Spotify’s free option to offer 30 minutes audio ad-free (if you watch an ad)

Music streaming services are great at offering an all-your-ears-can-eat supply of sound, but they tend to come with a price tag, and the free versions generally cut up your listening with ads, but what if there was a way to ditch the ads for a time?

Rolling out across Spotify’s network next year will be a video ad service that will let you watch an ad to pay for some of the time you’re listening to music on the Spotify network, instead of listening to an ad or two after listening to several songs, which is the way it is currently.

On the mobile, this will be called Sponsored Sessions, with the ads existing in either 15 or 30 second video promos that you’ll have to sit through after opting in. Think of it as for every one second of video you watch, you have roughly one minute of music to listen to.

Spotify hasn’t yet said if the Sponsored Sessions will offer an ad every 30 minutes to let you listen to all the music you want mostly ad-free, but we’re checking into it.

We do know that the concept won’t just exist on mobile and will extend to the Spotify desktop app, with Video Takeover ads also taking over the experience of using Spotify on computers.

On the positive side, you won’t have to use the Sponsored Sessions if you don’t want to, as it will be opt-in, at least for the moment anyway, with the audio ads still part of Spotify’s free system and playing after every few songs, which is good news for those who don’t mind the sound of a radio like ad and would prefer to keep video ads away from their phones.