How long was the ICE ads campaign with Spotify?

1. The timeline authorities set: October start, end‑of‑year finish

Multiple outlets trace public discovery of the DHS/ICE recruitment spots to mid‑to‑late October 2025, when listeners began hearing them on Spotify’s ad‑supported tier and artists and users pushed back, and those same outlets report the campaign concluded by the end of 2025 ^{[1] [2] [3]}. Spotify told Rolling Stone and others that the advertisements “were part of a U.S. government recruitment campaign that ran across all major media and platforms” and that the campaign “ended on most platforms and channels, including Spotify, at the end of last year,” anchoring the campaign’s termination to late 2025 rather than any January 2026 developments ^{[3] [2]}.

2. How long that equates to on Spotify: weeks to a few months, not years

Because public reporting places the campaign’s public rollout in October and Spotify confirms the campaign ended at the end of 2025, the reasonable reading is that Spotify ran the ICE spots for a period spanning October through December 2025 — effectively several weeks up to about three months — although no outlet or Spotify spokesperson provided exact calendar‑day start and stop timestamps ^{[1] [3] [4]}. Multiple follow‑ups note ambiguity in precise platform timelines — for example, some coverage says the campaign “started during October” and that Spotify’s ads “stopped running at the end of last year,” which implies a multi‑week presence concentrated in late 2025 rather than an extended multi‑year buy ^{[1] [3]}.

3. Context and caveats: part of a broader DHS buy, not an isolated Spotify campaign

Reporting consistently frames Spotify’s role as one piece of a larger Department of Homeland Security recruitment effort that ran across TV, streaming and online channels; industry trackers and sources estimated much larger spends on platforms like Google and Meta while attributing a relatively small amount to Spotify (reportedly about $74,000), reinforcing that Spotify’s run was a slice of a coordinated, time‑limited federal campaign rather than a unique, indefinite contract ^{[5] [1] [6]}. Spotify and DHS spokespeople emphasized the campaign’s cross‑platform nature and said the ads “ended on most platforms and channels” at year‑end, which is the company’s stated basis for asserting there are currently no ICE ads running on Spotify ^{[3] [2]}.

4. Conflicting narratives and what remains unclear

Some activist and artist coverage framed Spotify as actively hosting the ads and urged permanent policy changes or boycotts, while Spotify’s repeated defense was procedural — the ads did not violate its ad rules and were part of a broader campaign — and the company declined to say whether it would refuse similar buys in the future, leaving open the possibility of future placements ^{[7] [8] [6]}. Crucially, none of the cited reporting supplies a granular invoice or timestamp proving the exact first hour an ICE ad aired on Spotify or the exact last hour it played, so while the best available evidence places the run between October and the end of 2025, the precise number of days cannot be authenticated from the public record provided ^{[1] [3]}.

5. Bottom line: measured answer to duration

The most defensible, evidence‑based answer is that Spotify carried ICE recruitment ads beginning in October 2025 and stopped carrying them by the end of 2025, so the campaign’s Spotify presence lasted on the order of several weeks to roughly three months; specific start and end calendar dates on Spotify have not been publicly disclosed in the available reporting ^{[1] [3] [2]}.