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The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop. It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would see all the music tracks list

The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop. It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would see all the music tracks listed. Now it's all buried deep in and you have to search through the individual albums. Even the list of albums itself is not shown on the main artist page, you have to click "See Discography" first. The "Home" page is even worse. Where is my discover weekly playlist? Sometimes it's near the top, sometimes it's in this "Made for you" section. Sometimes you have to click "See All" next to that to find it. I mean moving shit around when you update your software is bad enough. Spotify moves shit around every time you boot the app!

wonnage 5y ago
Spotify has steadily gotten worse over the years. I remember a long time ago they had a cool feature where you could long press on a song to preview it. There was also a decently organized library tab, not as advanced as itunes but passable. All gone. Now you get an algorithmic homepage that's constantly shifting and trying to push podcasts on you...
- malwarebytess 5y ago
  But it increases three and a half key metrics, including engagement!
- ardit33 5y ago
  The engineers that did that have gone, replaced by newer folks... As companies get larger, the engineering talent reverts to the mean. The first crop of engineers, that were passionate about it, and made it a success. After they move on, they are replaced with average corp. employee, that joins Spotify as safe/boring job. Hence anything interesting gets removed, and the most boring features survive. Ps. I was one of the involved on that feature. I didn't write it (It was done in Sweden), but I created one of the earlier demos, (and patents), and that eventually became touch to preview.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    This seems very plausible, as an outsider looking in. There's also the problem of when new people get hired and out in charge of new sections of the product, and they feel that they either need to make a change to justify their existence, or that they have found something that really works well for the way that they use the product without realizing the variety of ways that the user base uses the product.
    - dcoo 5y ago
      It's already been happening I think. One of the core members of the team who built the music recommendation features left a few years ago https://notes.variogr.am/2016/11/16/leaving-spotify-the-echo-nest/ https://notes.variogr.am/2016/11/16/leaving-spotify-the-echo...
  - abledon 5y ago
    I'd love to see a linkedin scraper tool that 'visualizes' where the engineers go who originally worked on a product. like here, where are those spotify engineers now... and how do the products they work on now, compare
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Didn't they rewrite the client to share more code between the ballooning number of devices they're supporting?
brentis 5y ago
Spotify is atrocious. Feel bad for all you younger folks having to deal with repetitive auto tune crap injected into any station. Can't say much positive about Pandora or Tidal or.. Miss old Slacker days and prior.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  I think that's just the nostalgia talking. Spotify has pretty great radio/recommendations if you even bother to use those features.
  - rl3 5y ago
    >Spotify has pretty great radio/recommendations if you even bother to use those features. The radio feature used to be a fantastic tool for exploration. Now it just feeds you your existing music preferences.
    - noptd 5y ago
      Sounds like Spotify is going down Pandora's path then. It's amazing how several different stations started from the same genre will narrowly converge even after explicitly disliking different subgenre-specific songs on each station. But that's been Pandora for years now; why I still revisit it time to time is beyond me.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      I agree about the radio, but "similar artists" is still pretty reliable ime.
      - rl3 5y ago
        Yeah, that's the only thing that still works decently. Song radio and custom playlist radio feed you into your own preferences.
mattmanser 5y ago
One of the frustrating things about their mobile app too is that they don't keep the controls on screen when it's playing. I mean, seriously, this is basic stuff, how can they have got so far from the core product experience that they actually hide the controls of a music player. I don't want to have to figure out what random UI element to click to see the 'skip' control.
- ascar 5y ago
  When do you have that problem? I see big controls right below the song if I'm in player mode. If I'm searching for more songs while playing the song is on the bottom with a pause/play option and tapping the song returns to player mode with all controls. Is that different for you?
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Spotify on Android degraded in the same way. It's a garbage of an app nowadays. I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All because, instead of treating their users as adults with agency, they really want to drip-feed them with "recommendations" from their glorified Markov chain. "What do you mean, 'browse the works of an artist'? No, have a 'radio station' of their albums instead."
- ascar 5y ago
  I use Spotify on Android regularly and can only somewhat relate to what you're describing: when I know the artist, but not the song title and I have to literally search through his discography. But even that is doable in one click (see discography) from the artist main page (tried it just now, up to date app on Android 10) and playing the song is just tapping on it. For regular use the search button is right in the middle on the bottom of the app and right next to it is the button to my library Your criticism seems a bit harsh to me.
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  Are you on the free tier? Free users can't even see individual songs anymore :(
  - pbronez 5y ago
    I can’t figure it out on Premium either, but if it’s actually just removed for free listeners then maybe it’s a money thing. Perhaps hiding direct song access pushes people to listen to music with cheaper royalties or something.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    That may be just it. I've been a paid pro user for almost a decade (back before and when their app was good); I ultimately abandoned my subscription when I realized I don't use the service much anymore (something about them suddenly losing quite a lot of mainstream-ish music). That brush with their current app I described before happened when my wife wanted to evaluate Spotify subscription as a source of children songs. We both quickly realized that youtube-dl and manually copying MP3 files to the phone offers a much superior user experience to the Spotify app.
hiharryhere 5y ago
They’ve also removed the persistent search bar and replaced it with a menu item called ‘Search’. I always fumble now because I wonder where the search box is, first I scroll up thinking it’s out of view then I remember it’s been moved behind a click.
- ZucchiniZe 5y ago
  Yeah that change annoyed me too, until I figured out that you can use ctrl/cmd+L to go to the search page and autofocus the search box.
vlunkr 5y ago
Yeah that new artist page is atrocious. They used to give you the option to show all tracks at least.
sushisource 5y ago
I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some features have always been hopelessly broken (queuing). From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Music player UI is a solved problem. At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again, but that would mean people admitting they don't really serve much purpose. About as pure an example of a "bullshit job" as is possible.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  > Music player UI is a solved problem. No it isn’t. Not even close.
  - upcode 5y ago
    Thanks for such an insightful comment
    - orhmeh09 5y ago
      It’s infinitely more insightful than the claim that it’s a solved problem, which rates as a zero on that scale.
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        OK, let's try to move the conversation in a more productive direction. What aspects of the music-player problem weren't already solved by 2010 or so?
  - akho 5y ago
    Last music player UI I liked was Muine circa 2007. I don’t think we are improving our solutions.
  - manigandham 5y ago
Sanguinaire 5y ago
The part I find baffling is how companies like Spotify justify paying high salaries for engineers just to deliver trivial improvements over what Windows Media Player was offering 20 years ago. If they were piling this effort into reducing costs or making the app more resource efficient I'd be happy - but I'm not interested in trivial UI tweaks.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
antisthenes 5y ago
I mean, the worst offender is Windows itself, and by far the most critical to everyday user experience. The trend started with Windows 8 and continues to this day. And if someone brings up "improved security" as a benefit of more modern Windows systems, then they pretty much immediately concede the argument, because it's really not the job of the end-user machine to provide you with enterprise grade security. Nor is it really true that older OSs simply aren't able to be made secure without releasing additional UI/UX changes alongside security patches.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  In terms of pure UI, I agree. There were a few peaks in Windows UI/UX: 3.0, 98, XP, and Windows 10. Since then, the trend has been toward more and more bloat. But, if the long-term trend continues, maybe Windows 15 will clean things up again. :)
  - antisthenes 5y ago
    Windows 10 is not a peak in any sense. It's a continuation of the downward trend that Windows 8 started. It's the version of Windows that normalized ads in the OS, unreasonable amounts of telemetry and horrible flat UI.
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      Ugh. Maybe I was thinking of Vista? It’s been a while, after all....
  - lanterk 5y ago
    Just casually skipping over the highest peak (Windows 7) I see...
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      The last one that could be made to look like NT4 / W2K; yeah, definitely the best all in all. (Though it was of course somewhat bloated from all the .NET stuff.)
bjustin 5y ago
Sadly, the Apple Music app on macOS also has major issues. For example, I’ll open it and try to search, and the results view says “Showing results for ‘query’” followed by a bunch of unrelated songs and albums. Running the search again actually produces results. Apple Music on iOS has its own major issues, but at least search works the first time.
- pbronez 5y ago
  I tried Apple Music when I realized the HomePod Mini can’t play songs from Spotify. Try as I might, Apple Music just didn’t cut it for me. The biggest annoyance was the playlists and discovery features. It was MUCH harder to find a playlist/radio station for a particular mood.
wwweston 5y ago
So let's analyze this for a minute, first at a general level of incentives that every software-building org has, then at the specific level of Spotify's founding culture and present incentives. Generally: ideally we imagine UX & product roles as creating a strong experience rewarding the user on for their engagement, by user standards. In practice, in order advance their career, these roles need a narrative of wins they can sell to higher management. That usually means change one can take credit for, if possible paired with a metric management is invested in. Sometimes this metric is even connected with a rewarding experience for users. Sometimes. The incentive for change is there, though, regardless, at least as long as there's money in the dev budget for it. Spotify Specifically: was founded under the premise that consumers could be drawn into a product that acts like a record collection buffet in the cloud, but only pay broadcast prices! (ie, free or flat rate). This premise was correct, but also relied on the idea that Spotify was entitled to pay artists broadcast-royalties while effect occupying the space where recording royalties used to live, cannibalizing the market for recordings. And so you get execs telling artists that it's "entitled" to want rates as high as a penny a listen for their music and Spotify wasn't built to solve the problem of artists getting paid it was built to solve the problem of piracy (artists not being able to get paid or set their prices is indistinguishable from the problems of piracy). [0] This tells us that either Spotify isn't getting enough revenue to pay a penny a stream, or it feels entitled to keep what it is collecting. And here's what else we know about Spotify: their revenue per user is essentially fixed. Their model doesn't have much in the way to collect more from a user based off the users own values/actions. They can increase ads, but that's probably not a user driven win. What else can they do? Well, they can do what the rest of the social media companies do with their feeds. Randomize appearance of content, mix in known engaging user rewards with other things that let Spotify sell user attention -- to a label or individual trying to promote music/audio in a given space, to third parties wanting to advertise or place another content. That degrades user experience? Sure. You think the company that is founded down to the core on exploitation cares even a little bit about that? Especially now that they're such a huge name in music they outshine Apple in a lot of markets? Eventually, I suppose, other people will be dissatisfied in the same ways you are and maybe in a snowballing number of ways caused by the kind of bad-incentives driven rot. But it's likely to be a long slow ride down the curve, with an exodus as fast and complete as FB. [0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executive-entitled-pay-penny-per-stream/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv...
kilroywashere 5y ago
soulseek is far better than spotify.
- p1peridine 5y ago
  True. I cancelled my spotify sub the same day I discovered soulseek. I keep my music collection (~100GB) offline now, all organized in folders.
  - busymom0 5y ago
    Is soulseek available for mobile? (either iOS or android?)
    - p1peridine 5y ago
      Officially no, but check out Seeker on google play store: > An unofficial soulseek client. Allows for searching, filtering, browsing folders, and downloading files. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companyname.andriodapp1 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companynam...
Waterluvian 5y ago
I want to give the Spotify app one piece of credit for a feature that Apple and others don’t seem capable of providing: gapless playback. Entire albums simply do not work without gapless playback.
jpeter 5y ago
They changed the location of the "New playlist" button for no reason. The old location was perfect.
Ecstatify 5y ago
My Spotify home is filled with podcast suggestions. I hope podcasts kill the company, sick of companies shoving their agenda down my throat.
- slig 5y ago
  Exactly, never listened to a podcast on their app and never will, yet they keep pushing that shit.
- marderfarker2 5y ago
  I listened to 3 minutes of Joe Roegan out of boredom and now Joe roegan lives perpetually on the Spotify homescreen
  - haakon 5y ago
    Oh man. I discover an album I really love, and next time it takes such effort to find my way back to it. But that silly, boring podcast I listened to for a few minutes last year? It's the first thing I see when I open the app.
  - perryizgr8 5y ago
    I'm in this exact same situation. Now it shows Joe Rogan in the "your shows" section and there is simply no way to get rid of it. So annoying. And I have to struggle to find the album I added to my library a couple days ago.
- tomoko 5y ago
  On the flip side, for those who do want to listen to podcasts on Spotify, the experience is horrific. It's all so confusing and they are always trying to mix podcasts with music, almost treating them as same media. For a company that is spending millions on acquiring podcasts to their platform, I feel they really shoot themselves in the foot with such a non-intuitive UI. I used to be an occasional Joe Rogan listener, but ever since Spotify has acquired it I have ultimately stopped listening to it.
  - 5y ago
bartread 5y ago
The mobile app is also appalling. The Apple CarPlay integration is shonky and seems like it's intentionally designed to ensure you inadvertently kill yourself in an auto accident.
- look_lookatme 5y ago
  No joke I have switched to Apple Music because I feel Spotify in CarPlay is legitimately dangerous due to how broken it is.
gumby 5y ago
According to my GF, who is a UX researcher, Spotify has a large UX research team of interesting people. All I can imagine is that there is some confusion at Spotify and the developers must have the sign backwards, thinking that research findings are what not to do. It’s a consistently shitty experience.
pentagrama 5y ago
I have to kind of disagree, my experience with Spotify desktop which I use daily (almost don't use the mobile app) was from awful to bad. I still find it hard to navigate and find things, and the performance is bad, but before was really really bad, the last iterations come out well for me. I will like more features. For example I really want a feature to make playlists with albums, you can create playlists with all the songs of many albums, but is not possible to see it as a list of albums with the cover arts, like the Library. For example make a playlist of favorite albums of 2021, favorite albums of 90s rap, favorite albums of Bowie, etc. Also improve the Library feature, I want to order/filter all my albums by year, decade, genre, artist. A "listen later" feature on albums and songs will be great too, I want to have a place to "test" music, and later add it or not to my Library or Liked songs. Lately the streaming platforms and the music industry is focusing on songs more than albums, and this is reflected on the features that their apps have. I find great the power that playlists give to consumers, but I find that the album experience give me a layer of artistic exploration that can't be captured with playlists, discovery weekly, top charts, etc.
- drdec 5y ago
  > For example I really want a feature to make playlists with albums, you can create playlists with all the songs of many albums, but is not possible to see it as a list of albums with the cover arts, like the Library. For example make a playlist of favorite albums of 2021, favorite albums of 90s rap, favorite albums of Bowie, etc. This kind of thing boggles my mind. An album, a playlist, the current queue, these are all lists of songs. They ought to be implemented by the same model under the hood. You ought to be able to do the same set of actions to any of them - add to a playlist, add to the queue, etc. But for some reason you can only do some of things to some of the lists of songs and that changes depending on which client you are using. This is not unique to Spotify either, Amazon Music had the same issues.
deleted 5y ago
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harikb 5y ago
May be the fundamental problem is that since the app _can_ change every time its boots (it being electron based shell with dynamic loading of JS & all), the UX team gets compelled to tweak, experiment, iterate when there is no particular need.
baron816 5y ago
Some things I miss: Liking/saving all the songs of an album. You used to be able to do that with one click and they would be added to your liked songs play list. Now you either have to like all the songs individually, or like the album and not have it appear in liked songs. Being able to search through all the artists for songs you’ve liked/saved. You can now only follow an artist. You can’t just browse through all the artists you’ve liked before, which makes it hard to go back to song you liked years ago before they made the “follow” change.
- neilparikh 5y ago
  The triple dot menu on the album page has an option to like all songs (at least on iOS).
baby 5y ago
Have you tried to use the iTunes app on desktop? It’s pretty horrendous too. Been using it for more than a decade and it’s slowly gotten better but the integration with iTunes match and apple music is really weird.
vladikoff 5y ago
Oh my goodness, you are so right. Every new Spotify update is a freaking disaster. Makes me want to unsubscribe!
peterkelly 5y ago
The stupidest part is why it changed: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-future-of-our-desktop-apps/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-fu... According to https://community.spotify.com/t5/Community-Blog/The-New-Desktop-App/ba-p/5175848 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Community-Blog/The-New-Desk... "We're working on bringing back a list-like Discography view, something many of you have mentioned missing in the new UI" They could have just left things as is, but no.
- the_other 5y ago
  The article alleges they hoped to increase accessibility with the move to Electron. How is that stupid? (I'm not an Electron fan, but I think accessibility is important.)
mnutt 5y ago
I thought it was interesting how Spotify acquihired uTorrent's creator, Ludvig Strigeus, to build the Spotify desktop client. uTorrent was tiny and fast and written in c++, and early versions of Spotify were also small and incredibly snappy. I assume the move to Electron was a necessity to support a team of hundreds all working on the client, but it's still regrettable.
- x0x0 5y ago
  I suspect it was more the economics of maintaining 5 apps: web, mac, windows, iphone, android. It basically forces you to a toolkit that makes nobody happy...
Johnny555 5y ago
Another example is Netflix. You used to click on a movie to bring up the info page so you could see what its about and see its reviews. If you wanted to play it, you'd click on it from there. But now, if you click on a movie, it starts playing immediately. If you want to see what it's about, you hover over the movie, wait for it to expand, then click a small caret symbol to expand the movie page further to see details. And if you want to see reviews or customer ratings, too bad because Netflix decided those aren't useful so you have to go to IMDB or some other site to see what other people thought about it.
- FilMo 5y ago
  Agree here. That's annoying. That's why I try to see the reviews somewhere else, before starting the movie. I'm also using different streaming apps reviewed on https://www.firesticktricks.com/best-apps-for-jailbroken-firestick.html https://www.firesticktricks.com/best-apps-for-jailbroken-fir... that don't require so long process and show the info beforehand. It's time consuming. Netflix should think about it.
nanidin 5y ago
I think it shows a shift in priorities from users to metrics like engagement and profit. Then the prioritized parties are Spotify or investors. It stinks, but it opens the door for competitors that can compete on things like user experience even though there are powerful competitors already in the space.
oakfr 5y ago
I agree. And sadly we, as end users, are subject to the frog-in-the-hot-water effect. We don’t even realize how good the app used to be.
go_elmo 5y ago
Switched to yt music and it is great and not annoying as spotify. Also, there is vanced, for the immoral ;)
pjerem 5y ago
What is really sad about Spotify is where it comes from. The original player (in QT, iirc) was incredibly good : light (some mb of RAM), fast, zero bloat, well crafted UI. I signed up for Spotify because it was an incredible product, but I stay because I’m forced to (shared family account and nothing really better in terms of bloating). Sometimes those stories makes me wonder that the golden age of « life changing » software is behind us (I’d say exactly the same thing with Dropbox).
toothbrush 5y ago
I feel a bit bad plugging my own project (sorry not sorry i guess), but i wrote a macOS app to scratch my itch, because for years i've hated the Spotify interface (especially the queueing aspect). Curious to know if anyone finds it usable! https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue
kuu 5y ago
I really dislike that I cannot see the songs anymore
jessikat 5y ago
Not only that, in the past, your Artists and Albums page would show all artists/albums in your "liked" list, even if it was one or two tracks. Used to be able to play all the songs you did like, but now it only shows whole albums liked, or whole artists liked. Those two pages are entirely neutered, and I have zero use for them now, and find it really difficult to browse for a random artist to listen to, of just their stuff I like. Their UX gets worse every update. I miss the era of non-updating apps. Now it's change for the sake of change. Where have all the UX developers gone?
- craftinator 5y ago
  > Now it's change for the sake of change. Where have all the UX developers gone? I generally assign the problem of "change for the sake of change" to the UX developers, at least at any significantly large company. Once a company gets large enough, you're employment is no longer justified by the quality of your work. You justify it by shipping product features, enhancements, and fixes. So UX developers can't sit back and do nothing, the incentive is to endlessly tweak the state of the UI, by moving things, converting panels to ribbons and vice versa, redesigning icons every 6 months or so, etc. Is it the UX developers fault for doing this? No. But are they the ones doing it? Yes.
  - jessikat 5y ago
    Perhaps I don't understand the UX developer role enough, but I would imagine it involves research and user engagement. Perhaps the role is then too narrowly defined? I liked the comment about Word's competitor being the previous version, so that changing the UI/UX would need to provide tangible user benefits. I think Microsoft lacks some of that these days (early Windows 11 builds have been proof of that failing in my experience thus far).
foota 5y ago
shrug I like the spotify UI. I think the issue is that people are trying to use it as a catalog, which it isn't.
callamdelaney 5y ago
I mean, if they didn't make it worse then the product managers and 'product' teams wouldn't have anything to do, would they?
drw85 5y ago
They actually removed all the features that i used all the time. You can't shuffle all songs in your library anymore, since they removed the songs tab completely. There used to be a workaround with a playlist of all your liked songs (which turned into all songs in your library). That was killed too, so now the only way is by using a playlist and managing it manually. Playlists are limited to 10k songs though... Generally they seem to remove features in every second update and i'll move on to another service after my current sub runs out in 3 months.
zwaps 5y ago
Do people remember music players like Fb2000, MusicMonkey, Winamp etc? In these apps, you just had to have normal windows operations, like drag and drop, select multiple things, copy paste and many more things you just... did with computers. Also, if you wanted to list all songs by singer X by genre Y... you could just do that. It's just something music apps could do as a basic requirement. Now spotify makes drag&drop like ~somewhat~ work, but you still can't sort your music and at least the 1/4ths of the screen permanently shows an empty "connect with facebook to have 'friends'" sidebar, that can not be minimized. It's funny to me how the invention of these JavaScript apps has thrown computing back by a good decade. If you look at how careful Win9X was designed and researched, and how careless 100% of the current UIX is designed (mostly blindly A/B testing I guess), it is such a contrast. Are there any UIX designers or frontend devs here on HN? How do you deal with essentially being representatives of the dark ages of your profession? Are you embarrassed, or do you yourself think that your "craft" doesn't really matter for the bottom line? Or has design already been replaced by AI/ML anyway, and we are all yelling at windmills here? I really wonder how you release something like Spotify et. al. as, say, a lead designer or lead frontend developer, lean back in your chair and go: "Yeah, I did a good job here".
- rogual 5y ago
  Different definitions of "good job" I expect. Making something useful / effortless / fast / a joy to use etc. vs making something that boosts your key performance metrics. Having the friends sidebar always there probably increases engagement with Spotify's social growth strategy which boosts network effects and drives recurring revenue or something. It's all stuff you can plot on graphs and show that you're being effective.
- gempir 5y ago
  At least the social bar can be removed in the settings if I recall correctly.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  Foobar2000 is still around! http://mobile.foobar2000.com/ http://mobile.foobar2000.com/
bajsejohannes 5y ago
It's also incredibly slow. On my M1 Macbook, touted as one of the fastest laptops ever, it takes 3 seconds from opening it until there's anything on the screen, and than about 5 seconds more until it's interactive.
Anthony-G 5y ago
I tried using the Spotify desktop player a few years ago when I first subscribed to their service. I found the application to be a real resource hog compared to any other desktop music player (such as VLC, Audacious, Foobar2k or Winamp). It also lacked the usability and many of the features of these older players but the deal-breaker for me was that it didn’t support gap-less playback which ruins the experience of listening to live albums or DJ mixes.
anontrot 5y ago
it's infuriating when you click on the artist and see like 5 songs, and rest all are in oblivion.
drumttocs8 5y ago
Worse than that is offline functionality (on Android, at least). If I don't have good cell service, my "offline", "downloaded" albums just won't load up, and it's infuriating.

wonnage 5y ago

Spotify has steadily gotten worse over the years. I remember a long time ago they had a cool feature where you could long press on a song to preview it. There was also a decently organized library tab, not as advanced as itunes but passable. All gone. Now you get an algorithmic homepage that's constantly shifting and trying to push podcasts on you...

malwarebytess 5y ago
But it increases three and a half key metrics, including engagement!
ardit33 5y ago
The engineers that did that have gone, replaced by newer folks... As companies get larger, the engineering talent reverts to the mean. The first crop of engineers, that were passionate about it, and made it a success. After they move on, they are replaced with average corp. employee, that joins Spotify as safe/boring job. Hence anything interesting gets removed, and the most boring features survive. Ps. I was one of the involved on that feature. I didn't write it (It was done in Sweden), but I created one of the earlier demos, (and patents), and that eventually became touch to preview.
- epistasis 5y ago
  This seems very plausible, as an outsider looking in. There's also the problem of when new people get hired and out in charge of new sections of the product, and they feel that they either need to make a change to justify their existence, or that they have found something that really works well for the way that they use the product without realizing the variety of ways that the user base uses the product.
  - dcoo 5y ago
    It's already been happening I think. One of the core members of the team who built the music recommendation features left a few years ago https://notes.variogr.am/2016/11/16/leaving-spotify-the-echo-nest/ https://notes.variogr.am/2016/11/16/leaving-spotify-the-echo...
- abledon 5y ago
  I'd love to see a linkedin scraper tool that 'visualizes' where the engineers go who originally worked on a product. like here, where are those spotify engineers now... and how do the products they work on now, compare
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Didn't they rewrite the client to share more code between the ballooning number of devices they're supporting?

brentis 5y ago

Spotify is atrocious. Feel bad for all you younger folks having to deal with repetitive auto tune crap injected into any station. Can't say much positive about Pandora or Tidal or.. Miss old Slacker days and prior.

vlunkr 5y ago
I think that's just the nostalgia talking. Spotify has pretty great radio/recommendations if you even bother to use those features.
- rl3 5y ago
  >Spotify has pretty great radio/recommendations if you even bother to use those features. The radio feature used to be a fantastic tool for exploration. Now it just feeds you your existing music preferences.
  - noptd 5y ago
    Sounds like Spotify is going down Pandora's path then. It's amazing how several different stations started from the same genre will narrowly converge even after explicitly disliking different subgenre-specific songs on each station. But that's been Pandora for years now; why I still revisit it time to time is beyond me.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I agree about the radio, but "similar artists" is still pretty reliable ime.
    - rl3 5y ago
      Yeah, that's the only thing that still works decently. Song radio and custom playlist radio feed you into your own preferences.

mattmanser 5y ago

One of the frustrating things about their mobile app too is that they don't keep the controls on screen when it's playing. I mean, seriously, this is basic stuff, how can they have got so far from the core product experience that they actually hide the controls of a music player. I don't want to have to figure out what random UI element to click to see the 'skip' control.

ascar 5y ago
When do you have that problem? I see big controls right below the song if I'm in player mode. If I'm searching for more songs while playing the song is on the bottom with a pause/play option and tapping the song returns to player mode with all controls. Is that different for you?

TeMPOraL 5y ago

Spotify on Android degraded in the same way. It's a garbage of an app nowadays. I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All because, instead of treating their users as adults with agency, they really want to drip-feed them with "recommendations" from their glorified Markov chain. "What do you mean, 'browse the works of an artist'? No, have a 'radio station' of their albums instead."

ascar 5y ago
I use Spotify on Android regularly and can only somewhat relate to what you're describing: when I know the artist, but not the song title and I have to literally search through his discography. But even that is doable in one click (see discography) from the artist main page (tried it just now, up to date app on Android 10) and playing the song is just tapping on it. For regular use the search button is right in the middle on the bottom of the app and right next to it is the button to my library Your criticism seems a bit harsh to me.
squeaky-clean 5y ago
Are you on the free tier? Free users can't even see individual songs anymore :(
- pbronez 5y ago
  I can’t figure it out on Premium either, but if it’s actually just removed for free listeners then maybe it’s a money thing. Perhaps hiding direct song access pushes people to listen to music with cheaper royalties or something.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  That may be just it. I've been a paid pro user for almost a decade (back before and when their app was good); I ultimately abandoned my subscription when I realized I don't use the service much anymore (something about them suddenly losing quite a lot of mainstream-ish music). That brush with their current app I described before happened when my wife wanted to evaluate Spotify subscription as a source of children songs. We both quickly realized that youtube-dl and manually copying MP3 files to the phone offers a much superior user experience to the Spotify app.

hiharryhere 5y ago

They’ve also removed the persistent search bar and replaced it with a menu item called ‘Search’. I always fumble now because I wonder where the search box is, first I scroll up thinking it’s out of view then I remember it’s been moved behind a click.

ZucchiniZe 5y ago
Yeah that change annoyed me too, until I figured out that you can use ctrl/cmd+L to go to the search page and autofocus the search box.

vlunkr 5y ago

Yeah that new artist page is atrocious. They used to give you the option to show all tracks at least.

sushisource 5y ago

I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some features have always been hopelessly broken (queuing). From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Music player UI is a solved problem. At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again, but that would mean people admitting they don't really serve much purpose. About as pure an example of a "bullshit job" as is possible.

wodenokoto 5y ago
> Music player UI is a solved problem. No it isn’t. Not even close.
- upcode 5y ago
  Thanks for such an insightful comment
  - orhmeh09 5y ago
    It’s infinitely more insightful than the claim that it’s a solved problem, which rates as a zero on that scale.
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      OK, let's try to move the conversation in a more productive direction. What aspects of the music-player problem weren't already solved by 2010 or so?
- akho 5y ago
  Last music player UI I liked was Muine circa 2007. I don’t think we are improving our solutions.
- manigandham 5y ago

Sanguinaire 5y ago

The part I find baffling is how companies like Spotify justify paying high salaries for engineers just to deliver trivial improvements over what Windows Media Player was offering 20 years ago. If they were piling this effort into reducing costs or making the app more resource efficient I'd be happy - but I'm not interested in trivial UI tweaks.

deleted 5y ago
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antisthenes 5y ago

I mean, the worst offender is Windows itself, and by far the most critical to everyday user experience. The trend started with Windows 8 and continues to this day. And if someone brings up "improved security" as a benefit of more modern Windows systems, then they pretty much immediately concede the argument, because it's really not the job of the end-user machine to provide you with enterprise grade security. Nor is it really true that older OSs simply aren't able to be made secure without releasing additional UI/UX changes alongside security patches.

actually_a_dog 5y ago
In terms of pure UI, I agree. There were a few peaks in Windows UI/UX: 3.0, 98, XP, and Windows 10. Since then, the trend has been toward more and more bloat. But, if the long-term trend continues, maybe Windows 15 will clean things up again. :)
- antisthenes 5y ago
  Windows 10 is not a peak in any sense. It's a continuation of the downward trend that Windows 8 started. It's the version of Windows that normalized ads in the OS, unreasonable amounts of telemetry and horrible flat UI.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Ugh. Maybe I was thinking of Vista? It’s been a while, after all....
- lanterk 5y ago
  Just casually skipping over the highest peak (Windows 7) I see...
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    The last one that could be made to look like NT4 / W2K; yeah, definitely the best all in all. (Though it was of course somewhat bloated from all the .NET stuff.)

bjustin 5y ago

Sadly, the Apple Music app on macOS also has major issues. For example, I’ll open it and try to search, and the results view says “Showing results for ‘query’” followed by a bunch of unrelated songs and albums. Running the search again actually produces results. Apple Music on iOS has its own major issues, but at least search works the first time.

pbronez 5y ago
I tried Apple Music when I realized the HomePod Mini can’t play songs from Spotify. Try as I might, Apple Music just didn’t cut it for me. The biggest annoyance was the playlists and discovery features. It was MUCH harder to find a playlist/radio station for a particular mood.

wwweston 5y ago

So let's analyze this for a minute, first at a general level of incentives that every software-building org has, then at the specific level of Spotify's founding culture and present incentives. Generally: ideally we imagine UX & product roles as creating a strong experience rewarding the user on for their engagement, by user standards. In practice, in order advance their career, these roles need a narrative of wins they can sell to higher management. That usually means change one can take credit for, if possible paired with a metric management is invested in. Sometimes this metric is even connected with a rewarding experience for users. Sometimes. The incentive for change is there, though, regardless, at least as long as there's money in the dev budget for it. Spotify Specifically: was founded under the premise that consumers could be drawn into a product that acts like a record collection buffet in the cloud, but only pay broadcast prices! (ie, free or flat rate). This premise was correct, but also relied on the idea that Spotify was entitled to pay artists broadcast-royalties while effect occupying the space where recording royalties used to live, cannibalizing the market for recordings. And so you get execs telling artists that it's "entitled" to want rates as high as a penny a listen for their music and Spotify wasn't built to solve the problem of artists getting paid it was built to solve the problem of piracy (artists not being able to get paid or set their prices is indistinguishable from the problems of piracy). [0] This tells us that either Spotify isn't getting enough revenue to pay a penny a stream, or it feels entitled to keep what it is collecting. And here's what else we know about Spotify: their revenue per user is essentially fixed. Their model doesn't have much in the way to collect more from a user based off the users own values/actions. They can increase ads, but that's probably not a user driven win. What else can they do? Well, they can do what the rest of the social media companies do with their feeds. Randomize appearance of content, mix in known engaging user rewards with other things that let Spotify sell user attention -- to a label or individual trying to promote music/audio in a given space, to third parties wanting to advertise or place another content. That degrades user experience? Sure. You think the company that is founded down to the core on exploitation cares even a little bit about that? Especially now that they're such a huge name in music they outshine Apple in a lot of markets? Eventually, I suppose, other people will be dissatisfied in the same ways you are and maybe in a snowballing number of ways caused by the kind of bad-incentives driven rot. But it's likely to be a long slow ride down the curve, with an exodus as fast and complete as FB. [0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executive-entitled-pay-penny-per-stream/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv...

kilroywashere 5y ago

soulseek is far better than spotify.

p1peridine 5y ago
True. I cancelled my spotify sub the same day I discovered soulseek. I keep my music collection (~100GB) offline now, all organized in folders.
- busymom0 5y ago
  Is soulseek available for mobile? (either iOS or android?)
  - p1peridine 5y ago
    Officially no, but check out Seeker on google play store: > An unofficial soulseek client. Allows for searching, filtering, browsing folders, and downloading files. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companyname.andriodapp1 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companynam...

Waterluvian 5y ago

I want to give the Spotify app one piece of credit for a feature that Apple and others don’t seem capable of providing: gapless playback. Entire albums simply do not work without gapless playback.

jpeter 5y ago

They changed the location of the "New playlist" button for no reason. The old location was perfect.

Ecstatify 5y ago

My Spotify home is filled with podcast suggestions. I hope podcasts kill the company, sick of companies shoving their agenda down my throat.

slig 5y ago
Exactly, never listened to a podcast on their app and never will, yet they keep pushing that shit.
marderfarker2 5y ago
I listened to 3 minutes of Joe Roegan out of boredom and now Joe roegan lives perpetually on the Spotify homescreen
- haakon 5y ago
  Oh man. I discover an album I really love, and next time it takes such effort to find my way back to it. But that silly, boring podcast I listened to for a few minutes last year? It's the first thing I see when I open the app.
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  I'm in this exact same situation. Now it shows Joe Rogan in the "your shows" section and there is simply no way to get rid of it. So annoying. And I have to struggle to find the album I added to my library a couple days ago.
tomoko 5y ago
On the flip side, for those who do want to listen to podcasts on Spotify, the experience is horrific. It's all so confusing and they are always trying to mix podcasts with music, almost treating them as same media. For a company that is spending millions on acquiring podcasts to their platform, I feel they really shoot themselves in the foot with such a non-intuitive UI. I used to be an occasional Joe Rogan listener, but ever since Spotify has acquired it I have ultimately stopped listening to it.
- 5y ago

bartread 5y ago

The mobile app is also appalling. The Apple CarPlay integration is shonky and seems like it's intentionally designed to ensure you inadvertently kill yourself in an auto accident.

look_lookatme 5y ago
No joke I have switched to Apple Music because I feel Spotify in CarPlay is legitimately dangerous due to how broken it is.

gumby 5y ago

According to my GF, who is a UX researcher, Spotify has a large UX research team of interesting people. All I can imagine is that there is some confusion at Spotify and the developers must have the sign backwards, thinking that research findings are what not to do. It’s a consistently shitty experience.

pentagrama 5y ago

I have to kind of disagree, my experience with Spotify desktop which I use daily (almost don't use the mobile app) was from awful to bad. I still find it hard to navigate and find things, and the performance is bad, but before was really really bad, the last iterations come out well for me. I will like more features. For example I really want a feature to make playlists with albums, you can create playlists with all the songs of many albums, but is not possible to see it as a list of albums with the cover arts, like the Library. For example make a playlist of favorite albums of 2021, favorite albums of 90s rap, favorite albums of Bowie, etc. Also improve the Library feature, I want to order/filter all my albums by year, decade, genre, artist. A "listen later" feature on albums and songs will be great too, I want to have a place to "test" music, and later add it or not to my Library or Liked songs. Lately the streaming platforms and the music industry is focusing on songs more than albums, and this is reflected on the features that their apps have. I find great the power that playlists give to consumers, but I find that the album experience give me a layer of artistic exploration that can't be captured with playlists, discovery weekly, top charts, etc.

drdec 5y ago
> For example I really want a feature to make playlists with albums, you can create playlists with all the songs of many albums, but is not possible to see it as a list of albums with the cover arts, like the Library. For example make a playlist of favorite albums of 2021, favorite albums of 90s rap, favorite albums of Bowie, etc. This kind of thing boggles my mind. An album, a playlist, the current queue, these are all lists of songs. They ought to be implemented by the same model under the hood. You ought to be able to do the same set of actions to any of them - add to a playlist, add to the queue, etc. But for some reason you can only do some of things to some of the lists of songs and that changes depending on which client you are using. This is not unique to Spotify either, Amazon Music had the same issues.

deleted 5y ago

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harikb 5y ago

May be the fundamental problem is that since the app _can_ change every time its boots (it being electron based shell with dynamic loading of JS & all), the UX team gets compelled to tweak, experiment, iterate when there is no particular need.

baron816 5y ago

Some things I miss: Liking/saving all the songs of an album. You used to be able to do that with one click and they would be added to your liked songs play list. Now you either have to like all the songs individually, or like the album and not have it appear in liked songs. Being able to search through all the artists for songs you’ve liked/saved. You can now only follow an artist. You can’t just browse through all the artists you’ve liked before, which makes it hard to go back to song you liked years ago before they made the “follow” change.

neilparikh 5y ago
The triple dot menu on the album page has an option to like all songs (at least on iOS).

baby 5y ago

Have you tried to use the iTunes app on desktop? It’s pretty horrendous too. Been using it for more than a decade and it’s slowly gotten better but the integration with iTunes match and apple music is really weird.

vladikoff 5y ago

Oh my goodness, you are so right. Every new Spotify update is a freaking disaster. Makes me want to unsubscribe!

peterkelly 5y ago

The stupidest part is why it changed: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-future-of-our-desktop-apps/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-fu... According to https://community.spotify.com/t5/Community-Blog/The-New-Desktop-App/ba-p/5175848 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Community-Blog/The-New-Desk... "We're working on bringing back a list-like Discography view, something many of you have mentioned missing in the new UI" They could have just left things as is, but no.

the_other 5y ago
The article alleges they hoped to increase accessibility with the move to Electron. How is that stupid? (I'm not an Electron fan, but I think accessibility is important.)

mnutt 5y ago

I thought it was interesting how Spotify acquihired uTorrent's creator, Ludvig Strigeus, to build the Spotify desktop client. uTorrent was tiny and fast and written in c++, and early versions of Spotify were also small and incredibly snappy. I assume the move to Electron was a necessity to support a team of hundreds all working on the client, but it's still regrettable.

x0x0 5y ago
I suspect it was more the economics of maintaining 5 apps: web, mac, windows, iphone, android. It basically forces you to a toolkit that makes nobody happy...

Johnny555 5y ago

Another example is Netflix. You used to click on a movie to bring up the info page so you could see what its about and see its reviews. If you wanted to play it, you'd click on it from there. But now, if you click on a movie, it starts playing immediately. If you want to see what it's about, you hover over the movie, wait for it to expand, then click a small caret symbol to expand the movie page further to see details. And if you want to see reviews or customer ratings, too bad because Netflix decided those aren't useful so you have to go to IMDB or some other site to see what other people thought about it.

FilMo 5y ago
Agree here. That's annoying. That's why I try to see the reviews somewhere else, before starting the movie. I'm also using different streaming apps reviewed on https://www.firesticktricks.com/best-apps-for-jailbroken-firestick.html https://www.firesticktricks.com/best-apps-for-jailbroken-fir... that don't require so long process and show the info beforehand. It's time consuming. Netflix should think about it.

nanidin 5y ago

I think it shows a shift in priorities from users to metrics like engagement and profit. Then the prioritized parties are Spotify or investors. It stinks, but it opens the door for competitors that can compete on things like user experience even though there are powerful competitors already in the space.

oakfr 5y ago

I agree. And sadly we, as end users, are subject to the frog-in-the-hot-water effect. We don’t even realize how good the app used to be.

go_elmo 5y ago

Switched to yt music and it is great and not annoying as spotify. Also, there is vanced, for the immoral ;)

pjerem 5y ago

What is really sad about Spotify is where it comes from. The original player (in QT, iirc) was incredibly good : light (some mb of RAM), fast, zero bloat, well crafted UI. I signed up for Spotify because it was an incredible product, but I stay because I’m forced to (shared family account and nothing really better in terms of bloating). Sometimes those stories makes me wonder that the golden age of « life changing » software is behind us (I’d say exactly the same thing with Dropbox).

toothbrush 5y ago

I feel a bit bad plugging my own project (sorry not sorry i guess), but i wrote a macOS app to scratch my itch, because for years i've hated the Spotify interface (especially the queueing aspect). Curious to know if anyone finds it usable! https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue

kuu 5y ago

I really dislike that I cannot see the songs anymore

jessikat 5y ago

Not only that, in the past, your Artists and Albums page would show all artists/albums in your "liked" list, even if it was one or two tracks. Used to be able to play all the songs you did like, but now it only shows whole albums liked, or whole artists liked. Those two pages are entirely neutered, and I have zero use for them now, and find it really difficult to browse for a random artist to listen to, of just their stuff I like. Their UX gets worse every update. I miss the era of non-updating apps. Now it's change for the sake of change. Where have all the UX developers gone?

craftinator 5y ago
> Now it's change for the sake of change. Where have all the UX developers gone? I generally assign the problem of "change for the sake of change" to the UX developers, at least at any significantly large company. Once a company gets large enough, you're employment is no longer justified by the quality of your work. You justify it by shipping product features, enhancements, and fixes. So UX developers can't sit back and do nothing, the incentive is to endlessly tweak the state of the UI, by moving things, converting panels to ribbons and vice versa, redesigning icons every 6 months or so, etc. Is it the UX developers fault for doing this? No. But are they the ones doing it? Yes.
- jessikat 5y ago
  Perhaps I don't understand the UX developer role enough, but I would imagine it involves research and user engagement. Perhaps the role is then too narrowly defined? I liked the comment about Word's competitor being the previous version, so that changing the UI/UX would need to provide tangible user benefits. I think Microsoft lacks some of that these days (early Windows 11 builds have been proof of that failing in my experience thus far).

foota 5y ago

shrug I like the spotify UI. I think the issue is that people are trying to use it as a catalog, which it isn't.

callamdelaney 5y ago

I mean, if they didn't make it worse then the product managers and 'product' teams wouldn't have anything to do, would they?

drw85 5y ago

They actually removed all the features that i used all the time. You can't shuffle all songs in your library anymore, since they removed the songs tab completely. There used to be a workaround with a playlist of all your liked songs (which turned into all songs in your library). That was killed too, so now the only way is by using a playlist and managing it manually. Playlists are limited to 10k songs though... Generally they seem to remove features in every second update and i'll move on to another service after my current sub runs out in 3 months.

zwaps 5y ago

Do people remember music players like Fb2000, MusicMonkey, Winamp etc? In these apps, you just had to have normal windows operations, like drag and drop, select multiple things, copy paste and many more things you just... did with computers. Also, if you wanted to list all songs by singer X by genre Y... you could just do that. It's just something music apps could do as a basic requirement. Now spotify makes drag&drop like ~somewhat~ work, but you still can't sort your music and at least the 1/4ths of the screen permanently shows an empty "connect with facebook to have 'friends'" sidebar, that can not be minimized. It's funny to me how the invention of these JavaScript apps has thrown computing back by a good decade. If you look at how careful Win9X was designed and researched, and how careless 100% of the current UIX is designed (mostly blindly A/B testing I guess), it is such a contrast. Are there any UIX designers or frontend devs here on HN? How do you deal with essentially being representatives of the dark ages of your profession? Are you embarrassed, or do you yourself think that your "craft" doesn't really matter for the bottom line? Or has design already been replaced by AI/ML anyway, and we are all yelling at windmills here? I really wonder how you release something like Spotify et. al. as, say, a lead designer or lead frontend developer, lean back in your chair and go: "Yeah, I did a good job here".

rogual 5y ago
Different definitions of "good job" I expect. Making something useful / effortless / fast / a joy to use etc. vs making something that boosts your key performance metrics. Having the friends sidebar always there probably increases engagement with Spotify's social growth strategy which boosts network effects and drives recurring revenue or something. It's all stuff you can plot on graphs and show that you're being effective.
gempir 5y ago
At least the social bar can be removed in the settings if I recall correctly.
JadeNB 5y ago
Foobar2000 is still around! http://mobile.foobar2000.com/ http://mobile.foobar2000.com/

bajsejohannes 5y ago

It's also incredibly slow. On my M1 Macbook, touted as one of the fastest laptops ever, it takes 3 seconds from opening it until there's anything on the screen, and than about 5 seconds more until it's interactive.

Anthony-G 5y ago

I tried using the Spotify desktop player a few years ago when I first subscribed to their service. I found the application to be a real resource hog compared to any other desktop music player (such as VLC, Audacious, Foobar2k or Winamp). It also lacked the usability and many of the features of these older players but the deal-breaker for me was that it didn’t support gap-less playback which ruins the experience of listening to live albums or DJ mixes.

anontrot 5y ago

it's infuriating when you click on the artist and see like 5 songs, and rest all are in oblivion.

drumttocs8 5y ago

Worse than that is offline functionality (on Android, at least). If I don't have good cell service, my "offline", "downloaded" albums just won't load up, and it's infuriating.