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I often wonder what kind of work actually happens at Spotify. Pretty much every major change to the software or api since I started using it has made the produc

I often wonder what kind of work actually happens at Spotify. Pretty much every major change to the software or api since I started using it has made the product worse. Breaking libspotify, pointless UI redesigns, obvious, user-facing bugs that go unfixed for years. Removing features like play queue for long periods. There's metadata errors and even audio corruption in some albums that I actually reported to them years ago, never fixed. As for new features, there may be more but the only one I noticed somewhat recently was the ability to view lyrics at least for some songs, and sometimes but not always synced to the music. But this was already an add-on for Spotify wayyy back in their original client, and then they axed add-on support! This feature was gone for years after that. I'm legitimately curious at this point what people actually do at Spotify besides billing and accounting.

that_guy_iain 3y ago
I would assume it's mostly optimisation and bug fixing. Improving their ability to read files globally, improving availability, etc. Plus internal tools will probably be a major thing too.
scarab92 3y ago
All the pointless redesigns was a pretty clear sign that they had excess engineering headcount.
- fullshark 3y ago
  I saw it as a sign that they needed to find ways to get people to spend time listening to anything that is proprietary (podcasts, unique recommendation algorithms) to avoid just being the middle man for music streaming and getting squeezed by the publishers for all their revenue. Edit: By proprietary I mean - owned by Spotify.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    The music is propertiary. Even recordings of Mozart is unless the recording is older than an ever increasing limit of a bazillion years.
    - fullshark 3y ago
      Yeah but it's not owned by Spotify, at least the most popular music isn't. I mean: they want you to listen to things they own, not things they license.
- apwell23 3y ago
  It wasn't pointless. Spotify's whole existence depends on moving from background listening to active foreground use. It would be pointless for them to stay an passive background app. Might as well shutdown the company and cut the losses.
mlrtime 3y ago
I think this is the issue. 10,000 employees vs bad user experience. Spotify has gotten worse for me as well, I pay for Spotify + SiriusXM. Spotify should be much better, but it's not. I'm thinking of dropping it soon. Why doesn't Spotify still not have a Pandora style radio station? I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?
- deleted 3y ago
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- prox 3y ago
  This is why I went with Apple Music. Apple being a hardware company first makes it that they just want to provide a good portal to music. Thus far I have been happy with it.
- apwell23 3y ago
  > I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist? Can you describe the criteria ?
- coldpie 3y ago
  Just try a different service. There's a zillion of them out there, all more or less interchangeable. Maybe one has the feature you want.
- erellsworth 3y ago
  I'm not sure how specific you want your criteria to be, but you can create a Spotify "radio" station based off of any song, band/artist, or playlist. Spotify's discovery capabilities are miles beyond Pandora, in my opinion.
  - sometdog 3y ago
    They removed the ability to create "radio" stations off of playlists, which does make discovery somewhat more difficult.
RamblingCTO 3y ago
I still hate the change about the "add to playlist/like" button with all my heart. I don't want to like all the songs I add to playlists. I have a few hundred playlists with a looooot of songs (I listened to 86000 minutes last year of over 4000 artists ...). That change was utterly idiotic
- mrWiz 3y ago
  I've always used that button to "like" songs and used the "Add To Playlist" item under the ellipses menu to add things to a particular playlist. What was your process like before the change, and what is it now?
  - RamblingCTO 3y ago
    Before you had two buttons. I'd like songs I really like and add the rest to specific playlists. Now I have to do the cumbersome route via the elipsis, yes. It's just way harder and I do it less. I also still like songs on accident because the button is a fucking plus and not a heart. No idea which idiot at spotify proposed that.
alephnan 3y ago
There was a meme about Spotify replacing the heart symbol to like a song with a ‘+’ sign. No one asked for, it benefits no one, and people proactively want the old version. I’m sure they had countless meetings for this “feature” and how much human hours. There would have been a designer, and a researcher. There would have also been a data scientist lying with statistics about how this change moved the core business metrics. That’s from my personal experience of working in FANG and people doing unscientific and statistically invalid analysis of noise.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  This change reminds me of Netflix replacing their 5(?)-star rating system, with a simple thumbs up / down system. Netflix claimed there was statistical justification for the change, but my most charitable interpretation is that their goals don't align with mine.
wombat-man 3y ago
I think it's a lot of small changes being a/b tested. Stuff that you might or might not notice/see. But if it passes the test it's there forever. I'd guess the general goal is to first get you to use spotify more but more importantly get you to listen to content they don't have to pay to license like podcasts and whatnot.
gizajob 3y ago
If you have too many UI designers, you’re going to get a lot of UI redesigns. Probably whole devs working on one button each getting laid off today and in future.
jpalawaga 3y ago
The start a jam and speaker sharing functionality is partly new and partly old. What is definitely new is that it works well now and doesn’t glitch out. For better or for worse, Spotify has a lot of customized playlists. At some point, the “workout” playlist playlist stopped being a regular global playlist and started being one customized for individual users. Their “keep playing more like this” functionality that takes over after the playlist ends is quite good, as is smart shuffle which will mix in tracks that “belong” in the playlist even. Some songs will play artist uploaded music videos when you play their songs. Their “now playing” widget now shows a larger album art and background information about the band. I don’t know what happened to the lyrics all of those years, but I’m guessing it was a licensing issue. A random add on is different from first party application support for all of your users, globally. It’s possible you don’t use any of this and think it’s a waste of time. That’s fine. I think Spotify is seamlessly stitching in extra functionality in non-annoying ways, which I like.
jzb 3y ago
I'm guessing there's a lot of work at Spotify that goes into anti-copying efforts, for one thing. If the API and clients behave the same way for an extended period, it gets too easy to have spotify downloaders that work reliably for a larger audience. (I realize these things exist and work, but it remains enough of a moving target to keep it from pissing off Spotify's label/music publishing partners too much.) There's also maintenance for all their platforms, which expands a bit every year. When I first started using Spotify smart speakers weren't a thing yet, and the number of OSes and streaming devices have only increased since. They have to maintain updates for various releases of macOS, Windows, iOS, iPadOS, Roku, etc. No doubt they encounter plenty of bugs that need addressing on those platforms... They also have to have people negotiating rights for all the regions / countries they do business in, deal with fraud, and all that nonsense. And they have to keep up social and advertising to compete with all the other streaming music and podcasting platforms. They have editorial needs - maintaining the artist pages and all the incoming new music, building playlists, etc. Assuming Spotify offers this info in the appropriate languages by country, that's probably not an insubstantial number of people to ensure that you have pages for each artist translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, and on and on. Spotify is available in a lot of countries, if they actually offer the interface and content in half of the primary languages for those countries it's going to be a lot of work. (I doubt they attempt to translate lyrics across the board, that would be an extremely heavy lift...) That's not to say that Spotify doesn't have some unnecessary staff, but there's probably a lot of behind-the-scenes work aside from accounting and such that people don't think about.
emodendroket 3y ago
Spotify works on like a million different devices for one thing.
adamhp 3y ago
I don't work for and am not affiliated with Spotify in any way, but I can honestly say Spotify has added more value to my life than almost any other app I have downloaded. I have discovered so much music that I genuinely adore. It's honestly mind-boggling. I'm so excited to open up my Discover Weekly. I'm very grateful for the work that has gone into their curation of certain playlists and of the similarity scoring they are doing because my musical perspective has broadened tremendously since I regularly started listening to my Discover Weekly. Again, sounds like I'm some secret corporate shill or something but I truly am just genuinely appreciative of the service.
- dbrueck 3y ago
  I'm in both camps: Spotify is hands down the best ROI for me in terms of where my streaming dollars go. OTOH, it drives me crazy that customers like myself have been begging them for many years to add basic features like remembering my spot in a playlist.
  - fundatus 3y ago
    > remembering my spot in a playlist Can you elaborate? Seriously curious how that exactly would look like.
    - dbrueck 3y ago
      It's the equivalent of an automatic bookmark in book reader apps. While playing songs in a playlist, there is a tiny bit of state information - primarily what song you're on. As soon as you play something else, that state is discarded. There's no way to automatically pick up where you left off. For example, I really enjoy curated playlists, and some of them are really long. I'd love the ability to work my way through a playlist but also be able to take a break and listen to something else. Or to go to the gym and listen to other music while I'm there. Or temporarily stop and listen to a new song a friend shared. None of these scenarios work very well currently. Spotify already stores and syncs playlist name/ID/owner/etc. All I want is for them to add 2-3 bytes of sync'd data - just store the current sort field, sort direction, and a song index. It'd be totally fine if it didn't remember playlist state if you're on shuffle play.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

that_guy_iain 3y ago

I would assume it's mostly optimisation and bug fixing. Improving their ability to read files globally, improving availability, etc. Plus internal tools will probably be a major thing too.

scarab92 3y ago

All the pointless redesigns was a pretty clear sign that they had excess engineering headcount.

fullshark 3y ago
I saw it as a sign that they needed to find ways to get people to spend time listening to anything that is proprietary (podcasts, unique recommendation algorithms) to avoid just being the middle man for music streaming and getting squeezed by the publishers for all their revenue. Edit: By proprietary I mean - owned by Spotify.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  The music is propertiary. Even recordings of Mozart is unless the recording is older than an ever increasing limit of a bazillion years.
  - fullshark 3y ago
    Yeah but it's not owned by Spotify, at least the most popular music isn't. I mean: they want you to listen to things they own, not things they license.
apwell23 3y ago
It wasn't pointless. Spotify's whole existence depends on moving from background listening to active foreground use. It would be pointless for them to stay an passive background app. Might as well shutdown the company and cut the losses.

mlrtime 3y ago

I think this is the issue. 10,000 employees vs bad user experience. Spotify has gotten worse for me as well, I pay for Spotify + SiriusXM. Spotify should be much better, but it's not. I'm thinking of dropping it soon. Why doesn't Spotify still not have a Pandora style radio station? I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
prox 3y ago
This is why I went with Apple Music. Apple being a hardware company first makes it that they just want to provide a good portal to music. Thus far I have been happy with it.
apwell23 3y ago
> I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist? Can you describe the criteria ?
coldpie 3y ago
Just try a different service. There's a zillion of them out there, all more or less interchangeable. Maybe one has the feature you want.
erellsworth 3y ago
I'm not sure how specific you want your criteria to be, but you can create a Spotify "radio" station based off of any song, band/artist, or playlist. Spotify's discovery capabilities are miles beyond Pandora, in my opinion.
- sometdog 3y ago
  They removed the ability to create "radio" stations off of playlists, which does make discovery somewhat more difficult.

RamblingCTO 3y ago

I still hate the change about the "add to playlist/like" button with all my heart. I don't want to like all the songs I add to playlists. I have a few hundred playlists with a looooot of songs (I listened to 86000 minutes last year of over 4000 artists ...). That change was utterly idiotic

mrWiz 3y ago
I've always used that button to "like" songs and used the "Add To Playlist" item under the ellipses menu to add things to a particular playlist. What was your process like before the change, and what is it now?
- RamblingCTO 3y ago
  Before you had two buttons. I'd like songs I really like and add the rest to specific playlists. Now I have to do the cumbersome route via the elipsis, yes. It's just way harder and I do it less. I also still like songs on accident because the button is a fucking plus and not a heart. No idea which idiot at spotify proposed that.

alephnan 3y ago

There was a meme about Spotify replacing the heart symbol to like a song with a ‘+’ sign. No one asked for, it benefits no one, and people proactively want the old version. I’m sure they had countless meetings for this “feature” and how much human hours. There would have been a designer, and a researcher. There would have also been a data scientist lying with statistics about how this change moved the core business metrics. That’s from my personal experience of working in FANG and people doing unscientific and statistically invalid analysis of noise.

CoastalCoder 3y ago
This change reminds me of Netflix replacing their 5(?)-star rating system, with a simple thumbs up / down system. Netflix claimed there was statistical justification for the change, but my most charitable interpretation is that their goals don't align with mine.

wombat-man 3y ago

I think it's a lot of small changes being a/b tested. Stuff that you might or might not notice/see. But if it passes the test it's there forever. I'd guess the general goal is to first get you to use spotify more but more importantly get you to listen to content they don't have to pay to license like podcasts and whatnot.

gizajob 3y ago

If you have too many UI designers, you’re going to get a lot of UI redesigns. Probably whole devs working on one button each getting laid off today and in future.

jpalawaga 3y ago

The start a jam and speaker sharing functionality is partly new and partly old. What is definitely new is that it works well now and doesn’t glitch out. For better or for worse, Spotify has a lot of customized playlists. At some point, the “workout” playlist playlist stopped being a regular global playlist and started being one customized for individual users. Their “keep playing more like this” functionality that takes over after the playlist ends is quite good, as is smart shuffle which will mix in tracks that “belong” in the playlist even. Some songs will play artist uploaded music videos when you play their songs. Their “now playing” widget now shows a larger album art and background information about the band. I don’t know what happened to the lyrics all of those years, but I’m guessing it was a licensing issue. A random add on is different from first party application support for all of your users, globally. It’s possible you don’t use any of this and think it’s a waste of time. That’s fine. I think Spotify is seamlessly stitching in extra functionality in non-annoying ways, which I like.

jzb 3y ago

I'm guessing there's a lot of work at Spotify that goes into anti-copying efforts, for one thing. If the API and clients behave the same way for an extended period, it gets too easy to have spotify downloaders that work reliably for a larger audience. (I realize these things exist and work, but it remains enough of a moving target to keep it from pissing off Spotify's label/music publishing partners too much.) There's also maintenance for all their platforms, which expands a bit every year. When I first started using Spotify smart speakers weren't a thing yet, and the number of OSes and streaming devices have only increased since. They have to maintain updates for various releases of macOS, Windows, iOS, iPadOS, Roku, etc. No doubt they encounter plenty of bugs that need addressing on those platforms... They also have to have people negotiating rights for all the regions / countries they do business in, deal with fraud, and all that nonsense. And they have to keep up social and advertising to compete with all the other streaming music and podcasting platforms. They have editorial needs - maintaining the artist pages and all the incoming new music, building playlists, etc. Assuming Spotify offers this info in the appropriate languages by country, that's probably not an insubstantial number of people to ensure that you have pages for each artist translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, and on and on. Spotify is available in a lot of countries, if they actually offer the interface and content in half of the primary languages for those countries it's going to be a lot of work. (I doubt they attempt to translate lyrics across the board, that would be an extremely heavy lift...) That's not to say that Spotify doesn't have some unnecessary staff, but there's probably a lot of behind-the-scenes work aside from accounting and such that people don't think about.

emodendroket 3y ago

Spotify works on like a million different devices for one thing.

adamhp 3y ago

I don't work for and am not affiliated with Spotify in any way, but I can honestly say Spotify has added more value to my life than almost any other app I have downloaded. I have discovered so much music that I genuinely adore. It's honestly mind-boggling. I'm so excited to open up my Discover Weekly. I'm very grateful for the work that has gone into their curation of certain playlists and of the similarity scoring they are doing because my musical perspective has broadened tremendously since I regularly started listening to my Discover Weekly. Again, sounds like I'm some secret corporate shill or something but I truly am just genuinely appreciative of the service.

dbrueck 3y ago
I'm in both camps: Spotify is hands down the best ROI for me in terms of where my streaming dollars go. OTOH, it drives me crazy that customers like myself have been begging them for many years to add basic features like remembering my spot in a playlist.
- fundatus 3y ago
  > remembering my spot in a playlist Can you elaborate? Seriously curious how that exactly would look like.
  - dbrueck 3y ago
    It's the equivalent of an automatic bookmark in book reader apps. While playing songs in a playlist, there is a tiny bit of state information - primarily what song you're on. As soon as you play something else, that state is discarded. There's no way to automatically pick up where you left off. For example, I really enjoy curated playlists, and some of them are really long. I'd love the ability to work my way through a playlist but also be able to take a break and listen to something else. Or to go to the gym and listen to other music while I'm there. Or temporarily stop and listen to a new song a friend shared. None of these scenarios work very well currently. Spotify already stores and syncs playlist name/ID/owner/etc. All I want is for them to add 2-3 bytes of sync'd data - just store the current sort field, sort direction, and a song index. It'd be totally fine if it didn't remember playlist state if you're on shuffle play.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]