Spotify is the largest music streaming service in the world, boasting 155 million paid subscribers as of February 2021. Total monthly active Spotify users, which includes listeners on the service’s free ad-funded tier of service, reached 345 million.
While Spotify offers a free tier of service, it still has to pay record labels for playing their artists’ songs. This means they need to make money somehow to pay the royalties on those free plays. They do this with both visual and audio ads.
While the visual ads are not too intrusive, as they display while a song is playing, those 30 second audio ads can really break up the flow of your playlist, am I right?
As you might imagine, some listeners (possibly you) are looking for an ad-free way to listen to Spotify. There are some workarounds that can help block ads, but each one has at least one “gotcha” (including a possible account ban), so there is no truly simple solution.
Let’s take a look at the various ways you can avoid ads while listening to Spotify content, and their associated “gotchas.”
How to Block Ads on Spotify
Subscribe to Spotify Premium
Now, when you first read the headline for this section, you probably reacted with one word: “DUH!”
However, this is the safest and likely the most efficient way to get rid of ads. As you might imagine, the “gotcha” here is the fact that you have to pay good money for the premium subscription.
By paying $9.99 per month ($4.99 per month for students), you not only eliminate ads from your listening sessions, you also gain full control over music playback, as well as access to new releases that are available only to premium subscribers for the first two weeks the song is in release.
Premium subscribers are allowed to download songs for offline listening. If you’re a free subscriber, you’ll need a third-party utility to download and convert Spotify-streamed music into MP3 files for later listening. (More about that later.)
You also get to skip songs you don’t like as many times as you wish. Free users can only skip up to 6 tracks per hour.
True audiophiles (and you know who you are) will appreciate Spotify Premium, as it offers higher-quality playback than what Spotify’s free tier offers. The Premium tier streams music at a 320 kbps rate, which is a significant jump from the 160 kbps rate limit on free playback.
Use a Spotify Music Converter
There are numerous audio and music converters available for the Mac and Windows platform. These utilities allow you to designate which songs you’d like to have downloaded and converted from Spotify, then the app converts them from the Spotify native format to the MP3, M4A, FLAC or WAV formats.
There are drawbacks to this approach, as it doesn’t allow you to stream Spotify ad-free, you have to designate which songs will be converted, then you need to wait for the app to download and convert the songs.
Another drawback is that most of these solutions are pay-for-play solutions, requiring you to purchase a license for the app, or be faced with limitations such as shortened conversions of the songs. Money may be a deciding factor, especially if you’re listening to Spotify’s free service tier.
Use an Ad Blocker or Ad Blocking Browser
While there are numerous ad blockers available for many popular device platforms, keep one thing in mind before giving any of them a try: Depending on the blocking approach that the ad blocker app uses, you could get your Spotify account terminated.
The Spotify Terms and Conditions page explicitly mentions that “circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service, or creating or distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify Service” can be grounds for terminating service.
This means that you may someday get bumped from the service in mid-song or that you won’t be able to log in.
While this may be a minor inconvenience since it’s a free service, and you can get back on by using a different email address, it could become quite tedious if you’re doing it on a regular basis.
That said, I do report good results in using the Brave Browser to listen to Spotify on both my macOS and Windows devices. I used a free Spotify account to listen to the “70s Smash Hits” playlist for over an hour on each platform and I can report that I didn’t hear or see an ad during that time.
Well, I did see small ads appear in the lower left-hand corner of my browser window, but they disappeared immediately. This caused the music playlist to pause its streaming, and I had to manually start the next song on the list, but I was not subjected to ads.
Keep in mind, though, that I could be bumped off before the next song is over, or I may be unable to connect to the service a week from now because Spotify has noticed my ad skipping.
Don’t Use These Methods to Block Ads on Spotify
Don’t Use a VPN to Change Your Country
I have seen some websites suggest using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or a proxy server to change your device’s IP address to one located in a country where Spotify is not available, or to a country where Spotify is available but shows fewer ads.
While I normally recommend using a VPN to blast through geographical content blockades, when it comes to Spotify, I don’t see how a VPN will help.
First of all, if you’re connecting to a VPN server located in a country where Spotify isn’t available (and there are still a large number of countries where this is true), you likely won’t have access to any Spotify content.
This is because Spotify and other music and video streaming sites look at your device’s IP address. If Spotify sees your device as connecting from a non-served country, it simply won’t serve up any entertainment. (Unless error messages are entertaining to you.)
As for connecting to a country where Spotify doesn’t run as many ads, how the heck do you tell that without trying every country, spending a goodly amount of time streaming that country’s content, and counting the number of ads played each hour? That’s a waste of time, in my opinion.
In addition, if you’re connecting to another country’s Spotify streams, you’re going to miss out on some of the content you usually enjoy from your country’s Spotify streams. This is because the contracts that Spotify signs with record labels forces it to limit the access to certain songs to listeners in designated countries. This means the songs you listen to in the United States may not be available in the United Kingdom.
While a reliable VPN provides numerous security, privacy, and geo-blocked content accessing benefits, it is not a solution for blocking ads on Spotify.
If you’re looking for a way to access songs that might not be available in your area of the world, then I strongly recommend investing in a reliable VPN to access Spotify in other countries. But a VPN is all about UNblocking things, not blocking them. Well, unless it’s to block nosy folks from monitoring your online activities.
Don’t Use a Proxy Server to Change Your Country
I have also seen some sites suggest using a proxy server to access a country’s Spotify stream where fewer ads are streamed. A proxy server service offers features similar to a VPN, although it lacks the encrypted connection protection that a VPN provides.
While a proxy server can be useful when you’re trying to access geo-blocked content in another country, it is of no use when you’re looking for fewer or no ads on Spotify.
In Closing
As we’ve seen, paying for a Spotify Premium subscription is the best way to avoid ads on the music streaming service. However, there is at least one possible method that shows promise: using the Brave Browser.
Spotify is a quality firm, as streaming companies go. While I don’t approve of the fact that Spotify income streams go into the record labels’ pockets and fail to reach the bank accounts of deserving artists (and that’s a discussion for another day), the company does provide a reliable way to listen to your favorite tunes.
While I personally suggest subscribing to Spotify’s premium level of service (and you usually get a month or two of free service thrown in when you subscribe), you do you. Good luck and good listening!
