5 ms·

What do you miss?

by x0x0 11y ago

What do you miss?

bentlegen 11y ago
I was an Rdio subscriber from 2010 until it shut down, and I've been a Spotify subscriber since. I can name a few things: 1) Discovery. Rdio would inform me when new albums are out by artists I listen to. Spotify doesn't. Rdio's "Artist Stations" were also much better – not only did they not repeat (like Spotify's do), they also let you choose whether you wanted to hear "more" or "less" of the artist themselves while listening to their station. 2) Social. I miss seeing my friends faces next to albums, letting me know that they'd listened to it. I also miss the "Network Heavy Rotation" view, that showed trending albums by friends/users I follow. I miss that a user's profile would show you what albums they've been listening to frequently lately. Spotify only tells you what track a friend is listening to right now, and their profile shows you what artists. So, awesome, you know your friend is listening to Bowie, but you don't know which of Bowie's 20 albums they're into. 3) Your collection. Rdio had no upper bound on saved albums (that I'm aware of). I've already peaked the maximum number of saved songs in Spotify – it literally won't let me "save" anything else without going through my existing albums and choosing something to remove. 4) Playlist searching. Spotify by default names your playlist according to the first song you've added. You have to go out of your way to give it a different name. This means there are TONS of playlists in Spotify that are named "Nirvana" purely because that was the first song in the playlist. It massively pollutes searching and makes finding good playlists tough. Also, there's no sensible ranking of playlists – Rdio would at least tell you which were the most popular, which was usually good enough. There are about another dozen things I could name, but I'll stop here. Spotify has felt like a giant step backwards from Rdio, and I think I'm going to explore alternatives soon.
- deepakg 11y ago
  > Rdio would inform me when new albums are out by artists I listen to. Spotify doesn't. Spotify does, but you need to follow the artist from the artist page. I get a push a notification on the iPhone and a notification on the Mac desktop app. That said, sometimes an album being out doesn't necessarily mean it being available on Spotify in your country.
  - bentlegen 11y ago
    That seems like an unnecessary amount of work. So I need to click through and follow the 100+ artists I'm a fan of?
- x0x0 11y ago
  Hmm. I get notifications for certain artists of new song releases; I'm not sure which ones and why though. deepakg suggests you get them if you follow artists, but the spotify client won't load the artists page for me at this time. I will say, at least for me, Spotify's "Discover Weekly" which is refreshed Sunday nights is amazing. I've saved at least 2 songs from it every week, and most weeks more than 2. If only they could build an android app that doesn't crash or get flaky all the time... The social features sound cool.
  - bentlegen 11y ago
    > I will say, at least for me, Spotify's "Discover Weekly" which is refreshed Sunday nights is amazing. I've saved at least 2 songs from it every week, and most weeks more than 2. Rdio basically had a feature that created an "Rdio" station from what they called your "heavy rotation". It featured songs by artists that were similar. To me, it was the equivalent of "Discover Weekly", except available at any time instead of once a week.
- tonfa 11y ago
  1) Google music also tells me about new releases 2) not much social in gmusic 3) haven't found an upper bound on saved songs 4) I don't use public playlists a lot, but you do have to pick a name when creating one
- staticelf 11y ago
  A key feature that made me switch from Rdio was that if I searched for an Artist I could not play it's most popular songs. It just played albums. All the features you listed is nothing compared to that basic functionality.
  - thirdsun 11y ago
    I disagree. Sure, people value different things, but I'd rate that functionality as a pretty minor feature. As a compromise rdio highlighted popular songs within an album. Artist stations with the slider set to focus on the current artist (only?) might have achieved the same results too, I guess. So, it's not as if it couldn't be done. The almost complete absence of social features however, that's a big one in my opinion.
    - staticelf 11y ago
      Funny how people are different. It was big for me, since I stopped paying them money just because of that missing feature. Personally, I think the less social features, the better.
      - thirdsun 11y ago
        Sure, usually I'm not keen on social features either. Rarely touch them. However finding like-minded people and discussing shared interests. This is basically what happens here. With that in mind I always avoided following real life friends on rdio or Spotify as I didn't want them to ruin the recommendations, suggestions, feeds, etc. Well, it matters a lot less on Spotify since the features aren't there anyway. However rdio with a bunch like-minded people you never met was great. The good kind of social interaction.
  - bentlegen 11y ago
    You could visit an artist, hit "play Rdio station" and it was basically equivalent. It always leaned towards hit songs. Personally, I'm an album-centric listener so I preferred Rdio's music organization.
thirdsun 11y ago
The first things that comes to mind: - Browse by label (additionally sort by most recent releases): I know it's not a mainstream thing, but labels, particularly smaller ones, are very good curators and a great indicator for worthwhile music. For the music I enjoy it's absolutely necessary to keep up with a label's recent releases. - A great community that had tools to discuss music and releases: Being able to comment on albums, playlists and other items seems like a very obvious feature to me. And it was a powerful one on rdio - You'd often see familiar faces in the comment section of an album and start interesting discussions. This isn't possible on Spotify at all. Furthermore I could see what's popular among my friends (and not just in general!) on a single "Heavy Rotation" page - if you carefully select who to follow, this is invaluable. I have a similar follower count on Spotify as I did on rdio, but no meaningful way to interact with them - there's an activity feed where I can share discoveries with everyone, but it's the saddest thing I've ever seen in social networks: It's a one-way feature to shout recommendations at everyone but there's no way for others to get back to me and add their feedback. I might as well talk to myself. If you enjoy being a curator and recommending things to others Spotify is close to useless. - A working queue: This is just horrible. It's not obvious at all how the queuing system works in Spotify. Apparently it's tied to whatever client you're currently use. Listening on mobile? Better prepared to see a very different queue once you switch over to the desktop. In rdio the queue was basically a persistent "Listen later..." playlist - it could differentiate between single songs, full albums and palylists - if you had an album and a playlist queued it would show two items which you could drag and drop in order to move up or down. Beautiful. Enter Spotify: Imagine you're listening to an album and you'd like to add a second album to be played after the current one. Instead Spotify will start playing the second album immediately after the current SONG thereby interrupting the current album. By the way, the option to start that confusing process is called "Add to queue", not "Play next" which doesn't exist. Horrible. On iOS you can't change the order of the current queue either - you can't even jump from the current track to item #27 as the only way to navigate the queue on iOS is to skip track by track. It basically means that you'll never use the queue for anything and just create your own "Play later" playlists. I get the feeling that Spotify is for people who don't want to deal with music. Start the app, hit play on a Spotify-provided playlist with a hip background cover and mildly interesting name and be done with it. That person is not me. However I can see why it was appearing to the masses. The sad thing is that rdio could do all these simple things and be used in similar fashion to Spotify and its playlist-centric approach too - it just offered all those additional features on top and still lost.

What do you miss?

by x0x0 11y ago

What do you miss?

I was an Rdio subscriber from 2010 until it shut down, and I've been a Spotify subscriber since. I can name a few things: 1) Discovery. Rdio would inform me when new albums are out by artists I listen to. Spotify doesn't. Rdio's "Artist Stations" were also much better – not only did they not repeat (like Spotify's do), they also let you choose whether you wanted to hear "more" or "less" of the artist themselves while listening to their station. 2) Social. I miss seeing my friends faces next to albums, letting me know that they'd listened to it. I also miss the "Network Heavy Rotation" view, that showed trending albums by friends/users I follow. I miss that a user's profile would show you what albums they've been listening to frequently lately. Spotify only tells you what track a friend is listening to right now, and their profile shows you what artists. So, awesome, you know your friend is listening to Bowie, but you don't know which of Bowie's 20 albums they're into. 3) Your collection. Rdio had no upper bound on saved albums (that I'm aware of). I've already peaked the maximum number of saved songs in Spotify – it literally won't let me "save" anything else without going through my existing albums and choosing something to remove. 4) Playlist searching. Spotify by default names your playlist according to the first song you've added. You have to go out of your way to give it a different name. This means there are TONS of playlists in Spotify that are named "Nirvana" purely because that was the first song in the playlist. It massively pollutes searching and makes finding good playlists tough. Also, there's no sensible ranking of playlists – Rdio would at least tell you which were the most popular, which was usually good enough. There are about another dozen things I could name, but I'll stop here. Spotify has felt like a giant step backwards from Rdio, and I think I'm going to explore alternatives soon.

deepakg 11y ago
> Rdio would inform me when new albums are out by artists I listen to. Spotify doesn't. Spotify does, but you need to follow the artist from the artist page. I get a push a notification on the iPhone and a notification on the Mac desktop app. That said, sometimes an album being out doesn't necessarily mean it being available on Spotify in your country.
- bentlegen 11y ago
  That seems like an unnecessary amount of work. So I need to click through and follow the 100+ artists I'm a fan of?
x0x0 11y ago
Hmm. I get notifications for certain artists of new song releases; I'm not sure which ones and why though. deepakg suggests you get them if you follow artists, but the spotify client won't load the artists page for me at this time. I will say, at least for me, Spotify's "Discover Weekly" which is refreshed Sunday nights is amazing. I've saved at least 2 songs from it every week, and most weeks more than 2. If only they could build an android app that doesn't crash or get flaky all the time... The social features sound cool.
- bentlegen 11y ago
  > I will say, at least for me, Spotify's "Discover Weekly" which is refreshed Sunday nights is amazing. I've saved at least 2 songs from it every week, and most weeks more than 2. Rdio basically had a feature that created an "Rdio" station from what they called your "heavy rotation". It featured songs by artists that were similar. To me, it was the equivalent of "Discover Weekly", except available at any time instead of once a week.
tonfa 11y ago
1) Google music also tells me about new releases 2) not much social in gmusic 3) haven't found an upper bound on saved songs 4) I don't use public playlists a lot, but you do have to pick a name when creating one
staticelf 11y ago
A key feature that made me switch from Rdio was that if I searched for an Artist I could not play it's most popular songs. It just played albums. All the features you listed is nothing compared to that basic functionality.
- thirdsun 11y ago
  I disagree. Sure, people value different things, but I'd rate that functionality as a pretty minor feature. As a compromise rdio highlighted popular songs within an album. Artist stations with the slider set to focus on the current artist (only?) might have achieved the same results too, I guess. So, it's not as if it couldn't be done. The almost complete absence of social features however, that's a big one in my opinion.
  - staticelf 11y ago
    Funny how people are different. It was big for me, since I stopped paying them money just because of that missing feature. Personally, I think the less social features, the better.
    - thirdsun 11y ago
      Sure, usually I'm not keen on social features either. Rarely touch them. However finding like-minded people and discussing shared interests. This is basically what happens here. With that in mind I always avoided following real life friends on rdio or Spotify as I didn't want them to ruin the recommendations, suggestions, feeds, etc. Well, it matters a lot less on Spotify since the features aren't there anyway. However rdio with a bunch like-minded people you never met was great. The good kind of social interaction.
- bentlegen 11y ago
  You could visit an artist, hit "play Rdio station" and it was basically equivalent. It always leaned towards hit songs. Personally, I'm an album-centric listener so I preferred Rdio's music organization.

thirdsun 11y ago

The first things that comes to mind: - Browse by label (additionally sort by most recent releases): I know it's not a mainstream thing, but labels, particularly smaller ones, are very good curators and a great indicator for worthwhile music. For the music I enjoy it's absolutely necessary to keep up with a label's recent releases. - A great community that had tools to discuss music and releases: Being able to comment on albums, playlists and other items seems like a very obvious feature to me. And it was a powerful one on rdio - You'd often see familiar faces in the comment section of an album and start interesting discussions. This isn't possible on Spotify at all. Furthermore I could see what's popular among my friends (and not just in general!) on a single "Heavy Rotation" page - if you carefully select who to follow, this is invaluable. I have a similar follower count on Spotify as I did on rdio, but no meaningful way to interact with them - there's an activity feed where I can share discoveries with everyone, but it's the saddest thing I've ever seen in social networks: It's a one-way feature to shout recommendations at everyone but there's no way for others to get back to me and add their feedback. I might as well talk to myself. If you enjoy being a curator and recommending things to others Spotify is close to useless. - A working queue: This is just horrible. It's not obvious at all how the queuing system works in Spotify. Apparently it's tied to whatever client you're currently use. Listening on mobile? Better prepared to see a very different queue once you switch over to the desktop. In rdio the queue was basically a persistent "Listen later..." playlist - it could differentiate between single songs, full albums and palylists - if you had an album and a playlist queued it would show two items which you could drag and drop in order to move up or down. Beautiful. Enter Spotify: Imagine you're listening to an album and you'd like to add a second album to be played after the current one. Instead Spotify will start playing the second album immediately after the current SONG thereby interrupting the current album. By the way, the option to start that confusing process is called "Add to queue", not "Play next" which doesn't exist. Horrible. On iOS you can't change the order of the current queue either - you can't even jump from the current track to item #27 as the only way to navigate the queue on iOS is to skip track by track. It basically means that you'll never use the queue for anything and just create your own "Play later" playlists. I get the feeling that Spotify is for people who don't want to deal with music. Start the app, hit play on a Spotify-provided playlist with a hip background cover and mildly interesting name and be done with it. That person is not me. However I can see why it was appearing to the masses. The sad thing is that rdio could do all these simple things and be used in similar fashion to Spotify and its playlist-centric approach too - it just offered all those additional features on top and still lost.