Spotify Will Terminate Your Account If You Keep Blocking Ads

Dhir Acharya - Feb 11, 2019

Spotify has recently updated its Terms and Conditions, citing that ad-blocking actions in free users will lead to suspensions or termination of accounts.

Spotify has recently released its financial reports for 2018 along with a new update in its Terms and Conditions. Accordingly, blocking or circumventing ads in the Spotify Service, or making tools for ads blocking will result in suspension or determination of the account.

A report published in 2018 revealed that approximately 2 percent of free users on Spotify make use of accounts or apps which block advertisements coming between songs. The company then emailed users that pose unusual actions, telling them to remove the ad-disabling software. And in case of refuse, Spotify terminated the accounts.

Starting March 1, the new Terms and Conditions rules will take full effect, with which the platform can skip the mailing step and just terminate ad-blocking accounts without a single warning.

Earlier February 2019, the company announced that 207 million people are using its service actively each month. Among them, 96 million pay fee to use Premium services without advertisements, including a lot of features that fee users cannot access.

Spotify's free users see ads between songs

The rest 116 million users are supported with ads, consisting of a 24 percent increase year over year and a 6 percent rise quarter over quarter. From each of these users, the company made about $1.7, leading to total revenue of $198 million.

If ad-blocking users stop blocking ads or start paying a monthly fee of $8.5 (on average), Spotify’s income could theoretically rise by an amount of between $3.4 million and $17 million.

According to Spotify’s quarterly financial reports, the Swedish company is doing pretty good. The company made total revenue of $1.7 billion, 89 percent of which came from premium users, and the rest was from its monthly active users who are ad-supported. As of 2018, among millions of users, 36 percent are from Europe, 30 percent from North America, 22 percent from Latin America while 12 percent come from the other regions and countries across the globe.

The company has also made an official announcement about its plans to broaden its podcast portfolio.