To me, it varies with artist. I like folk music. With Christy Moore, for example, who really knows how to pace a show, the spoken intros are always short and relevant to the next track, so the track starts at the end of applause. With others, who take 10 minutes to introduce a 3 minute song, I make it a seperate track and ensure skipping it doesn't detract from the performance or make you lose the sense of what's going on.