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I was a Spotify lifer until I butted up against their 10,000 song limit. [1] Now, I'm using Google Play Music. There's no doubt in my mind that everything else

I was a Spotify lifer until I butted up against their 10,000 song limit. [1] Now, I'm using Google Play Music. There's no doubt in my mind that everything else outside of this limit is better on Spotify. Please, Spotify, fix this! Let me help inflate your valuation! 1. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Library-Song-Limit/td-p/1664935 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Library-Song-Limit...

tomhschmidt 9y ago
+1. Ability to upload music on Google Play Music is also keeping me from switching to Spotify. I have a lot of tracks that simply aren't in the Spotify catalog. If they add that, I'd switch tomorrow.
- cheeze 9y ago
  I'm blown away that the solution for this has been the shitty "local playlist sync" solution for years at this point. I guess I'm in a niche? For me, there are tons of hiphop mixtapes that will never be on Spotify that I definitely need in my music player of choice. Hell, Spotify won't even let me import local MP3 files from my phone!
  - fossuser 9y ago
    I just stopped listening to music that doesn't exist in Spotify. I fought it for a while with local playlist syncing and such, but just wasn't worth it over time. There's enough other music out there that I gave up trying.
    - halflings 9y ago
      You should give YouTube Music a try. It has both the "regular" catalog you'd expect from Spotify (high quality audio, organised by albums, etc.) + more indy bands that publish their music on YouTube.
- cbhl 9y ago
  ... until Google Play Music goes the way of Google Reader :'(
- firefistace77 9y ago
  I thought this was a feature already? https://support.spotify.com/is/using_spotify/features/listen-to-local-files/ https://support.spotify.com/is/using_spotify/features/listen... Or are you referring to something different?
  - Moncefmd 9y ago
    The problem is that, according to your documentation, local music has to be on a desktop (the only way to listen to local music on mobile is to be connected to the same WiFi of a desktop that serves that music (!)). Which I think defeats the purpose of having your music on the go.
    - nuclear_eclipse 9y ago
      You can still add local tracks to playlists and sync those playlists to your phone. I have plenty of albums that don't exist in Spotify's cloud that I bring with me on my phone as "downloaded" playlists.
- lambda_lover 9y ago
  I hit this issue with a lot of video game/movie soundtracks (Battlestar Galactica and Starbound OSTs are some of my favorite programming music), and it's extremely frustrating. Even worse, Spotify's app doesn't work on my work VPN, forcing me to use the web app... which doesn't support listening to user tracks since Spotify won't store them in its own cloud. I pay them $10/month for service, so why can't they reserve a couple gigs of space to store my files that they don't have in their library?
- awalton 9y ago
  Yeah this might seriously make me considering switching from my current half-baked solution of GPM and Pandora, but I still feel discovery is better on Pandora (and that's saying a lot because Pandora leaves a _lot_ to be desired).
arctangent 9y ago
This happened to me too, so I'm in the process of switching back to Apple Music. I scrobble to last.fm so I can still get decent recommendations over there.
INTPenis 9y ago
I like google play, also converted from spotify. But I don't like that albums disappear from google play. This happened at spotify too and I assume it's due to legal issues. When an artist released a certain album on one label and only that album disappears. It's very annoying and is pushing me back to good old piracy.
- brnzh 9y ago
  I've experienced all of these issues before, the 10k/disappearing albums is really debilitating for music lovers who like to collect full albums. I switched to Spotify from Google Music a few months ago, and my experience is mostly the same--mediocre, but functional enough. At least Spotify has an open API, so you (maybe) can solve your own problems given some time. (10k is really not that much at all if you're into a few genres.)
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Instead of saving full albums to your saved tracks, save only the very favorite tracks, and add the albums as playlists instead. I have a playlist folder called "favorite albums" specifically for this.
LudoA 9y ago
10K songs is limiting to you?! Wow, how/for what do you use Spotify? At a (low!) estimate of 4 minutes per song, if you listen to Spotify for 3hrs/day, it would still take you 222 days to listen to all of them once. Is this a form of data hoarding? If not, how do you use that many songs?
- chii 9y ago
  if you want to have music on 10hrs a day, a 10k long playlist only lasts 20 days. and 10hrs is only half a day, and you might want to have music outside of work hours too!
  - LudoA 9y ago
    Good point, hadn't thought of people listening to music at work :)
- spiralganglion 9y ago
  10K songs is restrictive when it comes to digital music collections. I have 15k songs in my iTunes library, and that doesn't include the music I listen to via Apple Music and SoundCloud. Given that I've been building up this music collection for about two decades now, there's quite a bit of stuff in the long tail, though I do listen to near all of it over the span of a few years. If Spotify want to be around for another decade, I think it's reasonable that they let people build up a respectable library.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    But you don't have to save every single track to your collection, there's no reason to be a hoarder. They're still there on Spotify even if you don't save them, it's not like saving MP3s to your hard drive. Use playlists as well. Each playlist has its own limit of 10K tracks AFAIK. So I save only absolute favorite individual tracks (and take some stuff off the list once in a while), and I save favorite full albums as playlists.
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
chrisseaton 9y ago
I don't understand - I thought you could stream any audio from their collection that you wanted on Spotify? Do you have to add audio to your library first? Otherwise why does it matter what is in your library and what isn't if you can stream anything?
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
  It allows you to quickly look through music you like, rather than having to manually search for the artist/album/song every single time. It's still streamed (unless you save it for Offline, which it supports) but it's waaay better for organization. Have you ever forgetten the name of an artist or forgot an artist exists until you scroll past them in your music library?
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Use playlists, they each have their own limit of 10K songs AFAIK.
amorphid 9y ago
I left Pandora for a similar reason. They had (still have?) a 100 station limit. It was lame. I am also a Google Play Music user.
peapicker 9y ago
I believe playlists don't count as library (please correct me if I'm wrong) - so you can effectively surpass the 10,000 as a limit by adding songs to playlists instead of the library. I've actually changed my model primarily around playlists and don't actually use the library feature of spotify hardly at all.
- bloudermilk 9y ago
  This is true, but IMO it's not a great replacement. I imported my old Rdio library this way and it's effectively useless. I've had to become a playlist-first user as well, but boy I miss having a browsable catalog of all "my music"...
- jasondemeuse 9y ago
  I've been a Spotify premium user for years now and have never used my Library, but have a ton of playlists organized and nested into different genre/mood/etc directories. I'm sure there's a good reason why people want to use their Library instead and why the "playlist" way is inefficient since I've seen a lot of users annoyed with the limit, but anecdotally I've never had a problem with the playlist-first way of using the app. Actually at this point if they put the limits on playlists and had an unlimited Library I'd probably be jumping ship to something else myself.
  - JauntyHatAngle 9y ago
    I use spotify in a lazy way, but essentially if I like a song, I press the check mark. If I'm doing my normal listening I just have all of my songs that are in my library on shuffle. I imagine if I hit the 10K limit this inability to use shuffle on ALL of my tracks at once would annoy me.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      I only save my very favorite tracks, for full albums I add them as a playlist. That way I can still shuffle my collection of favorite awesome tracks, but I also have easy access to my favorite albums, where I still consider the whole album to be good, but only a few of the tracks stand out as absolute favorites.
nuclear_eclipse 9y ago
Ironically, I tried and failed to switch to Google Play Music because they limit playlists to 1000 songs, and I have a couple different playlists with 1600+ songs each.
dx034 9y ago
Does anyone know the technical background of this? They talk about providing a great experience for others, so I guess it's about performance. But library entries can be partitioned by users so there should be no performance effect of 100k songs per library of one user on others? Also, the current 10k limit doesn't represent much data if stored with a bit of meta data.
KozmoNau7 9y ago
Instead of saving full albums (which adds every single track to your saved tracks list), focus on saving your very favorite tracks, and add the full album as a playlist instead.

tomhschmidt 9y ago

+1. Ability to upload music on Google Play Music is also keeping me from switching to Spotify. I have a lot of tracks that simply aren't in the Spotify catalog. If they add that, I'd switch tomorrow.

cheeze 9y ago
I'm blown away that the solution for this has been the shitty "local playlist sync" solution for years at this point. I guess I'm in a niche? For me, there are tons of hiphop mixtapes that will never be on Spotify that I definitely need in my music player of choice. Hell, Spotify won't even let me import local MP3 files from my phone!
- fossuser 9y ago
  I just stopped listening to music that doesn't exist in Spotify. I fought it for a while with local playlist syncing and such, but just wasn't worth it over time. There's enough other music out there that I gave up trying.
  - halflings 9y ago
    You should give YouTube Music a try. It has both the "regular" catalog you'd expect from Spotify (high quality audio, organised by albums, etc.) + more indy bands that publish their music on YouTube.
cbhl 9y ago
... until Google Play Music goes the way of Google Reader :'(
firefistace77 9y ago
I thought this was a feature already? https://support.spotify.com/is/using_spotify/features/listen-to-local-files/ https://support.spotify.com/is/using_spotify/features/listen... Or are you referring to something different?
- Moncefmd 9y ago
  The problem is that, according to your documentation, local music has to be on a desktop (the only way to listen to local music on mobile is to be connected to the same WiFi of a desktop that serves that music (!)). Which I think defeats the purpose of having your music on the go.
  - nuclear_eclipse 9y ago
    You can still add local tracks to playlists and sync those playlists to your phone. I have plenty of albums that don't exist in Spotify's cloud that I bring with me on my phone as "downloaded" playlists.
lambda_lover 9y ago
I hit this issue with a lot of video game/movie soundtracks (Battlestar Galactica and Starbound OSTs are some of my favorite programming music), and it's extremely frustrating. Even worse, Spotify's app doesn't work on my work VPN, forcing me to use the web app... which doesn't support listening to user tracks since Spotify won't store them in its own cloud. I pay them $10/month for service, so why can't they reserve a couple gigs of space to store my files that they don't have in their library?
awalton 9y ago
Yeah this might seriously make me considering switching from my current half-baked solution of GPM and Pandora, but I still feel discovery is better on Pandora (and that's saying a lot because Pandora leaves a _lot_ to be desired).

arctangent 9y ago

This happened to me too, so I'm in the process of switching back to Apple Music. I scrobble to last.fm so I can still get decent recommendations over there.

INTPenis 9y ago

I like google play, also converted from spotify. But I don't like that albums disappear from google play. This happened at spotify too and I assume it's due to legal issues. When an artist released a certain album on one label and only that album disappears. It's very annoying and is pushing me back to good old piracy.

brnzh 9y ago
I've experienced all of these issues before, the 10k/disappearing albums is really debilitating for music lovers who like to collect full albums. I switched to Spotify from Google Music a few months ago, and my experience is mostly the same--mediocre, but functional enough. At least Spotify has an open API, so you (maybe) can solve your own problems given some time. (10k is really not that much at all if you're into a few genres.)
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  Instead of saving full albums to your saved tracks, save only the very favorite tracks, and add the albums as playlists instead. I have a playlist folder called "favorite albums" specifically for this.

LudoA 9y ago

10K songs is limiting to you?! Wow, how/for what do you use Spotify? At a (low!) estimate of 4 minutes per song, if you listen to Spotify for 3hrs/day, it would still take you 222 days to listen to all of them once. Is this a form of data hoarding? If not, how do you use that many songs?

chii 9y ago
if you want to have music on 10hrs a day, a 10k long playlist only lasts 20 days. and 10hrs is only half a day, and you might want to have music outside of work hours too!
- LudoA 9y ago
  Good point, hadn't thought of people listening to music at work :)
spiralganglion 9y ago
10K songs is restrictive when it comes to digital music collections. I have 15k songs in my iTunes library, and that doesn't include the music I listen to via Apple Music and SoundCloud. Given that I've been building up this music collection for about two decades now, there's quite a bit of stuff in the long tail, though I do listen to near all of it over the span of a few years. If Spotify want to be around for another decade, I think it's reasonable that they let people build up a respectable library.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  But you don't have to save every single track to your collection, there's no reason to be a hoarder. They're still there on Spotify even if you don't save them, it's not like saving MP3s to your hard drive. Use playlists as well. Each playlist has its own limit of 10K tracks AFAIK. So I save only absolute favorite individual tracks (and take some stuff off the list once in a while), and I save favorite full albums as playlists.
squeaky-clean 9y ago

chrisseaton 9y ago

I don't understand - I thought you could stream any audio from their collection that you wanted on Spotify? Do you have to add audio to your library first? Otherwise why does it matter what is in your library and what isn't if you can stream anything?

squeaky-clean 9y ago
It allows you to quickly look through music you like, rather than having to manually search for the artist/album/song every single time. It's still streamed (unless you save it for Offline, which it supports) but it's waaay better for organization. Have you ever forgetten the name of an artist or forgot an artist exists until you scroll past them in your music library?
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  Use playlists, they each have their own limit of 10K songs AFAIK.

amorphid 9y ago

I left Pandora for a similar reason. They had (still have?) a 100 station limit. It was lame. I am also a Google Play Music user.

peapicker 9y ago

I believe playlists don't count as library (please correct me if I'm wrong) - so you can effectively surpass the 10,000 as a limit by adding songs to playlists instead of the library. I've actually changed my model primarily around playlists and don't actually use the library feature of spotify hardly at all.

bloudermilk 9y ago
This is true, but IMO it's not a great replacement. I imported my old Rdio library this way and it's effectively useless. I've had to become a playlist-first user as well, but boy I miss having a browsable catalog of all "my music"...
jasondemeuse 9y ago
I've been a Spotify premium user for years now and have never used my Library, but have a ton of playlists organized and nested into different genre/mood/etc directories. I'm sure there's a good reason why people want to use their Library instead and why the "playlist" way is inefficient since I've seen a lot of users annoyed with the limit, but anecdotally I've never had a problem with the playlist-first way of using the app. Actually at this point if they put the limits on playlists and had an unlimited Library I'd probably be jumping ship to something else myself.
- JauntyHatAngle 9y ago
  I use spotify in a lazy way, but essentially if I like a song, I press the check mark. If I'm doing my normal listening I just have all of my songs that are in my library on shuffle. I imagine if I hit the 10K limit this inability to use shuffle on ALL of my tracks at once would annoy me.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    I only save my very favorite tracks, for full albums I add them as a playlist. That way I can still shuffle my collection of favorite awesome tracks, but I also have easy access to my favorite albums, where I still consider the whole album to be good, but only a few of the tracks stand out as absolute favorites.

nuclear_eclipse 9y ago

Ironically, I tried and failed to switch to Google Play Music because they limit playlists to 1000 songs, and I have a couple different playlists with 1600+ songs each.

dx034 9y ago

Does anyone know the technical background of this? They talk about providing a great experience for others, so I guess it's about performance. But library entries can be partitioned by users so there should be no performance effect of 100k songs per library of one user on others? Also, the current 10k limit doesn't represent much data if stored with a bit of meta data.

KozmoNau7 9y ago

Instead of saving full albums (which adds every single track to your saved tracks list), focus on saving your very favorite tracks, and add the full album as a playlist instead.