Spotify Premium just can’t seem to get rid of its ad bug for good

If you’re looking for a great music streaming service, there’s a lot to like about Spotify. In fact, Spotify Premium is so popular that we’re a little shocked it took Google as long as it did to split up YouTube Premium and YouTube Music by offering a more affordable Premium Lite tier in the US for exactly the kind of people who already pay for Spotify. Considering that half the point of Spotify Premium is being able to listen to your favorite music without ads, we were confused to hear last month that paid Spotify users were suddenly hearing ads. Although we thought that Spotify had quickly tracked down that glitch and corrected it, it sounds like this is proving to be a more difficult bug that most to get to the bottom of.

When we first learned of this issue, it seemed reasonably widespread, and in a poll our readers participated in, a good third of all Spotify Premium subscribers who responded indicated that they had experienced ads on the platform.

Only a couple days later, Spotify was already communicating that it had a fix, sharing:

We have good news from our teams – a fix for the instances where Premium users noticed ads when listening to music has been deployed and you should notice a difference right away.

The company reminded listeners that certain content could still include promotional messages — podcasts, specifically — but it sure sounded from that like the underlying problem has been addressed. Except this week, Spotify posted to X a support link that indicated the ads were still persisting where they shouldn’t be. And indeed, users were quick to reply that they’ve still be experiencing them.

Well, hours later, a Spotify representative finally posted again in that support thread that the issue has been marked as “fixed.” Whether it’s going to stick or not this time, it may be too early to know. If you’re still hearing ads, the company suggests the somewhat annoying-sounding remediation step of logging into the app, then back out again, and repeating 2 or 3 times until a server sync is triggered. We sure hope your password’s not too complicated to type.