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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

They're talking about the ads in podcasts put there by the podcasters. Not ads put there by Spotify.

I use Pocket Cast. Just sayin...

Same. I can also recommend the Qobuz download store, which has a larger library because they get their music from the usual distributors.

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.