It’s finally possible to purchase an audiobook from Spotify’s iPhone app with just a few taps. On Monday, Spotify announced that Apple approved an update that allows users in the US to see audiobook pricing within the app and buy individual audiobooks outside the App Store.

The update also lets Spotify Premium subscribers purchase additional audiobook listening hours. This change follows last month’s Epic Games vs. Apple ruling, which upended the iPhone maker’s control over the App Store. Under the ruling, Apple can’t collect fees on purchases made outside the app store, nor can it govern how developers point to external purchases.

Spotify submitted the update last week, but now it’s official. The music streaming service pulled audiobook purchases from its iOS app in 2022 after accusing Apple of “choking competition” with App Store rules that made it more difficult to purchase audiobooks. Spotify also started letting iPhone users purchase subscriptions outside the App Store earlier this month.

The iOS apps for Kindle, Patreon, and Delta’s emulator have also taken advantage of the court ruling, but Epic Games is still fighting to bring Fortnite back to the App Store. “This change lowers the barriers for more users to embrace their first — or tenth — audiobook, while allowing publishers and authors to reach fans and access new audiences seamlessly,” Spotify said in its announcement.

This week, Spotify rushed to remove hundreds of obviously fake podcasts found to be marketing prescription drugs in violation of Spotify's policies and, likely, federal law.

On Thursday, Business Insider (BI) reported that Spotify removed 200 podcasts advertising the sale of opioids and other drugs, but that wasn't the end of the scandal. Today, CNN revealed that it easily uncovered dozens more fake podcasts peddling drugs.

Some of the podcasts may have raised a red flag for a human moderator—with titles like "My Adderall Store" or "Xtrapharma.com" and episodes titled "Order Codeine Online Safe Pharmacy Louisiana" or "Order Xanax 2 mg Online Big Deal On Christmas Season," CNN reported.

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Spotify announced earlier this month that podcast creators and listeners would get a new data point: how many plays an episode has gotten. The idea, according to Spotify, was that listeners could discover new shows they hadn’t heard of, enticed by this new public measure of fandom.

Podcasters did not see it that way.

Since the announcement, podcasters, especially those with smaller audiences, have been upset at the new public play count. The chief complaint was that some podcasters actually don’t want listeners to know how many people are listening to their podcast, because it might have the opposite effect: it could turn people off to know a show only has a few dozen plays. Some Spotify users in the chorus of opposition also noted that plays would only show a slice of listenership, since people use platforms besides Spotify.

The sustained backlash evidently hit a nerve: on Friday, Spotify announced it was partially rolling back the feature. Now it will only publicly display plays once an episode crosses the 50,000 plays threshold. When an episode hits that benchmark, it will get a “50K plays” marker instead of an exact count; the marker will update when an episode crosses other milestones, like 100,000 and 1 million plays. Podcasters will still be able to see exact play counts in their private analytics dashboards — but will be spared the embarrassment of having those figures broadcast publicly. The company is also vague about how exactly plays are counted, saying only that the metric represents “how many times people actively tried your content.”

Podcasting historically has been hard to quantify: a download doesn’t necessarily mean a listen. There are public charts, but those tend to favor the biggest shows. Across mediums, there’s the awkward growing stage for content creators just starting out: you have to post as if you have a million followers even if it’s just for your 10 actual fans. Is displaying podcast plays something nobody asked for? Absolutely. But also, the jokes write themselves, unfortunately.

• Spotify removed "podcasts" promoting opioid sales on websites imitating online pharmacies.
• Business Insider found 200 podcasts peddling prescription medicines, which have since been removed.
• Some podcasts advertised opioids without prescriptions, violating federal law and Spotify rules.

Fake podcasts openly offering highly addictive drugs are rampant on Spotify — which is cracking down after a Business Insider investigation.

BI found 200 "podcasts" that advertised the sale of opioids and other drugs — often without a prescription, in violation of federal law — and directed users to websites posing as legitimate online pharmacies.

Many of the episodes BI reviewed were under a minute long and are less about content and more about pushing product, providing links to websites claiming to sell opioids like tramadol and oxycodone.

"Buy tramadol online in just one click from [redacted] without a prescription with legal delivery in the USA," a voice said in one seven-second podcast episode.

Another episode said: "Want to buy 50mg of tramadol online? Learn how to get authentic pain relief medications with easy checkout, trusted pharmacies, and no delivery hassles. Buy tramadol online safely today."

Spotify's platform rules prohibit content that promotes the sale of regulated or illegal drugs. Some of the podcasts were apparently removed after an X user called out the issue on Tuesday and tagged Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. Others were removed after BI flagged them to Spotify. BI could not reach any of the websites for comment.

"We are constantly working to detect and remove violating content across our service," a Spotify spokesperson told BI.

Some of the podcasts didn't contain any audio. Instead, they relied on the episode description or even the cover art to list URLs or instructions on where to buy the drugs.

BI also found over 25 types of opioids, benzodiazepines, and weight-loss medications being advertised. They included Opana, a potent opioid pulled from the US market in 2017 at the request of the Food and Drug Administration because of its high potential for abuse.

While many of these drugs are legally prescribed for chronic pain or anxiety and other medical conditions, some are linked to high rates and risk of dependence, misuse, and overdose.

Some of the "online pharmacies" promoted in the podcasts claim to have "medical experts" who can review a customer's condition yet explicitly promise to deliver drugs "quickly" and "discreetly" without ever requesting a prescription. Some of the sites said they offered prescriptions via a phone appointment.

Federal law requires prescription medications to be dispensed only with a valid prescription from a licensed healthcare practitioner. Unregulated drug sales create public health risks, especially when the drugs sold could be counterfeit, laced with unknown substances, or expired.

While the websites viewed by BI take users to a payment page, it's not clear whether they actually deliver the drugs. Customer reviews for some of the sites claim they did not receive the drugs they paid for.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at jyotimann.11. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

Spotify is giving users more control over which songs are spat out by its AI DJ feature. Starting today, Spotify Premium subscribers can now use English voice commands to personalize what music they want DJ to play instead of relying on the ever-changing playlist that it curates based on their listening habits.

Users can access these new capabilities by pressing and holding the ‘DJ’ button located in the bottom right corner when using the AI DJ feature and listening for a beep. Users can then verbally tell the DJ bot what they want to hear, such as “play me some electronic beats for a midday run,” or “surprise me with some indie tracks I’ve never heard before.” 

Prior to the update, this button would just randomly switch up whatever song you were currently listening to and didn’t allow users to control what would be played next. Now, Spotify says that users can direct it to play specific artists, genres, and moods. It also borrows some of the quirkier vibe-based music recommendations from the AI Playlist building feature that Spotify launched in beta last year, which creates a tracklist based on text prompts. For example, users can ask the AI DJ to “play me some music to soundtrack my life as a movie.”

This new voice command update is currently the only means for users to have any control over what tracks the AI DJ will play, however, which is a bit awkward if you’re using the feature in an environment where you can’t be chatty.

Spotify is working on an update that could allow iPhone users in the US to purchase audiobooks through external links. In a post on Friday, Spotify says it has submitted the update to Apple, and if approved, it would also let Premium users buy “top-ups” for additional audiobook listening time.

The change comes in response to last week’s order issued by Epic Games v. Apple Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who found Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction. The judge ordered Apple to stop taking an up to 27 percent commission on purchases made through external links, and also blocked the company from restricting how developers direct users toward purchases outside the App Store.

In response to the order, Spotify started allowing users to purchase subscriptions through external links.

Adding links and pricing info for audiobooks would be a major change to the app. Spotify previously attempted to get around Apple’s restrictions by not displaying the price of audiobooks in the app, and instead emailing users a link to purchase the audiobook they want on the web. Spotify eventually pulled audiobook purchases from iOS altogether.

“It helps level the playing field by allowing developers to offer basic pricing information and easy-to-access links to purchase digital goods through iPhones with no unnecessary steps or additional taxes levied by Apple,” Spotify says in the post. “In short, this freedom is a win for authors, audiences, and developers everywhere — if Apple approves and if the legal ruling stands despite Apple’s continued attempts to stop it.”

Though Apple has asked the court to halt the order while it appeals the decision, other apps, including the ones for Kindle, Patreon, and Delta’s emulator, are taking advantage of the newly relaxed policies as well.

Spotify is testing a new “Snooze” button that will let you temporarily remove a track from your recommendations in case you need a short break from hearing it. The option will appear for songs you choose to hide from your playlists, and it will prevent Spotify from putting them in your recommendations for 30 days.

Spotify is testing the Snooze button with Premium subscribers first, but it says it will “bring it to more listeners soon.” Along with this update, Spotify is making a change to its Hide button, as pressing it will now drop a track from a playlist across all your devices, not just the device you selected it on.

The music streaming app also revamped its queue for Premium users with a new design that includes shuffle, smart shuffle, repeat, and sleep timer options. It will also allow subscribers to see Spotify’s recommended songs after their queued-up tracks end.

Additionally, Spotify is trying to make it easier to manage playlists on mobile by placing Add, Sort, and Edit buttons at the top of each playlist. There’s a new option for users in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa to turn liked songs into playlists, along with a Create button at the bottom-right of the app’s screen that you can use to build playlists and join shared ones. Premium users can also use the Create button to listen to music with friends and access AI playlists.

Spotify rolled out an update to its desktop app, too, as it has launched a new feature that lets you listen to previews of tracks from playlists, albums, and artists – just like you can do on mobile.

After a federal court issued a scathing order Wednesday night that found Apple in "willful violation" of an injunction meant to allow iOS apps to provide alternate payment options, app developers are capitalizing on the moment. Spotify may be the quickest of them all.

Less than 24 hours after District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that Apple had sought to thwart a 2021 injunction and engaged in an "obvious cover-up" around its actions, Spotify announced in a blog post that it had submitted an updated app to Apple. The updated app can show specific plan prices, link out to Spotify's website for plan changes and purchases that avoid Apple's 30 percent commission on in-app purchases, and display promotional offers, all of which were disallowed under Apple's prior App Store rules.

Spotify's post adds that Apple's newly court-enforced policy "opens the door to other seamless buying opportunities that will directly benefit creators (think easy-to-purchase audiobooks)." Spotify posted on X (formerly Twitter) Friday morning that the updated app was approved by Apple. Apple made substantial modifications to its App Review Guidelines on Friday and emailed registered developers regarding the changes.

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Apple has approved an update to Spotify’s iPhone app that makes it the first major app to support direct links for US users to pay for plans on an external site, without restrictions. Apple has been forced to change its rules on external payments following an order in its ongoing case against Epic Games. The updated app, version 9.0.40, is rolling out now on the App Store.

“In a victory for consumers, artists, creators, and authors, Apple has approved Spotify’s U.S. app update,” Spotify spokesperson Jeanne Moran told The Verge. “After nearly a decade, this will finally allow us to freely show clear pricing information and links to purchase, fostering transparency and choice for U.S. consumers. We can now give consumers lower prices, more control, and easier access to the Spotify experience.”

Spotify submitted the update to Apple’s App Store yesterday, in what was seen as the first test of Apple’s new rules. The new version includes details on promotional pricing and subscription plans available directly from Spotify’s website, where its transactions won’t be subject to Apple’s 30 percent service charge on in-app payments. If you can’t see them yet, Moran told us that “it may take a beat” for the new options to appear on every phone, even if you have the latest version.

Apple previously included strict restrictions on how developers were able to advertise and link to external payment options, forbidding the use of buttons or any mention of cheaper pricing outside the app, in addition to a 27 percent charge on external payments. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers put an end to that this week, ordering Apple to end all fees, design restrictions, and “scary” pop-up language for external payments.

Spotify has long been one of the most vocal critics of Apple’s payment policies, and Moran had previously said that the “outrageous” external payment policy “flies in the face of the court’s efforts to enable greater competition and user choice.”

Patreon has also announced that it intends to submit an update to enable external payments, while Epic is readying its own alternative payment processing system with lower fees than Apple’s.

The music app I've been using for the last 14 years recently decided that I'm obsessed with rainstorms.

When I last listened to my Spotify Release Radar playlist — which for years reliably curated a decent selection of newly released music informed by my favorite artists — the lineup quickly took a turn for the worse. After new songs by familiar indie pop names like Japanese Breakfast and The Marias, there was a five-minute recording of rain falling followed by a short, ambient instrumental by a little-known alternative rock artist. Then, for its remaining 25 tracks, my playlist delivered a succession of rainstorms, nature sounds, and brown-noise frequencies — not exactly the stuff of a killer music festival lineup.

When Spotify launched Release Radar in 2016, it promised "a weekly selection of the newest releases that matter the most to you." Not only was the feature designed to delight music fans upon first listen, but it would get better over time, the company promised.

So why, nearly a decade later, was my latest Release Radar delivering 85% noise?

Sure, my girlfriend and I had recently started listening to "sleep sounds" — things like ocean waves and the hum of an airplane's engine — at night, but that didn't fully explain the issue. The algorithm hadn't made such a crucial curation error before.

I'm hardly the first Spotify subscriber to notice that the gears of its music recommendation engine have gotten rusty. Over the past year, fans have taken to Reddit, LinkedIn, and other platforms to complain that curated, for you playlists like Release Radar, Discover Weekly, and Daily Mix have gone downhill, resulting in what many describe as an "echo chamber" that feels more repetitive or off the mark than it once did. Random tracks from white-noise playlists or kids' music albums are popping up where they don't belong, ruining the listening experience.

Molly Holder, Spotify's senior director of product for personalization, disagreed that the quality of these curated playlists has declined. "People are discovering more new music and spending more time doing so," she said in a statement, adding that the company listens to user feedback, continues to enhance personal recommendations, and that listener engagement metrics are up.

But after talking with former Spotify employees, it seems likely that a combination of layoffs and shifting business priorities has hollowed out the platform's music discovery product. Essentially, in a quest for profitability, Spotify broke its algorithm.

One of the features that set Spotify apart from its intensifying competition over the years was the platform's man-meets-machine approach to music curation, especially its personalized, algorithmically curated playlists. Discover Weekly promised to introduce listeners to new music that they might like, Daily Mix turned their tastes into themed playlists, and Release Radar highlighted freshly released tracks. For years, these features seemed to elicit near-universal praise online and gave Spotify a competitive advantage just in time to fend off competition from giants like Apple and Amazon. The music discovery features are likely one reason it's been able to lead the global music subscription market. A recent EMARKETER report found that Americans spend over nine times as much time on Spotify as the next closest competitor. Lately, though, those same features have inspired frustration.

For many, Discover Weekly has gotten worse at delivering songs that align with their musical tastes, sometimes including songs they've already listened to on Spotify. Other users report that Release Radar misses new releases from artists they like or mistakenly includes tracks that came out weeks earlier. Release Radar has also started including less relevant music from what one Reddit user described as "random artists with under 50k listens" that seemed to come out of nowhere, while others bemoan the inclusion of what sounds like "AI garbage."

The most audible groan of disapproval came with the arrival of Spotify Wrapped last year. While the personalized year-end recap playlist had historically sparked a tsunami of positive online buzz each year, the 2024 edition prompted a far more mixed reaction. Listeners said it lacked personality and interesting insights into their music habits.

Jeffrey Smith, a self-described "Spotify diehard" who leads marketing for the online music marketplace Discogs, has become so frustrated by the platform's declining music discovery feature that he's considering switching to Apple Music.

"Over the last couple of years, Spotify has met my needs less and less," Smith said. "It's not really reflective of my listening behavior as much as it is reflective of what they want me to listen to. It's just a listening machine at this point, not a music platform."

Smith's affinity for Spotify started fading when he noticed one song — "Back on 74" by Jungle — kept popping up on his personalized Spotify playlists. While it's possible that he had checked the song out at some point, it wasn't something he enjoyed or actively listened to. Still, the song made its way from one personalized music recommendation feature to another and even started inspiring Spotify's algorithms to play similar songs.

"It just continued until I finally said, 'I can't take it,'" Smith said.

As a music obsessive working at a major marketplace for vinyl records, Smith has no shortage of sources of quality music recommendations. But the days of Spotify augmenting his organic music discovery appear to be over. If he keeps his Spotify subscription at all, he says it will be for the podcasts and audiobooks the company has added to its premium tier.

I've found myself in a similar conundrum. After largely dismissing the 2015 launch of Apple Music as a then-satisfied Spotify subscriber, I recently decided to give Apple's music service another try. Since its debut, Apple Music has prioritized human editors over algorithms for music curation. Where it does use data-driven personalization, the results are pretty solid, and crucially, free of rainstorms. While Spotify's new audiobook library makes it tempting to stay, its playlists no longer feel like the best in the business. Once my free trial of Apple Music is over, I'm planning to make the switch.

Music subscription services like Spotify spend an extraordinary amount of money — last year, the company said it spent $10 billion — to license their massive music catalogs from record labels, publishers, and other rightsholders. These high costs make it more challenging to turn an enduring profit, something Spotify only managed to do for the first time in 2024.

From Wall Street's perspective, Spotify is killing it as year-over-year metrics like subscribers and revenue continue to grow. But in the quest to please investors, some ex-Spotify employees think it has abandoned too much of the human element that makes music and the culture around it so special.

Doug Ford was a Spotify executive who oversaw editorial playlist curation from 2013 to 2018. He arrived via Spotify's acquisition of Tunigo, a Swedish company that specialized in expert-curated music playlists based on different genres and moods. The next year, Spotify acquired Echo Nest, a music data startup founded by MIT grads that used a mix of machine learning and data filtering to build Pandora-style music recommendation algorithms. Both teams built out Spotify's man-meets-machine music discovery system, which helped the company successfully weather new competition from tech giants like Apple and Amazon as it started to explore the possibility of going public.

"That was a really beautiful moment in Spotify's history," Ford said. "That mix of the intentional algorithmic and human curation to make a really deep product was great."

The results spoke for themselves. Spotify said the 2015 launch of Discover Weekly yielded 1.7 billion streams in its first five months and generated a weekly wave of social media buzz when listeners' Discover Weekly playlists were refreshed.

"Our goal with Discover Weekly was to make something that felt like a friend or someone who knew you well was making you a mixtape," Spotify's product lead at the time, Matt Ogle, told me in an interview. To accomplish that feeling, the algorithm drew heavily from how real flesh-and-blood music enthusiasts were curating playlists on the platform.

"That's why that thing was so good," Ford said. "It was taking all the inputs equally and letting things happen normally with the audience. Now it feels a little bit different."

Ford said things started changing in the lead-up to Spotify's 2018 initial public offering and the ensuing pressure to prove to investors that profitability was possible in the notoriously tight-margined music streaming business.

"The culture changed because it had to become a business," Ford said. "You need to be a successful business in order to offer this utility to people. But they've discarded some of the human aspects of it, for sure."

One way the company shifted was by finding cheaper content to use. As the journalist Liz Pelly outlines in her book "Mood Machine," Spotify's pre-IPO years saw an increasing reliance on what is known internally as "perfect fit content," a euphemism for cheaper-to-license audio and mood-specific stock music that is optimized for longer listening sessions. As more listeners turned to streaming services like Spotify for "chill vibes" playlists and background music for studying, the company realized it could save money on royalty costs by populating those playlists with the cheap stuff. That would certainly explain the astonishing number of rainstorm audio tracks being released in a given week.

Ford watched with dismay as the platform became flooded with generic mood music. Around the same time, he said, respected colleagues started leaving the company. After what he describes as "a particularly bad stretch" of feeling frustrated by what he saw as a dramatic culture shift, Ford accepted an offer from YouTube to lead content for its music subscription service in 2018.

In the years since, Spotify's music programming strategy has only skewed more heavily toward automation. Pelly writes that by late 2023, the number of Spotify employees working on editorial music curation (about 200 people globally) was less than one-third the size of the team focused on algorithmic curation and personalization, according to an internal org chart. Notably, that head count was before Spotify laid off 17% of its total workforce in December 2023, a drastic cost-cutting measure that CEO Daniel Ek later admitted "did disrupt our day-to-day operations more than we anticipated." Holder said that there are now over 130 employees working on editorial music curation.

One of the more palpable victims of Spotify's 2023 cuts was Glenn McDonald, the company's data alchemist (his real job title), who came from the original Echo Nest team and designed and built much of the original data infrastructure and algorithms powering Spotify's music recommendation engine. He designed the system that identifies a song's genre, which was crucial to effectively sort and recommend music and understand listeners' tastes.

"The genre system was human-guided," McDonald said. "After they laid me off, they replaced it with a system that is not human-guided. It's just machine learning. It looks at patterns of words in the titles and descriptions of playlists. That's objectively worse."

McDonald said the ripple effects of this change could be felt across Spotify's listening experience. Music was often misclassified, like when Swedish folk-metal bands were suddenly lumped in with all other folk artists. He said it took Spotify engineers a year to fully deactivate and replace the genre system he built, according to data output from the company's public API. One of the many data-filtering tools he built during his tenure at the company was a set of filters designed to fine-tune the music recommendations presented by Discover Weekly and Release Radar — and crucially, prevent things like nature sounds and ambient noise frequencies from showing up where they don't belong.

"They would have been flagged as anomalies on those dashboards, and I would have followed up with the teams in charge of those recommendations," McDonald explained. "Without those dashboards, probably nobody is even watching for these issues."

Holder said that Spotify's approach to classifying genres and subgenres has "evolved" from the legacy system built by McDonald and other Echo Nest engineers, but declined to get into technical specifics of how it works now or what advantages the new system introduces.

"We're always laser-focused on continually enhancing personalized recommendations," she said. Recent updates include improvements to genre accuracy and Discover Weekly recommendations, she added.

Ford said the changes at Spotify are part of a broader industry shift away from costlier human curation. "There's been a tradeoff in favor of high metrics, long listening sessions, and music that's just 'good enough,'" he said. "It's happening everywhere."

The result is what Ford calls a "rampant wave of algorithmic fatigue" among listeners, who are clamoring for more meaningful cultural experiences as online platforms become increasingly hyper-automated.

While the occasional bug and ongoing iteration are to be expected in any product, some longtime subscribers find it odd that Spotify would need to fix or enhance features that worked so well in the first place. My Release Radar delivering mostly white noise and rainstorms, for instance, feels like a fundamental failure of what that feature used to do so well. Over the course of reporting and writing this story over the last few weeks, I've checked back with my Release Radar. Each week, it has a few new songs, but it's still mostly rainstorms.

John Paul Titlow is a freelance journalist who writes about technology, digital culture, travel, and mental health.

Spotify says it has submitted an update to its iOS app that would, among other things, let US customers use payment options that aren’t Apple’s, according to a blog post. The update submission follows Wednesday’s major Epic Games v. Apple ruling that forces Apple not to take a cut of payments on non-Apple payment systems and stops Apple from dictating how developers can tell users about outside payments.

“While other governments around the world have taken steps against Apple’s harmful practices, this is, by far, the most consequential action to date – and it delivers the benefits that all consumers deserve around the world,” Spotify says.

If Apple approves the update, Spotify says that US users:

Can finally see how much something costs in our app, including pricing details on subscriptions and information about promotions that will save money; 
Can click a link to purchase the subscription of choice, upgrading from a Free account to one of our Premium plans;
Can seamlessly click the link and easily change Premium subscriptions from Individual to a Student, Duo, or Family plan; 
Can use other payment options beyond just  Apple’s payment system—we provide a wider range of options on our website; and 
Going forward, this opens the door to other seamless buying opportunities that will directly benefit creators (think easy-to-purchase audiobooks) 

“If all of this seems obvious and user-friendly, you’re right, and we agree – these are the kinds of improvements that any app should offer its users,” Spotify says. “The fact that we haven’t been able to deliver these basic services, which were permitted by the judge’s order four years ago, is absurd.”

Now, we have to wait and see if Apple will approve the app update — which has been a bone of contention between Spotify and Apple in the past.

Patreon announced earlier today that it plans to submit an update for its iOS app to Apple that will let creators accept payments  outside of Apple’s payment system.