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I use Spotify every day and think it’s a good product. Why do you think it sucks? I’m genuinely curious.
by Nicholas_C 7y ago
I use Spotify every day and think it’s a good product. Why do you think it sucks? I’m genuinely curious.
- jasonjayr 7y agoI used Soundcloud on a daily basis, and I really like the discovery and constant new music available there. A lot of the artists I follow keep moving to Spotify, or releasing there first, and I've tried re-setting up on Spotify, but it's been very frustrating so far.
- jv22222 7y agoMy main issue with Spotify is there is no zombie apocalypse backup. What I mean is, if the zombie apocalypse happened, and you were lucky enough to have solar power to keep your devices going, it wouldn't matter because you would loose access to your favorite songs. There are a lot of folks who's only music source is Spotify. I just hope for their sake, there is never a zombie apocalypse ;)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- amiga_500 7y agoI started to use their free client to sample music after getting totally sick of youtube advertising. If I like something I get an actual copy of the music. It blows my mind that people would just keep music on the cloud.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoApps backed by the cloud still have a local download option (including Spotify) that does the job for the brief moments you don't have internet. I realized that needing every song I'd ever want to listen to on my local disk was just a form of digital hoarding. I backed up hundreds of gigabytes of my music, deleted it from my computer, and realized I never cared enough to restore it despite years of collecting and organizing it.
- SyneRyder 7y agoThat only works as long as the artist keeps their music on Spotify. I've run into situations where an artist has pulled a release from Spotify, and the downloads disappear once I get internet connectivity again and Spotify re-syncs the licensing.
- voltagex_ 7y agoDefinitely - there's an option in the settings to show unplayable tracks. There's tens, maybe a hundred songs I used to be able to listen to that I now can't (through Spotify) Bonus question: what about when this happens to a Spotify-exclusive track?
- jv22222 7y agoThe download option wouldn’t work in a zombie apocalypse because if you don’t connect to the Internet for a few weeks the song stops working on Spotify. I know this because I’ve tried it. In other words with no active Spotify service even downloaded songs simply stop working. I was even thinking of writing an open letter to Spotify to allow the user to choose 10 zombie apocalypse tracks that would Always keep working no matter what.
- benhurmarcel 7y agoI'd just like a feature to download a list of my library. Not the audio itself, it's not mine, but the selection I made. Then if Spotify has any problem (loses data, shutdowns suddenly, whatever) I have a backup of my data.
- heavenlyblue 7y agoAlso I have about 4K songs on Spotify. When I downloaded them, I still had issues listening to all of them on the tube because Spotify seems to check whether you still can listen to them separately for every song.
- ghaff 7y agoI know I have some non-mainstream and oddball stuff that isn't on Apple Music so I want to be sure I hold onto that. But, otherwise, I started to organize/curate my collection which I've largely not done anything to speak of with for literally years. (And which is messed up in various ways.) And I sort of came to the conclusion that it didn't really matter that much at this point.
- SyneRyder 7y agoSame here. Spotify for me is a legal way to sample all the music that's out there. If I'm listening to a song or album repeatedly then I buy the album, and the artist earns more from a digital download than if I only listened on Spotify. (Though I often listen on Spotify out of convenience, so they get the revenue from both.)
- AdmiralGinge 7y agoI do the same, except I tend to buy vinyl records if they're available rather than downloads.
- NoGravitas 7y agoSame. Spotify or Google Play Music to do discovery, then Bandcamp or direct-from-artist for the artists you like.
- voltagex_ 7y agoMy exercise playlist alone would cost around $600 AUD to purchase, and half of that would be lossy formats.
- mongol 7y agoIn a zombie apocalypse, I would worry more about physical safety and staying alive.
- ghaff 7y agoI go far enough back that I've always had enough of a physical music collection (although much of the vinyl that had never been upgraded to CDs was replicated on Napster) that I still feel like I want to own anything I really care about. That said, I'm honestly not sure I'd take the same path were I starting from zero.
- Kaze404 7y agoThe only good thing it has is its recommendation algorithm and the convenience of having all the available music in one place. Uploading your own music sucks (unreleased tracks get blocked for some reason), tags are messy (there is no standard, the labels do whatever they want), you can't customize your listening experience at all (no replay gain, dynamic playlists, custom tags or equalization) and obviously not owning your collection (which admittedly is irrelevant for most people).
- SiempreViernes 7y agoHaving "all the music" is a pretty important feature though. But yeah, you are renting the music from them so you have to give it back the way you found it. I don't really consider spotify a music player of the same sort as winamp or foobar2000, it's much more like radio where you have agency over the playlist rather than a local executable to manage and play your local files. It would be interesting if they provided some a way to get an audio stream you can then further process for replay gain and other stuff, though honestly fiddling with all that stuff seems like busy work.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agohttps://github.com/jwallet/spy-spotify https://github.com/jwallet/spy-spotify Classic interception attack
- Nition 7y agoI'm curious about their claim to have "no loss in sound quality", when they say they're recording Spotify's playback and saving as mp3. I'd expect double compression that way (the original compressed audio from spotify, compressed again to mp3). Are they somehow reading the actual file as Spotify plays it rather than the audio, and saving that? They say "Spytify records the same quality that Spotify outputs" but that implies a loss in quality if it's recording an mp3 and re-saving it as a new mp3. There's no lossless option in Spotify.
- 7y ago
- bentcorner 7y agoI don't like it for podcasts because: a.) It doesn't have all the podcasts I listen to b.) It's obvious the ads on Spotify aren't the same ads that are in the normal RSS-feed version of the same podcast, which feels very skeevy to me. I have no idea of the business arrangement but it doesn't feel like I'm supporting the podcaster when I listen to them over spotify.
- reiichiroh 7y agoRe: point b do you have an example of this? Is this a Spotify owned podcast producer?
- TylerE 7y agoLots of podcasts already serve different afs to different listeners. That’s old tech.
- rocqua 7y agoReally? How does that work with RSS feeds?
- chungus_khan 7y agoUpon receiving the HTTP request from a podcast client, render a new version of the MP3 file with an up-to-date advert inserted. This version can be cached for a pre-specified period and then replaced later. You can't really get any tracking information to do dynamically targeted ads from the request, but for a podcast this doesn't matter much, as the hosts are typically aware enough of their listener demographic.
- zchrykng 7y agoDynamic Ad Insertion. The file server guesses your location/demographic based on the user agent and ip address and then splices ads into the mp3 as it is sent to you.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoMy personal beef is that both mobile and desktops apps are slow and song upload really really sucks
- p1necone 7y agoMy biggest gripe with Spotify is that I don't want to be forced to use their player. I wish they had some kind of API to let other players access the music streams and metadata. (I know I know piracy, but the analog hole exists, and anything on Spotify is already easily pirateable).
- tsukikage 7y agoThey actually do have an API: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/ https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/ - you don't have direct access to the music streams, but you do have access to all the metadata, the various metrics used to generate "radio" etc and the capability to remotely control a Spotify player; so it's perfectly possible to write your own UI / playlist manager / whatever and just treat their player as a dumb part of your audio playback stack.
- kingosticks 7y ago_IF_ you have a browser available to run the audio playback part of your player. Additionally, their queue API extremely basic. So in reality you are limited to making a pretty UI. It's not great.
- Can_Not 7y agoI don't think spotify sucks, I don't plan on switching to it for podcasts, but my biggest gripe at the moment is there is no way to just see a simple list of all the artist's songs on the android app. You have to tediously click into each album and it's common that each album will have one song, or only 3 of 10 songs from the actual album, and many albums will actually be multiple duplicates of different "single releases". Very tedious when I just want to peruse a new artist. My car and bluetooth headset's "next song" feature doesn't goto the next album.
- Nicholas_C 7y agoThis is probably my biggest gripe as well. I’d like to play all songs ranked by plays. Otherwise I don’t have too many issues with it.
- benhurmarcel 7y ago> there is no way to just see a simple list of all the artist's songs on the android app You mean all the artist's songs in your library? You just go into Artists and choose it, you get the list of saved songs.
- Apocryphon 7y agoYou can't even copy the title of a song in the desktop client.
- strictnein 7y agoNot the original poster, but for me it's the amount of music that disappears from their service. I used to have a big list of DJ sets. Not random bootlegs or anything, but ones that were released on CD in relatively big name series- global underground, Renaissance, etc. Slowly they began to disappear and now they're just gone and they've been removed from the lists they were on. No warning of any sort. Just feels like we're going backwards for some of this stuff.
- pragmatick 7y agoI generally like it enough for music although it's a bit too dumbed down for me. But for browsing podcasts and seeing which ones have new episodes and getting information I still very much prefer Podcast Addict. Also I don't want my play queue to mix podcasts and music. When I want to listen to podcasts I continue playing in my podcast app and when I want some background noise I pause it and play my music in Spotify. Spotify's GUI is too simple and dumbed down for me and I prefer an app to do one thing.
- stfwn 7y agoFor me, the fact that artists get paid so little of what I would pay Spotify ruins it. There are various numbers floating around the internet and they are are all in the range of fractions of a cent per play, which is a weird metric to begin with. At $0.00473 per play [0], an artist needs ~100k plays to earn 500 bucks. Then has to be divided up between the label, songwriters, musicians, producers and whoever else was involved in the project. Compare this to me buying their album on Bandcamp, where anyone can sell their work and keep 85% to 90% of the money [1]. I get to have lossless files on disk forever + streaming while Bandcamp lasts, and the artist gets more money, more control over the distribution and an (opt-in at buy) email list to update their fanbase. Clearly the era of musicians that are not pop stars earning decent money by selling audio is over, but this is one of the things I like to spend a little more time and money on. [0]: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-music-services-pay-2019/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-music-... [1]: https://bandcamp.com/pricing https://bandcamp.com/pricing
- pjc50 7y agoSee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288645 - if the correct number is $0.00473 that's close to half of Spotify's revenue for streaming that in the first place.
- wwweston 7y agoThe fact that it's half of Spotify's revenue isn't a justification, it's essentially an admission that the whole model was never a particularly viable one for recording artists.
- raxxorrax 7y agoFor me it just doesn't do what I hoped. Most revenue on the platform goes to large labels, not the individual artist. Solutions like patreon would be favourable, since Spotify just condenses the most generic content.
- Cederfjard 7y agoSince the large labels are the ones representing the artists, paying the artists, and negotiating with Spotify, how could Spotify unilaterally change that? The artists need to start their own labels, form co-operatives or something, and cut the huge corporations out. Then they could funnel more of the profits to individual performers and songwriters, if they'd like. But as long as they rely on big labels, of course they're going to have their lunch money taken.
- raxxorrax 7y agoThey might not be able to and I don't make them responsible for the market situation, but it just isn't an interesting platform for me to use in its current form.
- wwweston 7y agoIt's a buffet that's just barely good enough for customers that it feels like it can replace a record collection with The Cloud, and all for a low low price! As one might imagine, though, that low low price means something is getting squeezed. Some of the answer vs past models is in exchanging fixed acquisition and distribution costs for fractional marginal costs. But some of the answer is also in squeezing artists (and/or less powerful owners), both in the appalling fractional revenue compared to other models and in how it's distributed. The result shows up in either stuff getting pulled from the catalog, or never added, or.... never made because the artist that would have made it is doing something else in order to make up for the revenue that might have come from a system that actually assigns value to recordings. But don't forget -- they'll also squeeze you too! Oh, sure, they know that price increases are a risk, but what risk is in there collecting as much of that sweet sweet data trail and harnessing it to sell you to others?
- e40 7y agoOne example: On Android, I bought an SD card (because my internal storage was too small to host my downloaded library, for offline listening on airplanes). I found that when I rebooted, every single time, it would redownload all 11G of my downloaded songs. Turns out, the Spotify service starts before the SD is attached and their program has a bug. I sent them the Stackoverflow link to delay the service. Support wasn't interested in helping me. My fix was to get a phone with larger internal storage.