Over 100 million people use Spotify to satiate their musical needs, and 40 million of those are paid subscribers, making the service the world’s largest music streaming company. It’s through paid subscriptions and advertisement revenue that Spotify can continue to offer a free service for its other 60 million users, but this freemium model just hit a serious roadblock.
Spotify’s free version was just found to be serving up malware to multiple operating systems via a particularly malicious advertisement. Here’s what the company had to say in response to the incident.
“We’ve identified an issue where a small number of users were experiencing a problem with questionable website pop-ups in their default browsers as a result of an isolated issue with an ad on our Free tier. We have now identified the source of the problem and have shut it down.” 
It seems Spotify has swiftly dealt with the problem, but it does not appear that the advertisement in question is responsible for certain reports of malware websites attempting to install viruses without any input or clicks from the user.
PSA: uninstall Spotify free, their ads are plagued with malware right now. pic.twitter.com/DUOqDrnDUZ
— Volp (@VolpRS) October 5, 2016
@SpotifyCares Yesterday the Spotify Free software started launching malware on my Mac's Safari on its own. Many have the same experience atm
— Taru Kalvi (@tarukalvi) October 5, 2016
Source: Telegraph
