27 Mar 2019

Block badly targeted Spotify adverts

Spotify is a great service and I especially love it when I am on premium and I don't have to deal with adverts, it's a guilty pleasure. Unfortunately I am not able to be on premium all the time, but even without premium, Spotify is a great service and the occasional advert or two is a price that I am happy to pay for the awesome privilege of music on demand.

However, I do wish that I could opt out of certain adverts. Most recently there has been an ad campaign for 'Pet Sematary' and I really don't need that in my life - certainly not more than once a day! I got in touch with Spotify on Twitter and they said they would 'mention it to their ad people' ... It would be really great if they could provide granular control over adverts, I wouldn't have to put up with Pet Sematary/Horror adverts and the advertiser wouldn't have to pay for a badly targeted advert. That's a win win situation for everyone!

I am hopeful that a long term solution for this problem will arrive soon, but in the mean time I present to you my temporary hack or 'mute your PC sound for 30 seconds'. I already use 'AutoHotkey' to create custom keyboard shortcuts and so I added the following entry to automatically mute my PC sound for 30 seconds when I press 'Ctrl + Alt + a':

!^a::
Send {Volume_Mute}
Sleep 30000
Send {Volume_Mute}
Return

Now I don't have to put up with the Pet Sematary advert raising my stress levels while I am already dealing with enough stress in my work day and I am still supporting Spotify by listening to all of their other adverts!