The growth rate is surprising to me. Anecdotally, I know at least 5 families who have canceled the service and are outspoken in their distaste (even if many just jumped to equally dubious all-you-can-stream offerings). For most folks, it seemed the AI slop made the service objectively worse just as subscription costs increased.

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sparrc 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I've been a subscriber basically ever since it launched in the US and haven't noticed any discernible difference in the service in that entire time. What has turned people off? I haven't noticed any AI features at all to be honest. Then again I only use it for music, not podcasts nor audiobooks.

	▲	schnevets 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Recommendations have gotten noticeably worse since the glory days of Discover Weekly. It's possible that my tastes have just stagnated in my mid-30s, but I just found myself listening to ~40 essential artists, so I decided to just buy once on Bandcamp, knowing that the music creators are getting a larger cut than Spotify would ever give them. Also, I can only give a thumbs down to Paul Simon's Call Me Al so many times. It's not a terrible song, but the way it snuck into every goddamn radio station I request became comical. Although algorithm discovery stopped appealing to me, I actually replaced Spotify with Radio Paradise and soma.fm and have been enjoying these public stations a lot more. I'm just a boring dad who now prefers carefully-curated for everyone over automatically-created for me
	▲	bl4kers 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Podcasts are shoved in your face everywhere, and their official playlists have been flooded with AI music.
	▲	fbd_0100 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		same. long time user, haven't really noticed any major changes
	▲	fwn 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I am on the paid plan since mid-2015 and nowadays I regularly get ads for concerts in the UI. The ads cannot be disabled and there is no amount I can pay to stop them. I even wrote to support, only to get a sloppy reply telling me no: because premium will always only have "an ad-free listening experience".