Spotify Put Courses in Front of 600 Million People. Then It Deleted the Catalog and Refunded Everyone.

There is a sentence sitting on a Spotify help page right now that should be printed out and taped above the desk of every course creator chasing a marketplace deal.

"As of March 31, 2026 we will be removing our course catalog. If you purchased a course you can expect a refund after this date. If you have started a course and you'd like to finish it you have until March 31, 2026 to do so."

That's it. That's the obituary. A paid learning marketplace inside one of the most-used apps on earth, shut off with a refund notice and a suggestion to go discover podcasts, audiobooks, and videos instead.

The shutdown date was six months ago. Almost nobody in the creator economy has talked about what it actually means.

What Spotify built, and how fast it got built

March 2024. Spotify, looking to get its 600 million-plus users to spend more time and money on its platform, started testing freemium video courses in the UK, produced with third parties including the BBC and Skillshare, with at least two lessons free and full courses ranging from £20 to £80 on average. The launch partners were BBC Maestro, PLAYvirtuoso, Skillshare and Thinkific, with topics grouped into four themes: make music, get creative, learn business and healthy living.

The logic was good. It was arguably the best logic anyone in online education has had in years. Mohit Jitani, Spotify's London-based product director for the education offerings, said the company's podcast business was the main inspiration, with about half of its 226 million Premium subscribers engaging with education or self-help themed podcasts. "More and more people were starting to come to Spotify with some intent of learning," Jitani told The Verge. "And we thought, how can we take this core insight and build something on top of it?"

On pricing, he was honest about the experiment. Jitani said pricing choices were part of what Spotify was testing before considering a wider rollout. "With this launch, we're trying to understand the demand first," he said. "Then we optimize how we can make it more compelling and exciting."

The plumbing went deeper than a content licensing deal. Thinkific built an actual payout rail. Spotify promoted the courses through its apps and ran the whole student experience from purchase to support, while the creator kept ownership of the content inside Thinkific, and revenue was split between the creator, Spotify and Thinkific. Payouts ran through Stripe Express, a separate account creators had to open specifically to get paid for Spotify sales. Creators whose businesses were based outside a list of supported countries simply could not participate.

It kept growing, too. In January 2025 Spotify was still promoting courses, and early adopter Chris Messina spotted the category appearing in the US app, though the category pages there were empty. As recently as July 2025, UK music edtech startup Syntho put its mixing and mastering lessons into the hub, becoming the second dedicated music-education provider there after PlayVirtuoso, since rebranded as Whatclass.

Eight months after that, the catalog was gone.

The line buried in the purchase terms

Here is the part that matters more than the shutdown itself.

The Courses on Spotify purchase terms, last updated March 25th, 2024, open with a warning in capital letters: they contain important conditions and restrictions on the availability of course content on Spotify. For the avoidance of doubt, the terms state, course content is deemed "Content" for the purpose of applying Spotify's Terms of Use.

And Spotify's Terms of Use say what every platform's terms say. Users get limited, non-exclusive, revocable permission to make personal, non-commercial use of the service and the Content, and that access remains in effect unless and until terminated by you or Spotify. The applications and the Content are licensed, not sold or transferred to you, and Spotify and its licensors retain ownership.

The course terms also spell out that content may become unavailable for a list of reasons that includes Spotify needing to make modifications, improvements or updates.

Translation for the buyer: you never owned the course. You rented a key to a room, and the landlord could change the locks. A student who paid £80 in 2024 for a course they half-finished had their library switched off by corporate decision, and got money back instead of knowledge.

Translation for the creator: the student relationship was never yours either. On Thinkific, the course sent to Spotify was duplicated into an entirely separate copy for the pilot. Spotify owned the checkout, the student, the data and the shelf.

Distribution is not demand

This is the fantasy that sells more creator courses than almost any other: get in front of a platform's hundreds of millions of users and the sales take care of themselves.

Spotify ran that experiment with better odds than any creator will ever get. Enormous audience. Proven appetite for learning content. Named partners with real catalogs. Free sample lessons on every course, and an optional experiment that let Spotify give away up to 50% of a creator's course for free to optimize sales. Publishers owned the videos and licensed them to Spotify, with the creator, publisher and Spotify all taking a share of each sale.

It still came down.

Spotify has form here. In 2019 it killed the beta that let indie artists upload music directly, giving them until the end of that month to move to another distributor. In 2022 it quietly closed the Greenroom Creator Fund, telling applicants by email that it "will not be moving forward." Co-founder Daniel Ek has told investors the company is not afraid of sunsetting products, saying that "killing things that sometimes sort of work is a healthy thing to refocus and reenergize people on the things that really drive lots of value."

That is a perfectly rational way to run a $100 billion audio company. It is a catastrophic way to run your only sales channel.

Thinkific's own documentation described Spotify Courses as a pilot with a select group of creators, UK-only, with a long-term goal of going worldwide. The creators who got in were, by definition, the chosen few. The lucky ones. The ones everybody else envied.

They are now back where they started, except with a dead link, a Stripe Express account with nothing arriving in it, and a list of students they never had access to in the first place.

The email list you own is slower. It is also still there on April 1st.