I feel the same way about Spotify. I'm fine paying an honest price for a useful service, but the upsells and dark patterns have gotten so aggressive I can't stand the client any more. I wish they'd at least allow third party clients to access basic functionality... but decisionmakers don't understand the attraction of a third party client in the first place, let alone feel like unlocking that functionality when it could negatively impact engagement with their dark patterns.
Aggressive podcast placement is the big problem, but they also allow artists to "promote" their music by accepting lower royalty payments. And those artists show up much more often than other artists in radios and suggested playlists.
As someone who doesn't like the podcast walled garden Spotify is trying to build (I prefer my podcast market with competitive open standards and choice of clients, thank you very much), the podcasts really bothered me. As a paying user, I should be able to turn them off entirely, but they kept overhauling the UI to make them more and more prominent. I stopped using Spotify a year ago today, and I've been very happy managing my own music library with Jellyfin since then.
