8 ms·

The Spotify app constantly frustrates me and I miss the old Google Play Music app. - I listened to 5 minutes of one episode of a podcast once, decided it wasn'

The Spotify app constantly frustrates me and I miss the old Google Play Music app. - I listened to 5 minutes of one episode of a podcast once, decided it wasn't for me and stopped, but ever since then I have an entire pane on my homepage dedicated to my apparent love for that podcast. - The first 4 sections of the homepage recommend me exactly the same things - I have the last 6 albums I listened to at the top, then "Jump back in", then "Recently played" and then "Recommended for today". There's no "here's some stuff you haven't listened to lately". I regularly enjoy an album, burn myself out on it (because it's always presented to me), don't listen to it for a week and then completely forget about it because Spotify never mentions it again. - The queuing functionality is horrible. There's way to add a new album to the end of the current queue. That means I have to consciously realise that I'm listening to the last song of an album and then queue up what I want to listen to next. It regularly gets confused especially if I connect it to a Bluetooth device mid-album, and will sometime decide to truncate my queue, chopping off the last few songs of an album or repeating a middle few songs that I've already listened to. How can such a simple concept (listen to music) get so many basics so wrong and have such glaring bugs?

hadrien01 4y ago
For your second point, there's a Time Capsule playlist with content you haven't recently listened to.
- dataengineer56 4y ago
  I listen to albums, not songs, and looking at that playlist then there's a lot of stuff there that I've never listened to and have no desire to listen to. Spotify seems exceptionally bad at metal music and says "oh you listen to prog metal? Then you're definitely going to love us constantly recommending you the exact same Korn, Slipknot and blink-182 albums".
jerpint 4y ago
The most frustrating for me is the way the “offline” feature works. On my android, even though I had downloaded songs/podcasts/etc. I had to dig in settings and set it explicitly to offline mode to enable offline playback. Another grievance: I love music and podcasts and use Spotify for both. It would be great to have a podcast tab and a music tab. Instead, if you switch from one to the other, you’ll have to dig out the previous episode you were listening to. Very user unfriendly
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  The whole offline / no data experience is absolutely terrible if you live anywhere like Canada where mobile data rates are small and expensive. The #1 complaint I've heard about Spotify for years is "I set it to not download music on data then didn't notice I was listening to a new playlist and now I'm out of data till next month". Also taking public transit like a subway without cell service was a pain. Hold on, let me open the settings in advance and flip the offline switch so I can keep listening to music on my commute. Ugh.
- jamil7 4y ago
  Offline is also weird on iOS, you often have to turn on airplane mode to get it into its offline state reliably.
- disruptiveink 4y ago
  Don't forget the part that you now have to "love" a song or an album in order to download it because there's no "Add to Library" anymore, completely ruining the concept of "likes". How would I know if I like something or not if I have to say I "love" it in order to download it so I can listen to it later? Do I really "love" every single song of an album or was I just forced to say so in order to download the whole album? There is no possible way you're getting the correct data points out of me like this. There's three things I want out of Spotify: * Browse the albums of a particular artist and play it – this is becoming harder and harder; * Find and play one song in particular by title – this is the only thing Spotify still does right; * Download an album / playlist and be able to listen to it later on regardless of my internet connection status – besides the requirement to "love" it stupidity, the UI just hangs until it timeouts if you have a spotty connection. If you have the content, just display and play it! It's actually slightly better now when you have no connection, a while ago, if you were on a plane in Airplane Mode, it would hang for a few seconds "loading" until it gave up and displayed the album art it had downloaded - why?! I just want Winamp with a search engine and a downloader built in. Is that really so hard? Is Electron really adding any value here, or just making problems far harder to solve than they should be across every single platform?
  - 4y ago
conradfr 4y ago
I use Deezer instead of Spotify, I don't know if it's better or worse, but what I can tell you is that I miss Google Play Music everyday.
- Aisen8010 4y ago
  Deezer has a lot of interface problems too. I think that Deezer is better because there is a button to 'don't recommend this track/artist'. I can filter the things that I dislike. Another positive thing about Deezer is that it shows less popups and notifications than Spotify.
fleddr 4y ago
"How can such a simple concept (listen to music) get so many basics so wrong and have such glaring bugs?" Spotify internally has a model where they have a large number of small teams where each is responsible for only a tiny part of the experience. Possibly this leads to a lack of a coherent experience. The other factor may be the constant experimentation. Frankly, 20-30 year old media players were better. So what the point of it all is...I have no idea. Quite similar experience with the Netflix app where it seems every single day I have to wonder where they put my currently watching series. Ironically, we look up to these companies for their engineering culture. We really shouldn't. It's a hot mess. Toy tech. Deeply unserious about quality and customers.
- dataengineer56 4y ago
  The constant moving of the Netflix "currently watching" pane is a huge annoyance for me, especially because it looks the same as every other pane ("horror films", "British comedy" etc). My grandma can't figure it out, she needs to be able to press the same buttons every time she goes on the app and Netflix doesn't let her do that.
  - MandieD 4y ago
    “She needs to be able to press the same buttons every time she goes on that app and [insert app name here] doesn’t let her do that” must sum up at least 90% of user problems.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    Not even episode syncing works (for me). I clearly finished watching an episode yet regularly on another device the next episode would be the one I already watched. Just one of many basic things that doesn't work. I forgot to add that not only will they change "currently playing" every 3 secs, also the cover art of each series changes, as an A/B test. So if you use that as a visual confirmation, well tough luck. In the case of Netflix, there's a reason for all of this. They don't really want you to go and sniff around the catalog in easy ways. You might discover its not great. Best to throw a bunch of random stuff in your face to give you the illusion of a fabulously rich and "dynamic" experience. The distraction UX of Netflix is intentional. In the case of Spotify it's mostly incompetence.
hef19898 4y ago
+1 on Google Music, I really miss that.
traveler01 4y ago
It's algorithm is really dumb. That's why these companies need to stop with these so called "algorithms", we should only select the genres of music we like and our front page should be a reflection of it. I still remember when my girlfriend searched for a fart noise podcast as a joke and then I kept getting suggestions based on it for weeks.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xenolithis 4y ago
Songza(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza) really brought a lot of value to GPM. RIP
silveroriole 4y ago
I think the most amazing mistake Spotify made was that recently all private playlists suddenly became public, because they changed the meaning of private and public to introduce some weird third level of privacy. I now have no idea what the privacy settings do. Second most amazing was when they made the scrollbar literally two pixels wide and therefore unusable. It’s not even that these are huge errors but it just makes you wonder who drove those change and why? What on Earth are their teams up to when they’re prioritising those kinds of changes?
- EastSmith 4y ago
  WTF? I just checked all my private playlist are now public! WTF Spotify?!?
  - silveroriole 4y ago
    They say that “public” means what “private” used to mean, “added to profile” means what “public” used to mean, and “private” now means that people can’t see the playlist at all even if they have a link to it. But it’s completely unclear which setting controls whether someone can search for the playlist by name and find it. I found out about this public/private change because I somehow got a subscriber to a playlist I’d thought was completely private, so I’m sure the previously private playlists actually did become more public without my permission…
  - puszczyk 4y ago
    WTF!!! Same here, the playlists are now public
  - mikhael28 4y ago
    They probably made a good chunk selling your now public playlist music preferences to advertisers.
- mikhael28 4y ago
  It's so they could sell your music preferences. You got got.
- 4y ago
bitexploder 4y ago
You still cant search for a song in your playlists only either.
unglaublich 4y ago
Podcasts are interesting for Spotify because they keep the listener attached to the service while their (royalty and license) costs are minimal. Just like they inject all kinds of cheap music from unknown artists in your recommendations.
randomifcpfan 4y ago
Google Play Music was designed in a pre-streaming world, when albums were much more popular. Unfortunately, very few people use streaming services to listen to albums. It is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but given the minuscule usage of albums by users, it’s not worth Spotify’s time to optimize the album playback experience. (Same goes for Classical music.) Your problem with a static, duplicate list of suggested music sounds like a bug. Somehow Spotify’s recommendation algorithm has run out of ideas of what to show you, so it just shows you the same thing several times.
xtracto 4y ago
I am just waiting for the personal I formation train to get to include my listening history and like/dislike behaviour. There should be an XML/JSON standard to store, download and share that information. I've got a listening history in last.fm, another in spotify, another in Tidal an finally in youtube. I should be able to use them together in any platform. My listening habits is also my personal information.
aequitas 4y ago
I just went back to Spotify after trying a 6 month Apple Music trial for only 3 weeks. Apple Music is even worse. First of all they don’t support handoff between my mac and iPhone. A feature that Spotify supports a lot better. There is no way to go back to the previous song. The mac app constantly fails to resume playing a song after a short while paused. And sometimes I have to go to a song or playlist again to get it to start playing music again. Searching for song has horrible ux. I haven’t found a way to get to the playlist I’m currently on. While spotify has its issues I’m now a lot more happy with it after trying an alternative.
agluszak 4y ago
> The queuing functionality is horrible. There's way to add a new album to the end of the current queue. That's precisely why I chose Tidal over Spotify when GPM died
InCityDreams 4y ago
And yet, people still pay for crap experiences. For me, even a slight annoyance means I'm out, with a quick email to 'contact us' explaining exactly why. Never heard back from several and they dont receive my $$ anymore.
nvarsj 4y ago
After using plexamp for the last year, it just reinforced my impression that the UX of Spotify is cosmically bad. Plexamp feels a lot like winamp, it is a nice pared down experience that just works and is fast. But I guess I'm just one data point. Spotify has enough users that they have no incentive to make any kind of radical change.
hbn 4y ago
There are plenty of dedicated podcast apps that offer a better experience with no or very little algorithmic recommendation system. I've used PocketCasts for years and it's been perfect and doing exactly what it needs to do and no more. The main page is just a grid of podcasts I'm subscribed to, and I can go into a list of all unplayed episodes of all my podcasts sorted chronologically. There is a "discover" tab that has featured/trending podcasts, but I never touch that other than to use the search (which doubles as an entry field where you can paste an RSS link to subscribe that way)
brown9-2 4y ago
Why does every thread about a consumer app company like this turn into off-topic feedback about the product?

hadrien01 4y ago

For your second point, there's a Time Capsule playlist with content you haven't recently listened to.

dataengineer56 4y ago
I listen to albums, not songs, and looking at that playlist then there's a lot of stuff there that I've never listened to and have no desire to listen to. Spotify seems exceptionally bad at metal music and says "oh you listen to prog metal? Then you're definitely going to love us constantly recommending you the exact same Korn, Slipknot and blink-182 albums".

jerpint 4y ago

The most frustrating for me is the way the “offline” feature works. On my android, even though I had downloaded songs/podcasts/etc. I had to dig in settings and set it explicitly to offline mode to enable offline playback. Another grievance: I love music and podcasts and use Spotify for both. It would be great to have a podcast tab and a music tab. Instead, if you switch from one to the other, you’ll have to dig out the previous episode you were listening to. Very user unfriendly

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
The whole offline / no data experience is absolutely terrible if you live anywhere like Canada where mobile data rates are small and expensive. The #1 complaint I've heard about Spotify for years is "I set it to not download music on data then didn't notice I was listening to a new playlist and now I'm out of data till next month". Also taking public transit like a subway without cell service was a pain. Hold on, let me open the settings in advance and flip the offline switch so I can keep listening to music on my commute. Ugh.
jamil7 4y ago
Offline is also weird on iOS, you often have to turn on airplane mode to get it into its offline state reliably.
disruptiveink 4y ago
Don't forget the part that you now have to "love" a song or an album in order to download it because there's no "Add to Library" anymore, completely ruining the concept of "likes". How would I know if I like something or not if I have to say I "love" it in order to download it so I can listen to it later? Do I really "love" every single song of an album or was I just forced to say so in order to download the whole album? There is no possible way you're getting the correct data points out of me like this. There's three things I want out of Spotify: * Browse the albums of a particular artist and play it – this is becoming harder and harder; * Find and play one song in particular by title – this is the only thing Spotify still does right; * Download an album / playlist and be able to listen to it later on regardless of my internet connection status – besides the requirement to "love" it stupidity, the UI just hangs until it timeouts if you have a spotty connection. If you have the content, just display and play it! It's actually slightly better now when you have no connection, a while ago, if you were on a plane in Airplane Mode, it would hang for a few seconds "loading" until it gave up and displayed the album art it had downloaded - why?! I just want Winamp with a search engine and a downloader built in. Is that really so hard? Is Electron really adding any value here, or just making problems far harder to solve than they should be across every single platform?
- 4y ago

conradfr 4y ago

I use Deezer instead of Spotify, I don't know if it's better or worse, but what I can tell you is that I miss Google Play Music everyday.

Aisen8010 4y ago
Deezer has a lot of interface problems too. I think that Deezer is better because there is a button to 'don't recommend this track/artist'. I can filter the things that I dislike. Another positive thing about Deezer is that it shows less popups and notifications than Spotify.

fleddr 4y ago

"How can such a simple concept (listen to music) get so many basics so wrong and have such glaring bugs?" Spotify internally has a model where they have a large number of small teams where each is responsible for only a tiny part of the experience. Possibly this leads to a lack of a coherent experience. The other factor may be the constant experimentation. Frankly, 20-30 year old media players were better. So what the point of it all is...I have no idea. Quite similar experience with the Netflix app where it seems every single day I have to wonder where they put my currently watching series. Ironically, we look up to these companies for their engineering culture. We really shouldn't. It's a hot mess. Toy tech. Deeply unserious about quality and customers.

dataengineer56 4y ago
The constant moving of the Netflix "currently watching" pane is a huge annoyance for me, especially because it looks the same as every other pane ("horror films", "British comedy" etc). My grandma can't figure it out, she needs to be able to press the same buttons every time she goes on the app and Netflix doesn't let her do that.
- MandieD 4y ago
  “She needs to be able to press the same buttons every time she goes on that app and [insert app name here] doesn’t let her do that” must sum up at least 90% of user problems.
- fleddr 4y ago
  Not even episode syncing works (for me). I clearly finished watching an episode yet regularly on another device the next episode would be the one I already watched. Just one of many basic things that doesn't work. I forgot to add that not only will they change "currently playing" every 3 secs, also the cover art of each series changes, as an A/B test. So if you use that as a visual confirmation, well tough luck. In the case of Netflix, there's a reason for all of this. They don't really want you to go and sniff around the catalog in easy ways. You might discover its not great. Best to throw a bunch of random stuff in your face to give you the illusion of a fabulously rich and "dynamic" experience. The distraction UX of Netflix is intentional. In the case of Spotify it's mostly incompetence.

hef19898 4y ago

+1 on Google Music, I really miss that.

traveler01 4y ago

It's algorithm is really dumb. That's why these companies need to stop with these so called "algorithms", we should only select the genres of music we like and our front page should be a reflection of it. I still remember when my girlfriend searched for a fart noise podcast as a joke and then I kept getting suggestions based on it for weeks.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

xenolithis 4y ago

Songza(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza) really brought a lot of value to GPM. RIP

silveroriole 4y ago

I think the most amazing mistake Spotify made was that recently all private playlists suddenly became public, because they changed the meaning of private and public to introduce some weird third level of privacy. I now have no idea what the privacy settings do. Second most amazing was when they made the scrollbar literally two pixels wide and therefore unusable. It’s not even that these are huge errors but it just makes you wonder who drove those change and why? What on Earth are their teams up to when they’re prioritising those kinds of changes?

EastSmith 4y ago
WTF? I just checked all my private playlist are now public! WTF Spotify?!?
- silveroriole 4y ago
  They say that “public” means what “private” used to mean, “added to profile” means what “public” used to mean, and “private” now means that people can’t see the playlist at all even if they have a link to it. But it’s completely unclear which setting controls whether someone can search for the playlist by name and find it. I found out about this public/private change because I somehow got a subscriber to a playlist I’d thought was completely private, so I’m sure the previously private playlists actually did become more public without my permission…
- puszczyk 4y ago
  WTF!!! Same here, the playlists are now public
- mikhael28 4y ago
  They probably made a good chunk selling your now public playlist music preferences to advertisers.
mikhael28 4y ago
It's so they could sell your music preferences. You got got.
4y ago

bitexploder 4y ago

You still cant search for a song in your playlists only either.

unglaublich 4y ago

Podcasts are interesting for Spotify because they keep the listener attached to the service while their (royalty and license) costs are minimal. Just like they inject all kinds of cheap music from unknown artists in your recommendations.

randomifcpfan 4y ago

Google Play Music was designed in a pre-streaming world, when albums were much more popular. Unfortunately, very few people use streaming services to listen to albums. It is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but given the minuscule usage of albums by users, it’s not worth Spotify’s time to optimize the album playback experience. (Same goes for Classical music.) Your problem with a static, duplicate list of suggested music sounds like a bug. Somehow Spotify’s recommendation algorithm has run out of ideas of what to show you, so it just shows you the same thing several times.

xtracto 4y ago

I am just waiting for the personal I formation train to get to include my listening history and like/dislike behaviour. There should be an XML/JSON standard to store, download and share that information. I've got a listening history in last.fm, another in spotify, another in Tidal an finally in youtube. I should be able to use them together in any platform. My listening habits is also my personal information.

aequitas 4y ago

I just went back to Spotify after trying a 6 month Apple Music trial for only 3 weeks. Apple Music is even worse. First of all they don’t support handoff between my mac and iPhone. A feature that Spotify supports a lot better. There is no way to go back to the previous song. The mac app constantly fails to resume playing a song after a short while paused. And sometimes I have to go to a song or playlist again to get it to start playing music again. Searching for song has horrible ux. I haven’t found a way to get to the playlist I’m currently on. While spotify has its issues I’m now a lot more happy with it after trying an alternative.

agluszak 4y ago

> The queuing functionality is horrible. There's way to add a new album to the end of the current queue. That's precisely why I chose Tidal over Spotify when GPM died

InCityDreams 4y ago

And yet, people still pay for crap experiences. For me, even a slight annoyance means I'm out, with a quick email to 'contact us' explaining exactly why. Never heard back from several and they dont receive my $$ anymore.

nvarsj 4y ago

After using plexamp for the last year, it just reinforced my impression that the UX of Spotify is cosmically bad. Plexamp feels a lot like winamp, it is a nice pared down experience that just works and is fast. But I guess I'm just one data point. Spotify has enough users that they have no incentive to make any kind of radical change.

hbn 4y ago

There are plenty of dedicated podcast apps that offer a better experience with no or very little algorithmic recommendation system. I've used PocketCasts for years and it's been perfect and doing exactly what it needs to do and no more. The main page is just a grid of podcasts I'm subscribed to, and I can go into a list of all unplayed episodes of all my podcasts sorted chronologically. There is a "discover" tab that has featured/trending podcasts, but I never touch that other than to use the search (which doubles as an entry field where you can paste an RSS link to subscribe that way)

brown9-2 4y ago

Why does every thread about a consumer app company like this turn into off-topic feedback about the product?