I noticed Spotify does this as well for some podcasts. Like the literally personalize an audio ad to my location and it's part of the audio of the podcast.
This has been a thing for years for non-Spotify podcasts. Podcast CDNs inject ads at the behest of the publisher (or the ad network provides the CDN) and will mint a new audio file for each region as it’s downloaded.
Automatically injected ads are also prone to failure and either a bug in the system or a misconfiguration by the producer of a podcast can result in some broken audio including skipping forward, backwards, creating a long tail of dead air, or (most egregiously) cut it many minutes short often enough to miss a significant chunk of the ending.
Automatic advertisement injection is a huge scourge on podcast listening, not because of the ads, but how broken it ends up being in practice.
Automatically injected ads are also prone to failure and either a bug in the system or a misconfiguration by the producer of a podcast can result in some broken audio including skipping forward, backwards, creating a long tail of dead air, or (most egregiously) cut it many minutes short often enough to miss a significant chunk of the ending.
Automatic advertisement injection is a huge scourge on podcast listening, not because of the ads, but how broken it ends up being in practice.