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.

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

Podcasts are shoved in your face everywhere, and their official playlists have been flooded with AI music.

same. long time user, haven't really noticed any major changes

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".