Picture this. You’re on a picnic date, enjoying a nice charcuterie board, playing some romantic tunes on Spotify, and you lean in for a kiss. BAM! “Want a break from the ads? If you tap now to watch a short video, you’ll receive 30 minutes of ad-free music.” Starts blaring on the speaker, the mood is ruined and now you’re just mad at Spotify for ruining a precious life moment for you. Sadly, this reality is far too common and relatable for a lot of Spotify users.
Spotify is known for its purposely terrible ads as its acquisition strategy, and it has also come under heat for incorrectly targeting many of its demographic with ads in different languages/recommended genres of music. As a person who doesn’t want to invest in Spotify Premium, you might be targeted by the most ridiculous, insensitive, and unrelated ads. What even adds to this oddity is the fact that Spotify uses video-centric ads instead of radio ads which makes the experience all the more frustrating since you need to pull out your phone at every ad and watch a video if you intend to skip it.
In my personal opinion, I find this strategy appealing and want to call Spotify out for disrespecting its customers and their private life, since Spotify music is also played at social gatherings and when your search history and dirty laundry is aired out to the public, it doesn’t necessarily lead to the most pleasant outcomes. At the end of the day, Spotify is using unsavory and manipulative tactics to get more people to convert to Premium. So most users either end up doubling down and keeping Spotify Free or they feel insulted and switch to other services like Apple Music or YouTube Music.
To add insult to injury to its users, Spotify also started increasing the price of all its subscription plans across the board, testing the limits of its customers. Users have already started to drop off the platform. In April 2023, Spotify hit 500M users and released their user base figures of more than 300 million ads-supported users and 200+ million premium subscribers, which shows that their strategy is clearly not working as expected. With an economic downturn, and issues with shortchanging and paying artists poorly, we can only see how the music streaming wars play out and whether Spotify can capture more of the market as Premium users.
