White noise has gained in popularity over the past decade, to the point where I hardly know a single person who has raised a child without a dedicated white noise machine in their room.

Apparently some people go to Spotify to find their white noise, and with folks listening to three million hours a day – much of it while they’re asleep – Spotify is wondering if there’s a way to put a stop to it.

Sleeping people can’t listen to ads, after all – even though the podcast creators are making up to $18,000 a month placing them.

Spotify makes the most money by pushing customers to its paid music subscriptions, and with razor-thin margins, there’s a lot of pressure for them to keep making money.

Music industry execs like Robert Kyncl at Warner Music Group would also like something to be done, even if it’s just adjusting the algorithms to assign more weight to “actual” music.

“It can’t be that an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof.”

Shifting away from white noise programming could, according to Spotify research, create an extra $38 million in profit.

That said, they claim they have not acted on these numbers yet.

“The proposal in question did not come to fruition – we continue to have white noise podcasts on our platform.”

Users, however, report white noise podcasts vanishing overnight.