akadir / spotifyadblock

Protect your privacy by blocking all annoying Spotify ads & analytics in Linux, OSX and Windows with hosts file.

I will show you how to easily block the servers hosting Spotify ads on your Linux/Mac or Windows machine. This will allow you to listen all day long on a free account without hearing a single ad or being tracked by third party. This trick is very simple, legal and works great.

In order to remove those pesky ads, all we need to do is setup out hosts file to override the DNS for Spotify's ad servers and redirect that traffic to our local machine.  

When the traffic hits out local machine the call will fail and the tracking third party advertising will be skipped.

Download & open hosts file using your favorite text editor.

For Windows 10 & 8:

Press the Windows key. Type Notepad in the search field. In the search results, right-click Notepad and select Run as administrator. From Notepad, open the following file: c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts Make the necessary changes to the file. Click File > Save to save your changes.

For Linux:

Open a terminal window. Open the hosts file in a text editor (you can use any text editor) by typing the following line:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

For Mac OS X 10.6 through 10.12:

Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal. Open the hosts file by typing the following line in the terminal window:

sudo nano /private/etc/hosts

Type your domain user password when prompted. Edit the hosts file.The file contains some comments (lines starting with the # symbol), and some default hostname mappings (for example, 127.0.0.1 – local host). Add your new mappings after the default mappings.* Save the hosts file by pressing Control+x and answering y. Make your changes take effect by flushing the DNS cache with the following command:

dscacheutil -flushcache

There you go, editing hosts file has taken effect.

Pi-hole compatible versions can be found here:

Blocklist: https://github.com/x0uid/SpotifyAdBlock/blob/master/SpotifyBlocklist.txt
Whitelist: https://gist.github.com/captainhook/9eb4132d6e58888e37c6bc6c73dd4e60
Bash script to import whitelist: https://gist.github.com/captainhook/f4ccfc82dc6696270d62b54b13f871c4
Credits to: captainhook

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I have maintained this ad-blocking list because I am passionate about this, and i think u have all the right to protect your privacy while enjoying music. Donations are one of the many ways to support what I do.