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I personally find that Spotifys offline content has worked reliably over the years. You just gotta remember that when you get a new device you have to go to lib

by rekoil 3y ago

I personally find that Spotifys offline content has worked reliably over the years. You just gotta remember that when you get a new device you have to go to library and click download and then leave Spotify open for a few hours. Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy. I haven't downloaded an mp3 file since I got a Spotify Premium account in 2007. OK that's probably a slight overstatement, but it's near enough to the truth for this argument. They made it so simple and convenient to pay for access to music that I've had zero reasons to even consider piracy. They have everything (well, enough that I've never felt something was missing anyway), they have clients for everything, the pricing is reasonable, and they have great value-add in the form of playlist generation. As for the rest, full agreement, the low bitrate of streaming services is the big one for me as I'm a film enthusiast with great gear that definitely doesn't reach its potential using any streaming services. Now that it looks like physical media is going the way of the Dodo I'm wondering where I'm gonna get actually high bitrate content from in the future.

mgoetzke 3y ago
Apple Music and Youtube Music both suffer from the issue of vanishing content. I have playlist where a growing percentage of songs are grayed out, not available, while they do exist in the store, just as part of a different album now. Very frustrating. Does Spotify do that ?
- take-five 3y ago
  Spotify does this too, at least in my region (Estonia). It's frustrating, but not that frustrating to go back to downloading MP3.
- rekoil 3y ago
  It happens, but pretty rarely in my experience, though I'm probably not the most avid consumer of music so other people might have a better grasp of the extent of this issue on Spotify.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- superhuzza 3y ago
  It does indeed happen. There seems to be a few different types of it. Sometimes a whole band will just disappear off the platform - chalk it up to contractual disagreement. Sometimes a particular album will not be available on Spotify, but other albums from the same band will be - likely some issue with the label that produced the album. Finally, sometimes the particular version of the song you like (e.g. a certain live version, acoustic version, whatever) will disappear but others will remain (e.g. studio version). However, it really doesn't happen that often. I probably have a few thousand songs save on Spotify and perhaps a dozen have been taken off after many years of using the platform.
- Levitz 3y ago
  Spotify has left me doubting my sanity a couple of times by removing albums I could have sworn I had listened to before in the platform. And I had, but they removed them since, listing nothing in their place.
- init2null 3y ago
  I've had it happen on both Apple Music and Spotify. Given my 40h+ master playlist, I tend to notice it. I always have a few gray holes. As for replacements, my understanding is that they are often due to the better royalties on original artist re-recordings. I always try to switch back to the originals, and AM, my current service, only sometimes still them. Frustrating to build a collection on shifting sand.
izacus 3y ago
I'm glad for you, but at least twice it happened to me that the songs on my phone ended up being unplayable after I enabled Airplane mode. (You just get the exclamation mark next to the supposedly downloaded tracks.) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
CaptainMarvel 3y ago
Spotify’s offline content was not been reliable for me. I am rarely offline, but recently I was taking a flight and my whole library was unavailable. I was so annoyed that I actually cancelled my subscription.
- illegalsmile 3y ago
  I was on a Grand Canyon river trip and offline content decided to offline itself giving me no music for three weeks. That was annoying and made me cancel my subscription for a couple years. I tried Apple Music but I think Spotify does a better job making recommendations for me.
machomaster 3y ago
One of Spotify's biggest problems is their terrible UI, lacking even the basic functionality. I don't understand how they haven't been able do the bare minimum for 15 years now.
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  Like what?
  - Robin_Message 3y ago
    My three biggest pet peeves are: - You can't turn your queue into a playlist (and you can't see previous queue as part of the queue, only as limited history.) - Clicking a song or album sometimes clears your queue and starts playing that instead (I know there is a logic to it, but a mistake or mis-click is easy). - There is no shortcut to add to queue, just long press then find the menu item. It's possible everyone else is only listening to albums or curating playlists then playing them, but I like to pick things as I go like a jukebox and it sucks at it.
    - mandarax8 3y ago
      > - There is no shortcut to add to queue, There is, just swipe the song to the right.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        that's neat! totally not discoverable though
      - JoBrad 3y ago
        You can also tap the kebab menu and select “Add to Queue”
    - grujicd 3y ago
      What I'm missing is multiple "currently playing" lists, each keeping its current position as I switch to play a different one. Use case: listening to a discography of the band, and if I wish to listen few songs from some other band. I can't go back to where I was with the first band. Foobar had multiple ad-hoc lists since forever. Now I balance between Spotify and Youtube music in these cases.
rand_flip_bit 3y ago
I would look into Kaleidescape if you want blu-ray quality viewing in your home with the convenience of streaming (although you have to download ahead of time). Only downside is the price and need for their proprietary player + server.
- Nullabillity 3y ago
  $9k ($4k player + $5k server) for a basic system is not a very "only" downside, and it seems kind of pathetic if you can't even access it from a regular desktop.
  - rekoil 3y ago
    It's great that it exists, but I'm priced out.
    - Nullabillity 3y ago
      Is it, though? Does _any_ of this need unique hardware?
quenix 3y ago
Spotify has never automatically deleted offline content for me, but it does have extremely confusing UI which makes it very easy to wipe all downloads without confirmation. Basically, the download button is a single down-arrow at the top of your library. When you tap it—and download your music–the down-arrow turns solid green to indicate your music is available offline. It doesn't disappear. It turns green, Spotify's primary color. The kicker is: if you accidentally (or out of curiosity) press that green arrow again, it will wipe all your downloads without confirmation (disabling "offline mode"). Did that on a flight once and lost all my music. It's absurd how that UX made it out of testing. Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. Tapping this icon deletes your library from your device: https://i.imgur.com/zrSid1T.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/zrSid1T.jpeg
- lupusreal 3y ago
  Really makes you wonder what "designers" get paid for.
  - dsr_ 3y ago
    A product manager needed to change stuff to justify their job. A designer who isn't changing things that the product manager wants changed is replaced by one who does. Therefore, designers get paid for doing what product managers want. Sometimes the changes get A/B tested, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the A/B test is gamed, sometimes it gets gamed by accident, and sometimes the tests get ignored when they are clearly wrong. Finally, sometimes the directive is "get people to stop using this feature because it's unpopular with management".
    - rekoil 3y ago
      Case in point, that time when Spotify removed all references to the word "queue", and replaced it with "up next" while also changing the behaviour of it. Ridiculous change which they eventually reverted thankfully. Or that one time when they removed the "set as current playlist" feature, which they still haven't restored. That feature was the only way to change playlist without breaking in the middle of a song, besides literally waiting until a song is over and doing it then, wasting time. I like Spotify, but they do some infuriating things sometimes. Don't get me started on their beef with Apple which has resulted in my HomePods still not being able to take music requests via Siri almost 3 years after I got the first one.
offices 3y ago
>Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy By being able to compete with it on the price they pay artists. It's a uniquely powerful negotiating position for the publishers that a) won't last b) won't extend to TV/video
mi_z 3y ago
Spotify isn't a great example because barely anyone makes money with it. It only works because the musicians are exploited to the max. The reason this won't happen with film and TV is because of unionisation. Why not just buy discs? People keep repeating that discs are dying but so many releases are coming out there is way more than I can buy.
- rekoil 3y ago
  Yeah I know discs still exist for now, I'm talking about when they suddenly don't anymore. Hopefully that's far far into the future. And as for Spotify exploiting artists, I don't know how accurate this[1] is, but if it is then it seems pretty fair to me? Maybe slightly on the lower end of what I had expected, but not that far off. If you have a million monthly listeners (and today you have access to over 574M monthly active users[2] via Spotify) then you're making $5,000/month in static income, meaning you have zero hours of work and still have enough to live on (depending on the size of the band I guess). The notion that artists (or movie stars for that matter) should be making 10x that or more is a little ridiculous if you ask me. 1: https://purecalculators.com/spotify-money-calculator https://purecalculators.com/spotify-money-calculator 2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/367739/spotify-global-mau https://www.statista.com/statistics/367739/spotify-global-ma...
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    I don't think you have any idea how much work, luck, work, talent and work it takes to get to a million monthly listens. "Zero hours of work" - I know artists get underestimated, but this is next level. Btw, taking the very top .1% of earners in a field, like movie or pop stars, and using their returns to imply that musicians and actors are fairly compensated, is a very silly thing to do. Tbh, as someone who knows a lot of talented and struggling artists (and teachers and janitors and nurses etc), it's revolting. If you want to give out about overcompensated people why not look at CEO's, like Daniel Ek (Spotify CEO) and his $3.8 BILLION net worth. That's about as clear a signal that there's exploitation happening that you could ever ask for.
    - 3y ago
Repulsion9513 3y ago
It's funny that Spotify figured out how to do it long before most of these TV streaming services even existed, and they still manage to get it wrong.
boring_twenties 3y ago
Spotify's Android app had a nasty bug that would delete everything you'd downloaded to an external SD card on reboot. Worse than that, it would then automatically start downloading all that same content to the internal storage, without any regard as to how much free space there was there. If not noticed it would fill it all up and then crash. Took them like 6 months to fix that.
bromuro 3y ago
> Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy. I have a friend who’s indeed paying Spotify - but for connecting his account with some “illegal” software, from which he can then download MP3s (or FLACs) to share with his friends.

by rekoil 3y ago

mgoetzke 3y ago

Apple Music and Youtube Music both suffer from the issue of vanishing content. I have playlist where a growing percentage of songs are grayed out, not available, while they do exist in the store, just as part of a different album now. Very frustrating. Does Spotify do that ?

take-five 3y ago
Spotify does this too, at least in my region (Estonia). It's frustrating, but not that frustrating to go back to downloading MP3.
rekoil 3y ago
It happens, but pretty rarely in my experience, though I'm probably not the most avid consumer of music so other people might have a better grasp of the extent of this issue on Spotify.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
superhuzza 3y ago
It does indeed happen. There seems to be a few different types of it. Sometimes a whole band will just disappear off the platform - chalk it up to contractual disagreement. Sometimes a particular album will not be available on Spotify, but other albums from the same band will be - likely some issue with the label that produced the album. Finally, sometimes the particular version of the song you like (e.g. a certain live version, acoustic version, whatever) will disappear but others will remain (e.g. studio version). However, it really doesn't happen that often. I probably have a few thousand songs save on Spotify and perhaps a dozen have been taken off after many years of using the platform.
Levitz 3y ago
Spotify has left me doubting my sanity a couple of times by removing albums I could have sworn I had listened to before in the platform. And I had, but they removed them since, listing nothing in their place.
init2null 3y ago
I've had it happen on both Apple Music and Spotify. Given my 40h+ master playlist, I tend to notice it. I always have a few gray holes. As for replacements, my understanding is that they are often due to the better royalties on original artist re-recordings. I always try to switch back to the originals, and AM, my current service, only sometimes still them. Frustrating to build a collection on shifting sand.

izacus 3y ago

I'm glad for you, but at least twice it happened to me that the songs on my phone ended up being unplayable after I enabled Airplane mode. (You just get the exclamation mark next to the supposedly downloaded tracks.) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CaptainMarvel 3y ago

Spotify’s offline content was not been reliable for me. I am rarely offline, but recently I was taking a flight and my whole library was unavailable. I was so annoyed that I actually cancelled my subscription.

illegalsmile 3y ago
I was on a Grand Canyon river trip and offline content decided to offline itself giving me no music for three weeks. That was annoying and made me cancel my subscription for a couple years. I tried Apple Music but I think Spotify does a better job making recommendations for me.

machomaster 3y ago

One of Spotify's biggest problems is their terrible UI, lacking even the basic functionality. I don't understand how they haven't been able do the bare minimum for 15 years now.

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
Like what?
- Robin_Message 3y ago
  My three biggest pet peeves are: - You can't turn your queue into a playlist (and you can't see previous queue as part of the queue, only as limited history.) - Clicking a song or album sometimes clears your queue and starts playing that instead (I know there is a logic to it, but a mistake or mis-click is easy). - There is no shortcut to add to queue, just long press then find the menu item. It's possible everyone else is only listening to albums or curating playlists then playing them, but I like to pick things as I go like a jukebox and it sucks at it.
  - mandarax8 3y ago
    > - There is no shortcut to add to queue, There is, just swipe the song to the right.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      that's neat! totally not discoverable though
    - JoBrad 3y ago
      You can also tap the kebab menu and select “Add to Queue”
  - grujicd 3y ago
    What I'm missing is multiple "currently playing" lists, each keeping its current position as I switch to play a different one. Use case: listening to a discography of the band, and if I wish to listen few songs from some other band. I can't go back to where I was with the first band. Foobar had multiple ad-hoc lists since forever. Now I balance between Spotify and Youtube music in these cases.

rand_flip_bit 3y ago

I would look into Kaleidescape if you want blu-ray quality viewing in your home with the convenience of streaming (although you have to download ahead of time). Only downside is the price and need for their proprietary player + server.

Nullabillity 3y ago
$9k ($4k player + $5k server) for a basic system is not a very "only" downside, and it seems kind of pathetic if you can't even access it from a regular desktop.
- rekoil 3y ago
  It's great that it exists, but I'm priced out.
  - Nullabillity 3y ago
    Is it, though? Does _any_ of this need unique hardware?

quenix 3y ago

Spotify has never automatically deleted offline content for me, but it does have extremely confusing UI which makes it very easy to wipe all downloads without confirmation. Basically, the download button is a single down-arrow at the top of your library. When you tap it—and download your music–the down-arrow turns solid green to indicate your music is available offline. It doesn't disappear. It turns green, Spotify's primary color. The kicker is: if you accidentally (or out of curiosity) press that green arrow again, it will wipe all your downloads without confirmation (disabling "offline mode"). Did that on a flight once and lost all my music. It's absurd how that UX made it out of testing. Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. Tapping this icon deletes your library from your device: https://i.imgur.com/zrSid1T.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/zrSid1T.jpeg

lupusreal 3y ago
Really makes you wonder what "designers" get paid for.
- dsr_ 3y ago
  A product manager needed to change stuff to justify their job. A designer who isn't changing things that the product manager wants changed is replaced by one who does. Therefore, designers get paid for doing what product managers want. Sometimes the changes get A/B tested, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the A/B test is gamed, sometimes it gets gamed by accident, and sometimes the tests get ignored when they are clearly wrong. Finally, sometimes the directive is "get people to stop using this feature because it's unpopular with management".
  - rekoil 3y ago
    Case in point, that time when Spotify removed all references to the word "queue", and replaced it with "up next" while also changing the behaviour of it. Ridiculous change which they eventually reverted thankfully. Or that one time when they removed the "set as current playlist" feature, which they still haven't restored. That feature was the only way to change playlist without breaking in the middle of a song, besides literally waiting until a song is over and doing it then, wasting time. I like Spotify, but they do some infuriating things sometimes. Don't get me started on their beef with Apple which has resulted in my HomePods still not being able to take music requests via Siri almost 3 years after I got the first one.

offices 3y ago

>Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy By being able to compete with it on the price they pay artists. It's a uniquely powerful negotiating position for the publishers that a) won't last b) won't extend to TV/video

mi_z 3y ago

Spotify isn't a great example because barely anyone makes money with it. It only works because the musicians are exploited to the max. The reason this won't happen with film and TV is because of unionisation. Why not just buy discs? People keep repeating that discs are dying but so many releases are coming out there is way more than I can buy.

rekoil 3y ago
Yeah I know discs still exist for now, I'm talking about when they suddenly don't anymore. Hopefully that's far far into the future. And as for Spotify exploiting artists, I don't know how accurate this[1] is, but if it is then it seems pretty fair to me? Maybe slightly on the lower end of what I had expected, but not that far off. If you have a million monthly listeners (and today you have access to over 574M monthly active users[2] via Spotify) then you're making $5,000/month in static income, meaning you have zero hours of work and still have enough to live on (depending on the size of the band I guess). The notion that artists (or movie stars for that matter) should be making 10x that or more is a little ridiculous if you ask me. 1: https://purecalculators.com/spotify-money-calculator https://purecalculators.com/spotify-money-calculator 2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/367739/spotify-global-mau https://www.statista.com/statistics/367739/spotify-global-ma...
- mandmandam 3y ago
  I don't think you have any idea how much work, luck, work, talent and work it takes to get to a million monthly listens. "Zero hours of work" - I know artists get underestimated, but this is next level. Btw, taking the very top .1% of earners in a field, like movie or pop stars, and using their returns to imply that musicians and actors are fairly compensated, is a very silly thing to do. Tbh, as someone who knows a lot of talented and struggling artists (and teachers and janitors and nurses etc), it's revolting. If you want to give out about overcompensated people why not look at CEO's, like Daniel Ek (Spotify CEO) and his $3.8 BILLION net worth. That's about as clear a signal that there's exploitation happening that you could ever ask for.
  - 3y ago

Repulsion9513 3y ago

It's funny that Spotify figured out how to do it long before most of these TV streaming services even existed, and they still manage to get it wrong.

boring_twenties 3y ago

Spotify's Android app had a nasty bug that would delete everything you'd downloaded to an external SD card on reboot. Worse than that, it would then automatically start downloading all that same content to the internal storage, without any regard as to how much free space there was there. If not noticed it would fill it all up and then crash. Took them like 6 months to fix that.

bromuro 3y ago

> Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy. I have a friend who’s indeed paying Spotify - but for connecting his account with some “illegal” software, from which he can then download MP3s (or FLACs) to share with his friends.