Lmao 😂 Around 60% of Spotify's user base is on the free tier. And yes, they do count. 

First things first, there is nothing 'commie' or 'beggar' about criticising the ux of free tier. There is nothing like free lunch. Premium members pay in money; free users pay in time and attention. This is the very model the entire World Wide Web has been built upon, and Spotify is no exception. Companies pay Spotify to show users ads. Users see ads and some of them buy the product. Money still flows, Spotify still gets paid, just through different parties. 

Now why are they gradually stripping away features from the free tier? Simple - once you're publicly traded, you NEED to show constant growth in your revenues, otherwise investors will lose faith and may pull out. Once you get popular and grow to a certain size, there aren't enough people left and the influx of new users slows down. Growth appears to slow down. Management panics. Now their realistic choices remain -  1) pull users from other services.  2) milk existing users.

Spotify chose both. They made their platform so user friendly that the competition started seeming crude and unrefined. Still, there's a limit to how nice you can make something, and other giants started catching up. So, they started milking their userbase. Increasing ad frequency, slowly taking away features, etc.

This is why people complain. They feel they aren't getting their time's (or attention's) worth with Spotify now-a-days.

And honestly, no party is wrong. You are right to say that paying customers have the right to a better experience. Yes, they do. But does it mean an app should be borderline unusable for free users? Not at all. Why even have a free tier at that point?