[samtho]

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.

[polishdude20]

Especially knowing that it's double-dipping by the podcaster.