BlockTheSpot

Spotify has a particularly interesting way of getting you to subscribe to their Premium tier. Besides banner ads, which are about what you would expect, you also get audio ones. For a program centered around streaming music and podcasts, it’s obvious that audio ads can get really effective at annoying you, to the point where some users choose to subscribe just to get rid of them.

Some workarounds are available on desktop to help you circumvent all of that. BlockTheSpot is, as its name would suggest, a tool that can act as a sort of ad-blocker for the Spotify app, offering you this Premium benefit free-of-charge.

The program is essentially a batch file that users will only have to run once to engage the ad-blocker. The setup process is mostly automatic and should take no more than a few seconds to complete. During it, the program will prompt you to choose whether to uninstall the Windows Store edition of Spotify if it exists on your drive: its functions do not work with that edition.

After that, it’ll start patching your Spotify client, and all should be well. You can start using it just as you normally would without having to sit through audio ads or see a bunch of banner ads on the interface.

For a Spotify ad-blocker, the tool works well and there were no side effects of any kind upon patching our client. Everything proceeded as normal, and we were able to enjoy our music without pause.

It should be mentioned that the patcher reportedly “lives” through Spotify updates, as stated by the developer, so there won’t be a need to patch your client again on subsequent updates.

As it stands, BlockTheSpot works as an effective ad-blocker for Spotify. Though I still find Spotify’s Premium service worthwhile, if you cannot subscribe yet for some reason, but use the app quite a bit, then this is a very easy to apply fix for some non-Premium woes.