their songs off Spotify? 🥁
Pandora has always been my go to, but it’s a different enough user experience that I didn’t like Spotify when I tried it years ago.
Congratulations on reproducing the technology brought to us by DVRs decades ago!
It was also built in to all stereo systems long before that. Not that LPs ever had ads, but I could dub to tape off the radio and then fast forward through the ads.
I skipped ahead by quitting it all together.
THE FUCKING ADS SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN THERE, THAT’S WHY I SWITCHED OVER TO STREAMING.
Sorry everybody had to get that out of my system.
Ooh, that’s like Morphe for Youtube that allows you to skip sponsors, “click subscribe” blahblah and other stuff.
It’s fine when I do it, but introducing this as default in Spotify will reduce the value of ad-reads, and I’m guessing Spotify won’t make up the difference to producers.
why stop there? they should add minutes of metal screeching at max volume on random places and make new super premium that lets you skip that too. the possibilities are infinite!
Spotify owns megaphone. Megaphone embeds the ads in podcasts. It’s sort of not in their interest to offer this feature. However, YouTube has this feature already. I’d guess they are mostly trying to stay competitive?