24 ms·

Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

• chrisbrandow 4y ago
  The design trend of replacing dense tables with white space heavy lists just grinds my gears. It’s in everything these days.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• vrajeshkanna 4y ago
  [dead]
• foozed 4y ago
  A couple of months ago I asked my wife to put on an a specific album in the car. I was surprised to find out she had just turned on the spotify artist shuffle. She then explained that this is how she listens to all music on spotify: search artist, press the big green button. This is very anecdotal, but since then i have been amazed to find out that a huge chunk of < 30y olds i have asked listen to music exactly this way. I'm still not sure if those users use spotify this way because the ui is so bad or if the ui is molded towards those users...
  • ufmemo 4y ago
    I bet you're right on you last point. It's a sign of how irrelevant albums are today. I bet if the UX team's average age was 45+, the UX would center more around the album construct. The post complained about album art for podcasts, i bet that's more of a symptom of Spotify slapping Podcast support over what has already been created for music.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Netflix and Amazon are terrible. Want to continue what you were watching? Gonna have to find where we hid that this time, g’luck!
  • KyeRussell 4y ago
    Which they openly admit to doing on purpose to “increase engagement” or whatever, even attaching a monetary value to shoving new stuff in your face before you can finish the old stuff.
    • nonrandomstring 4y ago
      This is why I believe forced interoperability is essential to the future of online consumer tech. We've discussed it here in the context of social media monopoly regulation, but it has far greater implications. Salient examples are the alternative Twitter interfaces that proliferated, and indeed those for Hacker News. One huge benefit is that users won't be stuck with a single, often hostile UI, but be free to either interpret data client-side, or make use of a possible open market in presentation layer websites which may add their own value.
      • robertlagrant 4y ago
        That would be cool, but then some of those interfaces (probably the ones with the most ad funding) would be part-owned by one of the streaming services and would push their content the most. Feels like it'd be just one more hull on the Titanic.
        • solarkraft 4y ago
          Which is fine as long as the better ones are available.
          • robertlagrant 4y ago
            My point being that most people will get the experience I mention, as they'll only be able to follow the ads.
      • barnabee 4y ago
        Couldn’t agree more. Infrastructure/service providers cannot be allowed to continue to control the interfaces that are used to access their services.
• brunooliv 4y ago
  Spotify used to be absolutely amazing, it really was!! It was my go to platform... Now it's just embarrassingly BAD and essentially unusable unless you're paying for it
  • arooaroo 4y ago
    And it’s not exactly a UX paradise if one is a premium customer either. I really find the UI hard work on desktop and mobile. If and when Apple Music introduces a Duo equivalent tariff I will jump ship, for many reasons but a significant one is that I use Spotify exclusively for music yet it’s UI takes up a significant amount of premium space for podcasts. Apple had seen the light and spun off podcasts to a separate app from music.
  • texasbigdata 4y ago
    I mean, if it's free anything above zero is good. Barely useable is still useable.
    • raydiatian 4y ago
      Quick Google search says they net about $5/mo per free user on ads alone. I’d honest rather go back to buying the albums.
  • mszcz 4y ago
    Yeah, and that whole Spotify HiFi fiasco? Announce and not deliver? I put off buying good headphones waiting for those assholes. Year end came, cancelled my subscription out of spite, went for Tidal and bought the headphones. As soon as Qubuz becomes available I'll try that.
  • probably_wrong 4y ago
    Not even paying is enough. I pay for it with gift cards, and the UI for renewing my balance is really, really bad. And the last time my subscription lapsed it brought down the entire app with it. I had to uninstall everything and clear the cache. The only reason I still use it is because I need a music discovery service that takes gift cards and has an offline mode. But guess what? On my last flight there was some error on Spotify's servers and even my local songs in offline mode stopped working. I do my best to support Spotify seeing as it is one of the few tech platforms not controlled by the usual suspects. But they are making it really hard for me.
• neximo64 4y ago
  I actually hate this thing Spotify does. Before they had a way to sorting songs by playcount and it made it easy to find songs youd instantly like. To increase cross sell with underrepresented artists or whatever the strategy is with this UI its quite a detriment when looking for songs you want. If i wanted to discover artists id like to be able to do that myself, not have it be imposed on my search because of the way the designer thought it up, to increase cross sell to things i had no intention of listening to. It's almost like a paid version of spam.
  • texasbigdata 4y ago
    Just pull up a top played playlist?
    • texasbigdata 4y ago
      Alsothe API is exposed and really easy to use.
      • afiori 4y ago
        Too bad Spotify is primarily a consumer app and not a Music-Streaming Salas to be used by third parties
  • 867-5309 4y ago
    >It's almost like a paid version of spam time to sail those musical seas
  • orangeoxidation 4y ago
    > It's almost like a paid version of spam. Well put. It seems they are trying to optimize for listener time. It makes sense for the free offering as listening time is advertisement time is income. But for the paid version what they should strive for is costumer satisfaction. Turns out that's a lot harder to measure and related, but not at all the same as listening time or 'engagement'. Taking thrice as long and twice as many clicks to get where I want to be increases the engagement metric and my dissatisfaction.
• kalev 4y ago
  Agree to this. I recently wanted to see a list of songs of one artist. I could not find it..
  • zorr 4y ago
    On desktop you might get something like this when navigating to an Artist page, find the Discography section and click the "show all" button. On the resulting page top right there is a dropdown where you need to select "All" instead of "albums" and make sure the list icon is active instead of the grid icon. Then it shows a list of songs segmented by release.
• asplake 4y ago
  While we’re at it, can we just get a list of daily mixes? Seems completely random which of them I’ll see
• copperx 4y ago
  I've heard that Spotify recommendations are top notch, but its terrible UX keeps me from switching from Apple Music (which sucks in different ways, but search is much better).
• dm270 4y ago
  I don't know if others saw the same behavior. I'm on Android. And I feel like I'm in some sort of a big A/B test regarding their app. One day, the interface changes one way, couple days later it changes back. Constantly some menu or behavior changes. It's super frustrating. Lately it seems to have stabilized, but it really made me feel like a guinea pig. And maybe that's my inner old person speaking, but most of the changes really made it worse. Thinking about movie streaming apps maybe that's on purpose to make everything require just a couple more clicks. But this is music streaming. Most ppl wanna turn it on and then it sits in your pocket.
  • californical 4y ago
    Yeah I switched to Tidal when I learned about Spotify’s data sharing and privacy concerns a little over a year ago, but I was also so frustrated with Spotify’s UI always changing in frustrating ways and making it worse. They’d break features that I used often (playlist sorting broke, for example). I’d contact customer support and they’d go through this whole “uninstall and reinstall the app, does it still happen?” …YES, it’s another bug for no reason! Stop breaking my shit! With Spotify, it would often be an update that looks pretty but was harder to use, which is the exact opposite of what I care about… I’m here to listen to music as fast as possible and get on with my life, not scroll through giant menus with way too much spacing, when it used to all fit on one screen. There are still usability issues with Tidal that are similar to Spotify (hard to find something specific, etc), but they basically never change anything about the core UI, it just always works the exact same with some minor additions here&there. And honestly it’s reduced my frustration dramatically.
    • arpanetus 4y ago
      Is Tidal's UI lightweight(like it's not Electron)? What about the songs? Are you satisfied with the songs library? I'm thinking about switching since native spotify app's playing gif (or icon) spikes my CPU usage for some very strange reason.
      • Beltalowda 4y ago
• mcjiggerlog 4y ago
  This is a big frustration of mine, too. The other is that Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface, which is actually what I recently started doing: https://i.imgur.com/ar7VrYy.png https://i.imgur.com/ar7VrYy.png. It's still work in progress but actually works perfectly well already. It's not ready for public use yet and also isn't open source yet though. If you want to follow development I guess the best place to do that is my twitter: https://twitter.com/tom_j_watson https://twitter.com/tom_j_watson.
  • rizzaxc 4y ago
    looks neat. is the project open source?
    • mcjiggerlog 4y ago
      It's not just yet, but a quick look at my GitHub - https://github.com/tom-james-watson/ https://github.com/tom-james-watson/ - should tell how that's likely to work out. The good thing is that the app is all client-side and so there's no need to monetize.
      • LilBytes 4y ago
        Followed on Twitter and GH, your screengrabs look awesome. Looking forward to testing it out <3
      • quercusa 4y ago
        Just submitted your WikiTrivia game - very fun.
  • bencollier49 4y ago
    > The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface In most big web services, actual functionality in the API normally seems to leads to its eventual deprecation. Will be interesting to see how this one plays out.
• gonzalocasas 4y ago
• Amplifix 4y ago
  Less is more
• raydiatian 4y ago
  A concise explanation: functionalism is secondary to the attention economy for modern media platforms. Hard to advertise in a functional list grid, but yeah like fuck, I’m right there with you. It’s to the point where I’d rather just steal the album off of YouTube. At least there’s an ad-blocker.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • xoac 4y ago
    Please don't steal off of YouTube, there are better places.
    • raydiatian 4y ago
      Suggestions?
      • lukyanovic 4y ago
        You could try SoulSeek, it's the best resource for music nowadays.
        • imbnwa 4y ago
          Has been for 20 years IMHO
      • criddell 4y ago
        Buy music at a store?
        • xoac 4y ago
          Listen I am 100% with you and buy a lot from bandcamp, but "stealing off of youtube" is just sad
      • teddyh 4y ago
• zorr 4y ago
  I have similar issues with their desktop app and the UI seems to get worse over time. Their API is pretty good and I've used it to build a PoC desktop client using JavaFX that works using simple table controls and local Sqlite caching so I can search/filter my playlist "library". The API even has playback controls and nowplaying support. Pretty much everything needed to build an alternative usable client. The reason I did not continue with it and I'm still stuck with their desktop-(but-actually-web)-client is that the playback control API seems to be blocked by Sonos so I cannot use it to control my main listening devices. I love Spotify as a service but their clients are horrible.
• slowmotiony 4y ago
  I like how the OP mentioned "Spotify's buddy, Apple Music". I work in IT for 15 years and I legit have problems navigating the app, I thought I must be stupid or something. Same with Tidal, just absolutely abhorrent UI where nothing makes any sense. Wanna go back to the Playlist you were literally just listening to a couple hours ago? That would be four clicks, three scrolls, a swipe and two jumping jacks. Want to listen to your favorite song from that playlist? Well then I hope it's not a long playlist because we removed the album arts for no reason. Guess you gotta squint your eyes pretty hard while scrolling and you'll find it eventually. Good luck.
  • mrweasel 4y ago
    > I work in IT for 15 years and I legit have problems navigating the app I have the same issue, just with YouTube Music (regardless of platform). Other applications I cannot figure out how to navigate includes Slack and Snapchat. Snapchat is on the phone, of cause, but sometimes I just need to exit the app, because I can't figure out how to get back. Slack... I just don't know, it looks like one of those crazy Chinese chat application that does EVERYTHING, or a Japanese newspaper. Installing and using a Linux desktop 25 years ago was easier than using some of these applications.
    • sofixa 4y ago
      > because I can't figure out how to get back Are you on iOS? IIRC it doesn't have a back button/gesture, unlike Android, and that's the only way that makes sense to me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding. Regarding Slack, maybe it's different on iOS, but it looks relatively straightforward - on login you get the list of channels and DMs, you can click on one, and then go back with a button next to the channel name, which does a left to right animation which implies you can just swipe left-right for that thing. What else is there? Long press for message details/options is the same across many messaging apps.
      • mrweasel 4y ago
        Yes, it's iOS. There might be a gesture, but those have zero discoverability. Especially when you're left handed, then many of them feels wrong. I never used Slack on iOS, it might be better than on the desktop. The desktop application doesn't use as many resources as the internet had led me to believe, so that's nice, but the interface as WAAAY too busy to be effective as a communications platform. I still miss HipChat, and while it has its own set of problem, I honestly think I prefer the train wreck that is Google Chat.
• avgcorrection 4y ago
  Spotify loves to use big images, long song lines and then stick the buttons that you need in (...)
• baby 4y ago
  I’ve been extremely frustrated by Apple Music/iTunes Match over the years. The whole reason I use that combo is that I got a big library of MP3 of my own, and this allows me to upload them as well as download my whole library. It doesn’t always work though, I’ve noticed that songs have disappeared over the years which is worriesome. I constantly get errors when I try to add new songs. Chinese or nicher songs are not always on Apple music, but always on youtube, so I sometimes have to download the song from youtube in MP3. It’s hard to figure out what songs I’ve listened to when I listen to their radios (so that I can add them to my library). And in general searching for a song in my library (basic feature) is an awful experience. Should I move to spotify?
• wasmitnetzen 4y ago
  I recently switched to Deezer, and the app web and webapp are so much more usable. And you can still upload missing tracks and sync them to your phone!
  • spaniard89277 4y ago
    Deezer is way better but the catalog is smaller too.
    • corney91 4y ago
      Personally I've not found that, I used Tune My Music to sync across 140 playlists of probably 10k songs from Spotify and not many came up as "not available". I have found their library for children's profiles more limited though.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• azifali 4y ago
  +1 on the frustration. The UX is bad on desktops, mobiles and in-car systems..
  • greenpresident 4y ago
    Where does it work well, tablets?
    • pastacacioepepe 4y ago
      Only in the investors board room
• block_dagger 4y ago
  UIs are designed by children these days.
• kristaps 4y ago
  Spotify UI in general feels like way too many product managers aggressively justifying their existence instead of making what the end user actually needs.
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    That's the playbook of any tech startup in the last decade. Live off an unviable business propped up by VC then rinse and repeat.
  • cube00 4y ago
    The hilarious thing is their "community" is full of up-voted suggestions in the thousands for things the end user actually needs.
  • savrajsingh 4y ago
    What users need is actually quite boring. No one gets promoted with boring.
• lapser 4y ago
  Spotify is horrendous. Their UI is subpar. Their mix of podcasts with songs is odd at best (seriously, I never listen to podcasts, why can't I switch it off completely?). Their shuffle is just not. Imagine listening to the same 20ish songs from a playlist of nearly 2k songs. How can you mess up shuffle that bad? It's also not easy to move away from it. It requires time and effort. Time that many don't have.
  • johnywalks 4y ago
    > podcasts with songs I really hate that. They are completely different pieces of content but NOOOO, they want to be the "all audio" platform.
  • gryn 4y ago
    I guess they got inspired from the way youtube does it (or maybe the other way around)
  • spockz 4y ago
    > Their shuffle is just not. Imagine listening to the same 20ish songs from a playlist of nearly 2k songs. How can you mess up shuffle that bad? I thought it was just me! I did notice that sometimes when this happens the numbers being skipped are “this song is currently not available for playback” or some such message. I seem to listen to the same music a lot actually so just buying the CD would be more cost efficient.
    • joek1301 4y ago
      Spotify shuffle is indeed not (uniformly) random, as confirmed by this blog post[1]. The post is eight years old, so it is highly possible the algorithm has changed. [1]: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...
  • Sharlin 4y ago
    Spotify’s been making a soft pivot into podcasts (as original/exclusive content, they can be more profitable plus you don’t have to deal with record labels). So they’re trying to promote those.
• ducktective 4y ago
  Is there a Spotify alternative that uses YouTube but actually has the former's features like cataloguing albums and recommended playlists? I just want to search some songs and play them.
  • berkes 4y ago
    Audiotube is one: https://apps.kde.org/audiotube/ https://apps.kde.org/audiotube/
• blenderdt 4y ago
  Today everything is focused on making money. The focus on money makes the experience good for the ones that make the money, but for the end user it means everything turns into one giant ad. That's why Spotify uses tiles instead of tables. The tiles are important for the content producer, not for the Spotify user. A tile can scream at you 'Listen to me!', a row in a table cannot do this. It shows that Spotify is making more money from content creators than content consumers.
  • neilpanchal 4y ago
    Yep. I wonder, if the balance has gone too far without any checks or balances? A/B testing our way into oblivion. May be, we should do a massive A/B test between 15 year old UI and today's UI. They'd probably have to modify old UIs to add some more images because visuals dominate. I realize these things probably have commercial implications, but goddamn it feels good to rant.
    • blenderdt 4y ago
      The problem is: a frustrated user is not a leaving user. So as long the users stay at the platform and more money can be made the user experience will be crap. Spotify has 2 types of users, the creator and consumer. As long as there is more money to be made from the creator user they will also A/B test for that user.
• orestis 4y ago
  The truncated text is a huge peeve of mine with designers. I get that it’s hard to design a nice grid if you have to account for text that wrapped etc, but not everyone is called Tom Smith, and not all titles are 20 characters long. A designer I know advocated that users should be coaxed into using shorter titles and descriptions so that the UI looks good. It just makes me seethe.
  • motoxpro 4y ago
    https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/ This is why they were advocating for "Concise Titles" instead of "Titles that are Short Enough to Read, but Long Enough to Convey Info!"
    • orestis 4y ago
      Well sure, if we were building something towards general audience I’d say yes, let’s bias our UI towards editorial rules that can be enforced, since incentives align. We’re building enterprise-internal software. There’s ton of jargon that is in play that we can’t really shorten or guide. It’s insane to think that the users, experts with decades of experience in their domain, should editorialize to fit a design goal. Sometimes, the users do know best.
    • DarylZero 4y ago
      When you have 20 consecutive listings that all have the same first 80 characters, you don't even read those 80 characters. But the listing only shows the part you don't read!
      • hyperdimension 4y ago
        I agree. It's so anno...
  • blenderdt 4y ago
    I have been building websites for over 20 years and this has always been a problem. 99% of the designers also design texts that perfectly fit the design. The end result is a bad experience for both the developer, the customer and the end user.
• danielovichdk 4y ago
  I use Winamp for my MP3 collection that I downloaded of my T1 line at the office. When I turn that mother up on and my CRT monitor starts smoking because of the Winamp addons that spikes all kinds of shit whenever the tune is changing, then I know I have found the right track. Then I get cracking on the floor. Break dancing and caps flying around. The neighbors come jumping in the door and starts clapping and the music just keeps going. Everybody can understand a list of songs, even my grandma who's pushing 84. So we battle out songs on each of ours computers, but we don't use Spotify any more.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • Cipater 4y ago
    Now THAT'S whipping the llama's ass.
  • pnut 4y ago
    Forgive me if I'm wrong but I suspect this comment is GPT3 generated. Regardless, it was hilariously absurd.
    • danielovichdk 4y ago
      No GPT here. Just CRT and MP3.
    • hanoz 4y ago
      Oh no, can it already be that the memory of 90s internet culture is indistinguishable from the mad ravings of an intelligent machine?
      • joshspankit 4y ago
        The neon Turing test.
    • _moof 4y ago
      Oh dear. You're about to be kicked off so many lawns.
• Cardiox12 4y ago
  If you’re sick of Spotify UI you can use https://spicetify.app/ https://spicetify.app/, you will probably find a theme you will like.
• alaricus 4y ago
  I hate the modern designs like this in apps or websites.
  • mrweasel 4y ago
    It seems like we moved back in time somehow. To a time before Windows 95. We use to have multiple applications running, each in their own little Window, on a low resolution monitor. Windows where no bigger than you could reasonably justify, because you didn't know other programs the user might be running at the same time, on their tiny monitor. Our monitor are bigger than ever, higher resolution, yet many applications are designed as if they would have the entire screen to themself.
• nathell 4y ago
  > Foobar2000? where are you? Do you still have that tattoo on your arm that screams "FUNCTIONALISM"? F2K is at https://www.foobar2000.org/ https://www.foobar2000.org/, it works just as well as ever, and, yes, still has that tattoo. I’m happily using the Mac version on Big Sur.
  • VistaBrokeMyPC 4y ago
    Foobar2k and Lidarr is where it's at. I went full circle back to sailing the seven seas because streaming services got so bloated and user-friendly in my opinion.
• golemotron 4y ago
  It's easy to find bad UX in the industry, and I think that the reason is that it doesn't have to be good. It's hardly ever the differentiator that makes a difference when you choose to subscribe or not. The same could be said about the UX of Google services, etc. Capital flows to acquiring new subscribers and, grudgingly, to retaining old ones.
• motoxpro 4y ago
  Dear Spotify, please do not go back to 2001. Thanks. On a serious note. If all you do is high intent searches (I know exactly the one song/podcast I want), Spotify is not for you. Spotify is about discovery. Stick to iTunes or Winamp or Kazaa or Youtube or anything else that just gives you a list of things. Don't make the product worse because you're using it for something it's not designed around.
  • pastacacioepepe 4y ago
    A bad search UI is a bad search UI. Saying that Spotify is about discovery makes it even worse. Why wouldn't they have a functional UI for searches then? Also quit the Spotify exceptionalism please. YouTube has a discovery algorithm that is as good, plus there's tons of niche music on YouTube that you will never find on Spotify, because it wouldn't be easy to get a deal to have it on the platform (royalties blabla)
  • ksdnjweusdnkl21 4y ago
    Why not both?
  • basisword 4y ago
    Spotify is not “about discovery”. It’s supposed to be the service you use to play music (and now general audio). Whether that’s new music, old music, playlists, your library, it doesn’t matter. They want you to use Spotify for all your music needs.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• boesboes 4y ago
  I f'ing hate spotify with a passion. The shit UX and them pushing JRE and other bullshit podcasts I dont want or need in my life was bad, but for me the final straw was that they decided to show me popups for their shit playlists when I was trying to put on one some music. Found out they have been doing it for years to people, and if you complain they basically refer you to the suggestion box and to go f yourself. I don't get it. Why would you want to torment paying customers like that? Just leave me alone and let me play some music you psycopaths. So I switched back to Apple music. It's pretty shit, but at least I get to decide what I want to listen too.
  • basisword 4y ago
    >> So I switched back to Apple music. It's pretty shit, but at least I get to decide what I want to listen too. I love and hate Apple Music. The library style interface is great. But for a company that hangs on about the virtue of native apps the Music app is complete dogshit. Even with the recent slightly more native “rewrite” I still spend ages waiting for screens to load. Spotify is so much snappier.
    • karatinversion 4y ago
      Surprised by this comment - in my experience, Spotify is the only application I’ve used which takes a noticeable time to render its window when I alt-tab to it.
      • basisword 4y ago
        I mean alt-tabbing to it isn’t really ‘using’ it. I was referring to searching, clicking links to albums/playlists etc. with Apple Music these all load like a webpage so you get a white screen while they load.
    • 0x00000000 4y ago
      My biggest issue with it is that every time my phone connects to bluetooth Apple Music starts playing my entire library on shuffle wasting all of my data and battery and there is no way to turn off this feature. It seriously has me contemplating switching but the alternatives are not appealing.
• pharmakom 4y ago
  When talking about the downside of Spotify, everyone focuses on the lack of control over the catalog. This is a real issue, with tracks sometimes just disappearing, but another loss of control is in the interface. Local audio files for me, please.
  • sascha_sl 4y ago
    On the contrary, some releases I want only release on streaming services, low quality Amazon MP3 and Vinyl.
• dusted 4y ago
  I remember posting this to hn some time ago and it was well enough received that I'll mention it here, a self-hosted streaming solutions with absolutely no bells or whistles. Just a table of music, though, the table is generated by a search query, fast. https://github.com/DusteDdk/dstream https://github.com/DusteDdk/dstream
• lolski 4y ago
  I second this. Also this UI / UX issue isn't just a problem with Spotify but iTunes (Apple Music) to! So I guess it's just a general trend that started for no good reason. In iTunes, the table view is now only for the main page, and has been gone from the search and the playlist pages. It's so inconsistent. You get the nice old-school table view when you're on default but then when on the search page they display it on grid view. On the playlist page, you're like on this weird half-table half-grid view.
• noir_lord 4y ago
  I just use youtube for music. I listen to a lot of new wave retro and lesser known prog/prog metal and it's all on there anyway.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• spaniard89277 4y ago
  I've got tired of this stuff so I just went back to downloading music. It has friction but in the end it's much better to have my music in my regular music player.
  • wccrawford 4y ago
    It really hampers discoverability, though. I've used Youtube Music for quite a while now, and I discovered a lot of songs that I really like. (And way more that I didn't.) Without a service pushing those other songs on me (and not listening to the radio with all its commercials!) I'm not sure how I'd find new songs, especially ones that came out years ago and I just never heard them. This might even include genres that I wouldn't think to look in. I'm very picky about music, but it's across most genres so far. I can't really rule anything out... Even foreign music. `Alors En Danse` comes to mind quickly.
    • spaniard89277 4y ago
      For me regular YT is enough for discovering new stuff, and fan websites are even better. I feel like i look like a neoludite but honestly, it's just better.
    • alerighi 4y ago
      You have a lot of ways to discover new songs, friends, radio, YouTube. Then when you find the song that you like you can download them, possibly not from YouTube but in FLAC quality (that is better than the shitty mp3 that Spotify gives you)
• sgarrity 4y ago
  RIP Rdio
  • kilroy123 4y ago
    It really was the best back in the day.
• revorad 4y ago
  Try cmd+K - it brings up a search modal which shows results in a table.
  • miduil 4y ago
    On Linux it's alt+K, awesome works great thank you for the tip. This it how it looks like: https://imgur.com/sxXKG2s https://imgur.com/sxXKG2s
  • informalo 4y ago
    Also discovered this by accident recently. I have 200+ playlists and this type of search is the most reliable way of finding a saved or self-created playlist by name (looking at you "normal" Spotify search that always shows others' public playlists of the same name first). Funny enough it's not documented, so let's see how long it will stick around for: https://support.spotify.com/kr-en/article/keyboard-shortcuts/ https://support.spotify.com/kr-en/article/keyboard-shortcuts...
• john___matrix 4y ago
  The goal with this design (same for Netflix etc) is not to show you the results you want to see in the most efficient format, it's to push what they want you to see. It's even more apparent on Netflix where the UI has got progressively worse over the years to the point it's basically unusable to discover stuff you actually want to see - I mean, large rows of "you watched this already, here it is again".
• robertlagrant 4y ago
  But if podcast art and beautiful-looking UIs aren't the most important things, then what will we do with all the UX people?
• mr90210 4y ago
  I’ve moved on to another service once I realised that there was no way to remove JRE Podcast from my homepage, despite the fact I hadn’t listened it in months.
• sofixa 4y ago
  I quite like YouTube Music's UI. The suggestions to relisten to songs I've listened to, the autosuggest continue on the same type of music works really well and has helped me discover many new bands i now like. The search manages to show the album art, title, artist and type ( song or album, and it's grouped by song, album, artist). And of course there's the added bonus that it comes with a YouTube Premium subscription, so i get good music UI + no YouTube ads + YouTube mobile app downloads.
  • layer8 4y ago
    While its UI and its discovery algorithms could use some improvement, at least the mobile app UI doesn’t change all the time, and search results are lists, not tiles.
  • LegitShady 4y ago
    ...and somehow, quite a while after shuttering google music, youtube music app still has no horizontal mode.
• jasonkester 4y ago
  Amazon's Kindle app is an even bigger offender in this category. It shows your library as a 4 x 4 grid of tiny cover thumbnail on your phone, so there is no hope whatsoever of reading a title. So you click one, and what does it do? It downloads the whole book then drops you in at whatever page you last read, then hides the book title and author. Unless you can recognize the cover photo (which changes to match the latest edition), there is really no way to know what you're going to get except to guess.
  • layer8 4y ago
    > It shows your library as a 4 x 4 grid of tiny cover thumbnail on your phone You can switch to list view in the “⇵” menu (at least on iOS).
  • logbiscuitswave 4y ago
    When browsing games on the Xbox it’s the same way — just a grid of cover art in smallish tiles. No text. Finding what I want can be very difficult if the text isn’t clearly visible in the cover art or if it’s not art I’m very familiar with. Even the fact that it’s sorted A-Z doesn’t help because it often sorts titles starting with “The” under “T”. Sigh. UI designers: just give me a list view option. Please.
• heckerhut 4y ago
  Foobar2000 was hands down the best time for music in the pc era
• miduil 4y ago
  At the same time I met a five year old who'd show me how they is finding their favorite songs on Spotify, even though they can't read yet. I feel like "I need my plain text interface back, yesterday"-folks maybe don't consider how many different people are actually using these apps.
  • corney91 4y ago
    Spotify has a dedicated kids app for those with a family plan, it's one thing I miss from my subscription. However the interface is basically the same as the full version so maybe the developers think adults use apps in the same way as children...
• clolege 4y ago
  Also - can we get a queue that clears itself when I click Play on an album, and that I can add songs to the front of? I added a +1 to the "Play Next" community feature request [0]. Not sure if one exists for the queue clearing behavior, but I would definitely +1 that too if I found it. [0] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Queue-Queue-to-Next-or-Last/idi-p/120484 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Queue-Queue-to...
• rednum 4y ago
  I used to really like Spotify when I first installed it long time ago, but over the years they worked really hard to make me hate them with passion. It feels like their motto is "Change for change's sake", they seem to remove and add stuff randomly, shuffle UI elements whenever they want to, etc. In the meantime, the basic functionalities regress. I had the app bug out on me countless times in weird ways; offline stuff disappearing, freezes when clicking on an album, that one time when I was listening on headphones and suddenly Spotify changed volume from minimum to max and almost gave me hearing damage, etc. Some time ago I moved to Tidal. It's not perfect, the search is inferior, the app bugs out sometimes too; but at least they don't seem to change it that much.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    It's fun (scary maybe?) how ones experience can be so different with the same software. I use Spotify daily on a number of different platforms (iOS, Android, Linux [Arch + Ubuntu], Windows and macOS) and never experienced any of those issues. I also can only remember ~3 redesigns since I started using Spotify back in 2007 or something like that, none of them have significantly moved around the playback controls, although the overall browsing experience has changed a lot. Edit: Continuing to read the HN comments, it seems some people (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31618177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31618177) have a constantly shifting UI, possibly driven by Spotify doing A/B testing. Could be that some locations (the US?) are subjected to this while others are not. I've used a total of 5 accounts since I started using Spotify, and never had anything change day-to-day when using it, so doesn't seem to be account-based.
• gerardnll 4y ago
  I'm sorry, but... now that we are speaking about Spotify... can we get Airplay 2 PLEASE? It's been so long since they said they were working on it...
• brainzap 4y ago
  at least it now has built in lyrics (even when sometimes not in sync)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jdblair 4y ago
  If I had to guess, Spotify is optimizing for engagement and listening hours, not searchability.
• drdd 4y ago
  Dear spotify user, can you just delete your account
• sqqqqrly 4y ago
  I've recently started using Spotify premium again. I'm amazed at the crappy ui. Often go back to radioparadise.com to not have to deal with it.
• mskullcap 4y ago
  I still miss rdio. Even though I have pretty diverse tastes in bands and musical styles, I loved how rdio would match me up with other people who shared similar musical interests. I could look at their music collection for inspiration. I would find many new artists I loved this way.
• agluszak 4y ago
  My biggest problem with Spotify (and possibly the easiest to fix?) is that you can add songs only to a single end of the play queue. In Google Play Music (RIP) you had a deque. And that single reason is why I chose Tidal. I don't use playlists, I always eiter create my queue ad-hoc or listen to whole albums.
• mattlondon 4y ago
  To be honest the album art view in media catalogs is actually quite easy to "scan" if you know what you are looking for already. I guess our brains are probably hard wired for this sort of visual quickly-spotting-something-familair/-important/-dangerous-in-a-jumble-of-other-stuff type thing. I would prefer a toggle to flip between a list (ideally with sortable headers etc) and album art cover view though - not exactly super complex to resolve.
  • neilpanchal 4y ago
    This is true, visual search has a optima when the contrast of the object in the search field is above certain threshold. Below that magic threshold, it is useless (for e.g searching for a Jigsaw puzzle piece). But, when visual search works, it is probably ridiculously fast for the evolutionary reasons you rightfully mentioned. There are a couple of things when we search for something in a text box: We're pattern matching what we think their database contains. If the hysteresis between the search and the match is small, Album grid view might work. You have to know the cover art a-priori though. But if you are vaguely looking for something, list is far better.
• Cynosaur 4y ago
  I still don't understand why sometimes I click play on an album of a specific artists and in half an hour or so songs from a completely different artists start playing too. I specifically did not click mix or radio or genre - just play on the album itself. I have no idea why big companies like that always have to have such shitty UI.
  • slig 4y ago
    Same reason the default YouTube config is to autoplay indefinitely: normal people are not bothered, and it turns it into a TV. What I can't figure out is why TF can't we disable the autoplay on YouTube playlists.
  • onychomys 4y ago
    You can turn that behavior off in the settings. On desktop, it's in Settings > Autoplay, on mobile (android, anyway), it's in Settings > Playback. You'll want to uncheck both "Autoplay on this device" and "Autoplay on other devices" in either case. Then once your album ends, playback stops.
• sorokod 4y ago
  One can reverse engineer the ideal customer according to Spotify. It is a person who to a large extent gave up on strong personal preferences and is comfortable with algorithmic/business driven replacement.
  • criddell 4y ago
    Sometimes their algorithmic playlist is exactly what I want. For me, it has been good for discovery. Other times I just want to play on album, from start to finish, in order, and then stop. For some reason, Spotify has trouble with the last part - stopping. There are two autoplay options and I keep turning them off and Spotify keeps turning them back on.
  • wyager 4y ago
    Spotify's algorithmic song selection seems pretty mediocre to me. I think it might get confused by multi-genre listening.
• asdojasdosadsa 4y ago
  Only reason I use Spotify (Premium = no ads) is that I don't have to manage my music anymore and I can find all the music I need / want. But holy moly it is going towards a bad direction, in fact so bad that I am considering moving to Apple Music... Their desktop app used to have a "search bar" in their Home -view which is now moved to a separate "Search" -view, which is.. one of the most annoying things ever. I used to boot up Spotify, hit ctrl+f, type the playlist or artist I was looking for and click. Now it's just a mess. 1/5 edit: remove curse words
  • moosimoose 4y ago
    In the desktop app, press '?' to get a list of shortcuts. Ctrl-l opens search and focuses the input field, from any page. Ctrl-f searches in the current playlist or page.
  • monkeypilot 4y ago
    You can still do a Cmd+L or a Cmd+K (Might be Ctrl instead of Cmd for you) to get to Search. Try using Apple Music. That shit is 5 years behind Spotify in any UX measure.
• JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  I just assume this and all UI weirdness in programs these days are dark patterns and they work very well for whatever nefarious reason the company uses them for.
• jnurmine 4y ago
  IMO the Spotify Android UI is OK for the most part. That said, Spotify could improve the UX. For one thing, recommendations are fine but how about reduce the amount of lists. Let the user click something if they want recommendations based on feeling or genre or "more like x", etc. To illustrate the previous point, when I open the app, there are these lists: Your top mixes Made for Recently played More like x Your shows Genre/feeling recommendation Musiken att ha koll på Genre recommendation For today's drive (but WHY?) More like y More of what you like Genre recommendation Genre recommendation Genre recommendation Discover something new New releases for you Discover i Discover j, Genre again, Genre. Why is my New releases near the bottom? Why do I even have a "Musiken att ha koll på" with some pop songs I couldn't care less about -- and besides, why is the title in Swedish though the app is in English? Why are there like 7 genre suggestions?
• 1ark 4y ago
  I have been using spotify-qt[1] lately. It's quite close to the original client from more than 10 years ago. 1. https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt https://github.com/kraxarn/spotify-qt
• rplst8 4y ago
  It's not just Spotify that has this problem. All major, successful web applications have huge usability issues. Software becomes successful not because of how it looks, but because of how it helps humans in their daily lives. The current fad is form over function to the nth degree.
• iambateman 4y ago
  I find that the top result is the right one about 90% of the time, so it’s not really an issue. That said, the other 10% is pretty irritating. Side note…I believe that all music apps are _fated_ to irritating mediocrity. iTunes was once perfect, and grew unusable. Spotify was perfect in 2019 and is trending toward usability issues as well.
• cybg 4y ago
  I used this when I had subscription. https://github.com/jpochyla/psst https://github.com/jpochyla/psst Now I download directly to my sd card.
• jeandejean 4y ago
  I so fucking agree. That 5 songs only for each damn artist, that makes you browse through albums... What an outrage! I just gave up and don't use the app anymore. So frustrating.
• datavirtue 4y ago
  Same clusterfuck on Amazon Music. It's like they don't want you to find anything. It constantly adapts based on some algorithm and it is parallizing.
• daigoba66 4y ago
  I still miss Rdio.
• jordanpg 4y ago
  Want to browse your favorite genre? Trying clicking Search, and then... scroll through and read 80 tiles, one by one, until you find the one you're looking for! You can't sort the list. It's not even in alphabetical order. The ordering of the list changes based on unknown criteria. It's comically bad UI/UX. If there was a sitcom about bad UX, this would be in the pilot episode.
• glennos 4y ago
  +1000 I hate the Spotify interface. Why the f can’t we get a full list of tracks for an artist?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Hizonner 4y ago
  The author's problem is that he is under the misapprehension that Spotify gives a fuck about what he wants.
• night-rider 4y ago
  I found the iOS Spotify app dreadful. The UX is so difficult to navigate. I can’t go into details but I had to uninstall it, it’s basically unusable.
• tfsh 4y ago
  Anyone aware of decent alternative Spotify clients for Android (rooted is fine)? I can't stand the Spotify app.
• joshspankit 4y ago
  No. Because even though you pay for the subscription, they are still getting paid to promote artists, albums, and tracks while also trying to keep you on the platform for more time by offering playlists made by themselves (more opportunity to promote) or other users.
• WeZzyNL 4y ago
  What I hate most about Spotify is: after meticulously adding songs to a queue, accidentally tapping a song near the end of the queue just to see the entire queue being cleared up to that song. It’s just mind-boggling and creates some sort of anxiety during using the app.
• gverrilla 4y ago
  optimized for brain-washing and diminished/diminishing agency
• hammock 4y ago
  There is a great website someone put up called “sort my music” and also “organize your music”. If you google those terms they are the first and second result. It will allow you to sort Spotify playlists by a number of hidden variables like BPM and year of release. You can also export/copy paste the tables that it generates in the process. Not perfect and might not fit your exact use case, but wanted to let HN know.
  • maxique 4y ago
    Those tools and more are on Playlist Machinery (http://www.playlistmachinery.com/ http://www.playlistmachinery.com/)
    • hammock 4y ago
      Wow they have added so much
• zamalek 4y ago
  For those wanting an alternative, do give Tidal a trial (there are services that can port over your playlists). Pros: You can view almost everything as a list, although their UI is optimized for touch screens - so the rows are rather large. Their radio rivals Pandora in terms of properly understanding your tastes. Cons: After a very quick look, I don't think they do podcasts. Their API support is utter shit, 3rd party clients aren't a possibility, and there is no Linux client. You have to use the their client for "master" quality (which isn't bit-perfect and is definitely snake oil). Having tried Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Play, Pandora, and Qobuz, I have found that Tidal is comfortably the best. Amazon Music is a very close second, but suffers from what I call the "Armin Effect". Armin van Buuren plays many genres of electronic music, and so inferior recommendation engines tend to connect this huge umbrella of genres through Armin. Your taste in music may not be affected by this problem. Tidal and Pandora are the only two services I have used that don't suffer from this.
  • solarkraft 4y ago
    > Cons: (...) I don't think they do podcasts. That's a big pro. Podcasts and music don't belong together. A good recommendation engine is important to me, so I'll check it out.
• dawnerd 4y ago
  Anytime someone mentions a table of songs it makes me miss Rdio even more. Their UI was almost perfect for how I listened to music.
• user3939382 4y ago
  I feel like I have such a disconnect from most others with these services. I tried out Pandora one night when it first came out while I was in college in 2004/2005. Then it was “someone made an algorithm that can pick music for you!” After about 15 minutes I lost interest “Hm that’s neat, I’m good though I know what I like” Fast forward 17 years and you have these multibillion dollar companies everyone loves and hates, controversies. I never saw the appeal in the first place.
• nightowl_games 4y ago
  Spotify's UI is a case study of the negative impact of assigning single screens to single teams, designers and managers. There is no cohesive vision. The useful functionality is all obscured by esthetics. I am perpetually annoyed at how poor spotify is at it's basic purpose. They have leaned way too far into recommendation systems and over designed layout. 99% of the time, I know what I want to listen to. Spotify's UX is designed for people to 'browse' the app. That doesnt resonate with me, at all. I know what I want. My biggest gripe with spotify is it's inability to reliably answer the question of "what playlist or source am I currently listening too?". A constant flow that spotify fails to deliver on is this: Search for a song, play the song, then the rest of the album, on repeat, without shuffle. It's annoying to have to load multiple slow UIs to navigate from search to album, visually search the album's track list and play the song your after. Itunes and Windows Media Player set the standard for how media should be navigated and Spotify should use some of those old standard concepts. EDIT: Try browsing Armin Van Buuren's massive discography on Spotify.
  • moolcool 4y ago
    iTunes and WMP were okay, but nothing ever has topped Foobar 2000 IMO.
  • djhworld 4y ago
    I might be having rose tinted spectacles but I remember when Spotify first launched in the UK, maybe 2010. The app was _screaming fast_ in comparison to iTunes at the time, and I think it had a similar interface to itunes as well (although could be misremembering) with a table-like layout [1] I really don't understand what happened between then and now, it was really a big deal at the time where the UI was snappy and playing a song was almost instantaenous. Nowadays, while the playback speed is still just as snappy, the UI feels much worse [1] https://www.cultofmac.com/102309/spotify-will-launch-in-the-states-between-july-5th-and-july-15th/ https://www.cultofmac.com/102309/spotify-will-launch-in-the-...
    • OldTimeCoffee 4y ago
      It's no longer a native app, it was rewritten in 2015 to be non-native. It's the same story everywhere, they're using Electron (or similar) so they can maintain one codebase for everything written in HTML/CSS/JS.
• JimmaDaRustla 4y ago
  It's funny that Spotify is regarded as a talented dev shop, but they don't know how to seed their random number generator.
  • ImaCake 4y ago
    Yeah this infuriates me. I have a very large playlist and it will definitely keep playing the same stuff each time I shuffle it. It’s not like is even hard to set a pseudo random seed.
• jkdufair 4y ago
  If you are an Emacs user, check out Smudge. https://github.com/danielfm/smudge https://github.com/danielfm/smudge It gives you just such a list.
• dhbsnanasn 4y ago
  Try https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue! It's macOS native, blazing fast, scriptable in Guile (GNU's Scheme), and keyboard-driven, if you're so inclined.
• moolcool 4y ago
  Spotify's UI is the absolute worst. The craziest thing to me is that it's never improved either, it's always been down bad. - Managing music offline is _terrible_. The first iPod did it well in 2001, but Spotify still can't let you navigate your downloaded music while offline on mobile at in any reasonable manor - The "Now Playing" mechanism is awkward and confusing. Sometimes your playlist disappears as you play it, eliminating the "previous track" function - If you come across the song while listening to a playlist, and you want to switch to listening to song in the context of the album instead of the playlist, there's no way to do it without restarting the song from the start (Apps like Foobar 2000 do this extremely well) - Their recommendation engine is (generally) terrible. There's one particular song I get every single time I play one of three of my generated "mixes" even though I choose "Don't Recommend" every single time it comes on. - My generated "mixes" are almost identical every day. Gimme something I haven't heard before! - On the topic of not wanting to hear a particular artist, they added "Block Artist" functionality, as a compromise in response to anger that controversial artists like Chris Brown were allowed to stay on the platform. Annoyingly though, you can only access this feature from mobile. Like if I wanted to listen to The Smiths on my laptop for some reason, I'd have to first use my phone to unblock them (I blocked them due to the aforementioned "Don't Recommend" feature not working) - They are a shitty podcast player, so I use the excellent Pocket Casts instead. Unfortunately, there's no way to not to be exposed to be inundated with ads for their original podcasts whenever you're navigating the app - I resent the idea of podcasts being locked to a specific platform in the first place. It's bad enough that we have a dozen different streaming services, but now we have vendor lockin with podcasts? Give me a break. - No lossless audio in 2021 - Artist pages are a fragmented mess. Look at the page for Barenaked Ladies for an example. Their catalog is hard to navigate because they have such a large amount of live albums. Why put live albums in with studio albums? - Similarly, multiple editions of the same album are listed separately (but not always). Look at the page for The Beatles for an example. They have 3 versions of Sgt Peppers (various special editions which came out over the years), and they are all tagged as 1967. Then they have a "Super Deluxe" of Let It Be which apparently came out in 2021. Why do contemporary reissues and remasters sometimes have the date of the remaster, and other times have dates of the original albums? I could go on...
• midislack 4y ago
  I don't think people understand the purpose of Spotify and every user interaction they engage you with. Spotify is not for you - you're not the customer. Big labels are. Podcasters are. You're a product and you're being shown what's been paid for. Why do people couch their interactions with big tech as if they matter? What are you going to do, NOT use Spotify? Fat chance.
• chrisdalke 4y ago
  Spotify won’t even let you view an artist’s songs in order, which frustrates me because I like to listen to entire discographies in order while working. I spent one weekend building a free tool to generate chronological playlists for an artist - https://www.timelineify.com https://www.timelineify.com. A decent number of people use this, which I think indicates some clear gaps in Spotify’s basic display features. Luckily the Spotify API is very generous with the data they expose about artists.
• markus_zhang 4y ago
  First time I tried out Spotify I as horrified to find that so many common functions are behind a pay wall. I forgot which one but probably just too many to recall. I will never use Spotify.
• Taywee 4y ago
  I'm so irritated with Spotify. Deezer is a bit better, but not a hell of a lot. I was a CD buyer and music pirate for a very long time, and while music streaming has helped me find a lot of new music, it has come with many frustrations as well. The biggest problem is the slow slide from convenience into a pre-packaged, curated experience, leveraging the audience for extra revenue. I know it's inevitable when companies need to maintain constant growth, but I can't help but get a little angry when I'm paying for a service, and I'm STILL the product to be sold for advertising dollars. The old adage of "if you aren't paying for it, you are the product" doesn't apply anymore. It's now basically "If it is a service, you are the product". You can't customize any of these home screens. You can't tell them to STOP SHOWING ME PODCASTS I DON'T LISTEN TO PODCASTS. You can't reset your listening profile to get back to a vanilla experience (especially applicable if you use your account for multiple different things. I don't listen to the same music while working as I do while working out, or actual "just sit-and-listen to music" sessions, and I also use music for D&D sessions, so all my suggested music ends up being a terrible mishmash. Spotify's suggestion here is to pay for multiple accounts. Even the AI and suggested music is wearing thin. Both Spotify and Deezer just give me the same exact tracks constantly, 99% of it is very mainstream, well-known stuff, and I haven't discovered any new music in over a month, despite listening for at least 4 hours a day. I kind of want to go back to just pirating everything again. It's actually pathetic that these top-of-the-line services offer less flexibility, power, and control than just pirating music and sticking it on your PMP did 15 years ago. It's sad. At least Bandcamp is still a thing, but then I've got an annoying library split. I can't mix my bought Bandcamp tracks in with Deezer or Spotify. Why are these the options? Pay out the nose for music (if you're a serious listener, $150 gets you 10 albums, which I can get through in three days). Be a criminal. Pay for a subscription that gives you no control and sells you to advertisers.
• oneoff786 4y ago
  Use the web interface. With Adblock you can play any song and play entire albums, in order, for free.
• acidburnNSA 4y ago
  I cancelled my spotify subscription after they banned libspotify from working in May. I was using it in Mopidy using the Iris plugin to get this nice table of songs. Now I'm spending my subscription fee on MP3s to grow my local MP3 collection and curating local playlists in Iris just like the olden days. So far so good. https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/ https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/
• fullshark 4y ago
  No because Spotify needs to turn its music catalog listeners into (proprietary) podcast listeners. Possibly proprietary playlists/recommendation radio streams as well. Same reason why Netflix pushes originals over licensed content. It's incredibly annoying but haven't yet heard a compelling reason to switch to apple music.
• srinathkrishna 4y ago
  Ah, foobar2000 - had such fun with that app back in the day!
• cosmiccatnap 4y ago
  We live in an age of poor design. Advertisement and dark patterns run rampant and reduce the functionality and usability of our software all the time. That being said Spotify still somehow stands out as a case study in how not to design an interface. What's worse is that the mobile apps are specifically designed with electron under the assumption that it will make cross platform development easy...but it breaks on every device in different ways. It's sad because I hate having to maintain a large music catalog manually but no music service really provides an adaquite solution to this and the system with the most extensive library is sadly...the worst platform for it. I hope they get better but I've been hoping that for years at this point.
• geoffeg 4y ago
  Spotify is full of those UI frustrations. There have been many times where I've thought "Just give me 'select * from songs where artist = % order by listen_count'". I started slowly moving myself away from online streaming services for my daily listening. I ripped all my CDs (to FLAC so I can re-encode to whatever I want in the future) and started buying albums from new artists off of Bandcamp, 7digital and HDTracks. I've even bought a few new CDs from local record stores and ripped them. I still use streaming services for discovery but I'm moving back to blogs (Pitchfork, Stereogum, etc), aggregators (Anydecentmusic) and forums for more of that discovery.
  • cube00 4y ago
    I really don't enjoy that they've started hiding the listen count now so you can no longer tell which songs are the most popular if you're checking out an album.
    • geoffeg 4y ago
      The listen count is huge for checking out new artists. Find a new band, try the first four or five tracks to see if they're a band you're interested in. At least YouTube still has view counts... for now.
• opportune 4y ago
  I think one reason companies have been doing this lately is because a surprisingly large population of computer users are only semi-literate (low education or just children). So if you’re doing UX Research you’ll actually notice this more visual, non-textual UI does “better” in a lot of metrics
  • uxcolumbo 4y ago
    Do you have any sources for this? I'd be interested to read more about it. Why in general the UX in a lot of apps has been dropping (for me). It's like information density doesn't matter anymore.
• mihaaly 4y ago
  I am glad I am not alone hating these kind of user hostile designs which is a trend nowadays. I departed Spotify long ago but its pair, the Tidal is at least as bad, some may say (me! me!) that is much worse. It took about ca. 2-3 years for them to get to a state where you click on a song and it plays it. With no long delay, no stutter, ability to skip into a specific spot, almost no crash. With still no decent playlist support (2-3 years more work to develop this cutting edge revolutionary concept to an entry level), but it was enough to switch for HiFi quality. Since then there was a tiny addition to playlists, fairly usefule if you now where the traps are, but they did a bunch of making it flashy and big, with very limited advancement on functionality. In fact, basic functionality got f..d up here and there! Drag and drop makes random things, search bar jumps all over the place, album/playlist info only visible topmost or much scrolled down position, in between just a big emty space. Which ironically can react to click! They introduced the invisible item gets clicked concept. Funny. : / Lists go to the very edge, visually cluttered navigation and item text, invisible title bar to drag (but click slightly elsewehere and it will start some song). And the most bloated search results, yes! They make it exceptionally hard to find what you need, in pair with Spotify. And the same kind of suggestions and trends and lists and whatnot, but your own favourites are pushed back somewhere. Their choices have the prime location not your own! How hostile is that?! (very!) Looks like they hired the slowest working most incompetent UX/UI designers, turning the usability into an ever descending spiral. But on the positive side.... well, nothig. It is huge, slow like f..k, bloated, a nighmare to use. As soon as I pick up building an offline file cathalog again I will go back to the good old days of owning my songs and copying the file I want to have in the centre. This streaming kind of hostile nighmare is not for me. I am thinking about collecting my complaints into a post but it is a long work. And futile anyway. I tried to communicate problems with them but they do not listen. They try to change my behaviour first, also asking about things I already told them, seems like not even reading my mail in full. So likely will just go away while emitting little puffs of smoke through my ears.
• olingern 4y ago
  I agree with the post. I should be able to set how I view my search results. Not everyone has the bandwidth to download all of the album art. My most recent, frustrating bug is setting an album or podcast to be available offline and then having to wait 30 seconds to 1 minute for the iOS app to give up on finding the network while in airplane mode. Like another top comment mentions, there seems to be no cohesive vision. If a true competitor ever emerges, I’m happy to jump ship. I enjoy the subscription experience a lot. p.s. - I never want ads or popups for new album drops. I’d take a “feed” with search available over whatever “Home” is.
• eurasiantiger 4y ago
  Now that they are the market leader, Spotify does not have any business incentive to make their app nice to use. In fact, their incentives are to keep you paying but not listening, since that maximizes their ROI.
• rickstanley 4y ago
  Does anyone know a "good" source of torrent fo music? I'm tired of Spotify and Deezer, the former not giving me the free choice of settings to, say, disable podcasts and the latter not having a "native" linux client at all. I'm going for Gnome's Music app + stored music somewhere.
  • teddyh 4y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/music https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/music
• the_only_law 4y ago
  > There are so many terrible UX/UI patterns everywhere in these tech companies. Apple, Google, Spotify, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, etc; I 100% agree with this, and I find myself increasingly hating software the worse the UX is. I was in visual studio the other day, and wanted to view the properties of the project on the settings page, so I open it up trying to view it, which immediately and automatically without any input from me fired some sort of event off that modified the settings and completely broke the project.
• warent 4y ago
  > Hmm. What the fuck is this!? Why are you trying to be edgy? This killed me lol. Very true. Thanks for the write-up. I left Spotify after a few years of using it and currently am trying Tidal because they pay the artists more apparently? Sadly, however, they're guilty of the same UX problems.
• thegabez 4y ago
  The entire UX is clunky, how does this even happen?
• chx 4y ago
  So we just forgot Joe Rogan and continued with Spotify as if nothing happened? Cool, cool.
  • ByteJockey 4y ago
    I mean, yeah? Are you new to internet drama? People use it to feel high and mighty for a couple weeks and get some sweet, sweet dopamine hits, and then they go back to doing exactly what they were doing before.
• kthejoker2 4y ago
  Just want to give a shoutout to Amazon Music, who (in a good way?) don't care much about the customer or a great experience, or even about being seen as a company who cares a lot about music or the artists. They just shove a bunch of music into a giant search engine and do some easily ignorable curation. But their search works great, easy to play an album, good back catalog on Unlimited (I've been doing a lot of crate digging into the early 2000s using Wikipedia's album catgeory listings and my hit rate between the list and it being in Amazon is about 85%) The API sucks, playlists have weird limits, their UI is atrocious ... but you can hear what you like, when you like, so I'm happy.
• theknocker 4y ago
• Havoc 4y ago
  UI and UX got optimized to hell like other streaming services chasing metrics at all cost. Sometimes I think there are companies and apps that would benefit from firing their entire UX/UI teams wholesale and then slowly rehiring a portion of them as actual problems crop up from their absence. A reset to this A/B madness of sorts.
• teawrecks 4y ago
  Ended up canceling my Spotify, in part because of how bad the UX is.
• gimme_treefiddy 4y ago
  I’ve developed such a inadvertent hatred for Spotify because of their app.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I miss being able to buy music for other people.
• sprremix 4y ago
  There are some alternative frontends for Spotify available. None of the ones I found works on M1 mac, but Windows and Linux users have some options available. https://github.com/jpochyla/psst https://github.com/jpochyla/psst https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue https://github.com/xou816/spot https://github.com/xou816/spot
  • imbnwa 4y ago
    Psst runs on Rosetta just fine on my M1 Mini. Only issue they're using drawing the window themselves and it has issues re-drawing itself after wake
  • PestoDiRucola 4y ago
    It's ridiculous that we'd have to set up and use a third-party app for a service we pay for.
• why-el 4y ago
  If a Spotify PM is collecting feedback: If I go to a song's Radio to try and discover similar songs, do not play me songs I already "liked" (ones with the heart icon highlighted), it defeats the purpose of going to the radio.
• TeeMassive 4y ago
  "Dear product manager, can you stop creating useless widgets to justify your next raise?" "No."
• j0112358 4y ago
  I wish so many "modern" things just had "spreadsheet view" and "spreadsheet edit" mode.
• wutbrodo 4y ago
  I tried switching from YouTube music to spotify recently and was shocked that they don't have a _music library_ feature: a table of songs that you can slice by artist, album, etc, in the manner of every music player since the dawn of time. How does anyone serious about music use it? Did I somehow miss that spotify is only intended for casual, "I'll listen to whatever"-type users?
• b3morales 4y ago
  > If there is a piece of information about a podcast that is the least useful, that would be the cover art. Slightly disagree with this. When you're searching for something whose cover art you know well, the visual match is definitely the fastest way for you to get to it. Truncating the title/track info on the other hand, I agree is pretty unforgivable.
• rsanheim 4y ago
  I refused to use Spotify from early on because it is so anti-album. The interface just sucks for playing albums, and its ridiculous that they haven't fixed it. Playlists are fine for parties or when you want to discover new music, but if you are doing more focused listening albums are the way to go. I use Apple Music for streaming / high quality downloads while on the go or airplaying around the house, and Roon (https://roonlabs.com https://roonlabs.com) for dedicated in-home album listening. Its definitely a more expensive combo than Spotify, but worth it.
• roansh 4y ago
  Emacs has a plug-in. Slightly off topic but.. couldn’t resist
• everdrive 4y ago
  >Dear Spotify, can we just get table of songs? No, you can't. This is a for-profit service, and a table of songs interferes with their ability to choose what you listen to, and prefer certain artists or songs over others. I would not expect a high-quality music library interface from any cloud provider, because the intent is to stream you the things they prefer, and not empower you.
• fattless 4y ago
  I agree, spotifys ux is terrible. Nowadays though I dont notice it as much, probably because i use it every day. But I have complaints. Ive mentioned it before but their mobile design sucks. I use it a lot in my car, so usually ill keep the playback screen open amd just swipe when I need to change songs, simple and probably safe. But if I swipe ever so slightly upward, it opens the lyrics function, so I have to look down, see what happened, swipe, then get back to driving. I get im not using it the way it is "supposed" to be used, but its an akward design choice anyways. When are the lyrics that on the fly important, and even when im looking at the screen I still mess it up. That and the issues ive been having with the desktop app. Maybe its just my hardware but it never seems to just open om the first try, I usually have to close, then reopen it.
• annnoo 4y ago
  Just a side note: Iirc Spotify does not use Electron - it uses the Chromium embedded Framework. It is kinda the same as electron (it gives you an Browser) but instead of JavaScript you have to use C++ (or a wrapper around the library in you favourite language) to implement the Backend side of the app
• stockerta 4y ago
  Or in my case, dear spotify, I don't care about the damn podcasts, never was, never will, don't fckign show me them. I don't care.
• franczesko 4y ago
  Spotify's UI is a nightmare to use. If someone from the UX team hangs out on HN, please pass the message to the right people - fix the menu and split podcasts from music.
• al_borland 4y ago
  I mostly quit listening to Joe Rogan's podcast after it left YouTube. I'd watch when he had an interesting guest that showed up in my recommendations. A while back a co-worker told me about a recent episode I should check out. Reluctantly, I went to Spotify to check it out. It took me a good 20 minute, and a lot of just scrolling through page after page of podcasts, until I actually found it. You'd think after spending $50M on the guy they wouldn't make it so hard to find. The search and navigation was horrendous. I listened to maybe 20 minutes of the podcast, quit to go do something else, and never went back. I don't particularly like what Apple Music has become, when compared to the iTunes from the music-only era, but it's still dramatically better than Spotify.
• seandoe 4y ago
  Hear hear! Spotify's UI/ux choices have frustrated me more and more over the years. Do any of their employees use their clients? Why is artist not a column that I can sort. Why such terrible uses of space? What happened to the social features? I'm not on any social platforms but it'd be fun to easily see, share, comment on friends' playlists.
• JohnnyHerz 4y ago
  OMGEEEE +1000 for the OP
• tonguetrainer 4y ago
  Ha, you should try Deezer. I don't even know how to get to my own music using their interface.
• sytelus 4y ago
  Do they do any development still? I haven’t seen a single useful feature come out from the team during past 3 years. Their single tap feature is absurdly bad. For some reason, shuffle is never truly random and keeps playing same old songs. I know people have been complaining about this for years. There is no easy way to merge duplicate playlists. There is tons of things to do but I don’t think they have any development team anymore. They rode on popularity, founders cashed out, bought private islands and now they probably only have small maintenance team to keep the lights on.
• mayneack 4y ago
  Plex (and plexamp) have really brought back the old iTunes interface I didn't know I was missing. I can search and get a list, I can sort within that list by whatever I want, I can create a "smart playlist" for "100 tracks, with more than 5 plays that were last played more than 3 months ago". There's also a "shuffle albums" feature that I didn't realize I missed from iTunes. You can also add a tidal subscription within plex, but it's a little clunky so I just stick to my library.
• Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
  I think the inconsistent mess of Spotify is what most people actually want, because back in the day I remember constantly hearing from people how much they hated iTunes. This Neil fellow and myself are the ones with the weird taste in software, not the UX experts behind Spotify.
• fleddr 4y ago
  This kind of "discovery" UI sucks. You see it everywhere now. A/B testing, out of touch design teams and algorithms have overtaken basic common sense. Spotify has many teams working on the UI of their app, could be 100+ people, perhaps even hundreds. Isn't that absurd when the UI of any classic music/media player is superior?
• casey2 4y ago
  Dear Spotify users, don't. There are good reasons Spotify does what Spotify does, some of which have already been mentioned in this thread. Instead of begging and groveling for them to change, why not change your habits to ones more beneficial to you? Spotify has never promised users freedom; they are simply a front-end to their collection of licensed music. Spotify has all the power in the relationship with their users and will perpetrate abuse on their users without hesitation or warning. If you're on a freedom-respecting OS, I recommend either soulseekqt or any plain old BitTorrent client for music acquisition. I recommend mpd with ncmpcpp as a client for playing, and sending cash by mail to whoever you want. Remember, sharing is a virtue, not a vice.
• tarboreus 4y ago
  I think it says a lot when people hate Spotify this much and then feel like they have to use it. There are comments here about buildling your an entire new interface to Spotify. At that point, shouldn't you just...not use Spotify? What would Spotify have to do to you to get you to not use it, sneak into your house at night and do something to the family pet?
• Dylovell 4y ago
  Been using spotify since they launched a beta in the US (11 years ago?), but them constantly pushing services that are not music on their platform, and populating their recommended playlists cheaper-per-play songs, I am actively looking to move.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• sizzle 4y ago
  Fire their UX team and hire this guy and consult with NNG, their visual design language is so unusable, small tiny cryptic icons and hidden gestures be damned. Why do we consumers put up with this bullshit design? The cover art search pattern for podcasts literally makes it impossible to search when I’m on the go, it bothers me so much. I miss the days of Apple Human Interface Design Guidelines that were actually based off scientific principles of human visual perception.
• neop1x 4y ago
  I don't like when podcast creators publish on Spotify only as it is not even possible to change playback speed in their web ui. And yt-dlp doesn't work either. They want me to download their app & create an account to just be able to listen so I mostly seek through it quickly or skip the podcast completely. They should follow the Netflix path, it is barely usable service.
• hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
  And please show the release YEAR of albums in the Appears On section. AND please stop recommending stupid house remixes of my favourite songs. I don't like house music one bit, I don't know the remix artist at all, so don't recommend their TRASH to me!
• jlbang 4y ago
  The article says "If there is a piece of information about a podcast that is the least useful, that would be the cover art." I think that's not true. Cover art / album art allows you to visually scan through a pile of different podcasts to find the one podcast you're looking for. E.g. "I know it's mostly purple with a little white, so now I'm scanning for purple… there it is." You can find the one you want even if the art is tiny and you can see 100 at a time. Let's not allow the lesson to be "text is better, don't display cover art". Instead, let's allow the lesson to be "let me make the software work the way my brain does." It's not that Spotify has made a terrible decision, necessarily. It's just that their UI isn't optimized for a non-visual person, or a person who prefers text to images. What if software had far more customizable UI, such that I can make the software display the information to me in the way that makes the most sense to me? Harder to test, for sure, but if they made it a paid feature (meaning only for paying users) it might pay for itself.
• CZiNTrPT 4y ago
  True. I left Spotify years ago for the single reason of their UI/UX getting worse every update. First tried to offer feedback on their tracker, but it just never changed for the better...