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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
- lylo 3y agoI feel similar about the UX and the poor AI playlists, but with a little effort you can find the gems and build a library Regarding artists being shafted, when I find an album (yes I listen to albums) I love, I’ll buy it on Bandcamp or (for the major artists) somewhere like Qobuz so I can own it (come the day the streamers die) and support the artist a bit more directly.
- quattrofan 3y ago[dead]
- ochronus 3y agoI'm not hyped about Spotify (don't dislike it either) - but there's one feature I haven't found in any other service - it's recommendation engine (e.g. Discover Weekly) which I'm enjoying a lot. I've discovered great music using it and that's almost the only thing keeping me there. Hivemind, do you know of a good alternative?
- bioinformatics 3y ago[dead]
- scinerio 3y agoMy biggest peeve of Spotify is the feature discrepancy between mobile/desktop. Two examples: 1. On mobile, you can see the top trending podcast episode. 2. On mobile, you can filter liked songs by *some* genres. Why? These seem like fairly trivial features to implement across both platforms. You have hundreds of devs. Wtf is going on over there?
- Valakas_ 3y agoHere I am, a lonely soul, who discovers music through youtube mixes... Am i missing something by not using spotify?
- ThinkBeat 3y agoI love to buy Cds. I am not eustatic about returning to vinyl. I remember how grateful I was with Cds came out since they were far easier to care for and durable¹. I like collecting them, I love listening to them, and I like owning them. Letting friends borrow them, and the rest of the freedom that comes from owning a physical object. I liked going to the store, browse through shelves of cds to find something I wanted to listen to. Buying it. Going home, getting chores done, and then sit down and play from start to finish. Spotify with increasing regularity remove some of my favorite songs and artists from their collection. Due to licensing, I presume. Plus, the artwork is nice Now it is nearly impossible to buy cds. The selection in the few stores that still carry them in Norway is atrocious, even when you try to order them from records stores in Norway. I dont listen to anything near the Top 10, and that is usually most of what they have. - Amazon carrier a lot more but even their selection leaves out most of the cds I want to buy. (Plus the shipping is a killer) For a while ordering them directly from the "merch" store the bands had (some) to buy cds, but even that is fading away as bands dont event produce/print cds. It seems the best way to buy them now is to see the band live. But bands like selling vinyl at inflated prices. I presume because the demand is higher for those. I can buy the digital tracks, with all the problems that entails. I have started to use them to burn cds with the artists' album. It is not the same with the lack of artwork and connection. ¹ Vinyl records can last a long time. If you are careful in how you treat it, do the maintenance, clean it, and have a deck that makes it easy to lower and raise the head. I was not good enough to ensure the longevity of my records, so they would eventually get scratched .
- blowski 3y agoSpotify is a background noise generator. With hard work it can be used to listen more attentively by searching for specific albums by specific artists, although the amount you’re contributing to those artists is ambiguous.
- platelminto 3y agoI'm also not a fan of the direction Spotify is going, but if I want to keep listening to music, I don't see a way around it - and I don't think other music services are materially different. I support the artists I care about most by going to their concerts and/or buying merch. I use services like last.fm for better discovery. Spotify doesn't have to be the only way you interact with music. The author doesn't say how they're going to keep listening to songs. Are they going to start buying/torrenting all their music? Are they going to switch to a different service, and does that service address any of the listed issues? Or are they simply giving up on listening to music (in the quantities/variety available through a catalogue like Spotify's)?
- threeseed 3y ago> I don't think other music services are materially different They very much do if you care about audio quality. Spotify still doesn't support high-res audio e.g. CD quality and above.
- platelminto 3y agoFor people that used to enjoy Spotify, such as myself & the author, this was never a main concern.
- nusl 3y agoWhich services would you recommend as alternatives for higher quality audio at similar price points?
- jm547ster 3y agoApple Music if you're in that ecosystem
- robin_reala 3y agoWhat ecosystem? It’s on Android and Windows too, and has a web version for Linux use.
- lawgimenez 3y agoMy Spotify has only one row of podcast recommendations (in the All tab). The rest are my type of music or the last album I was listening to. Am I missing something here?
- 6581 3y ago> It keeps pushing playlists that feel generic, bland, more based on demographics than my years of consistent listening history. I don't really agree with this point. The personal playlists (both Discover Weekly and the Daily Mix ones) are very close to what I usually listen to and have made me discover dozens of artists I didn't know before. Maybe they work better for some than for others, but they don't feel like being based just on demographics at all to me.
- LelouBil 3y agoSame, even if music is available freely through YouTube or else, Spotify's recommendations are the reason I am still subscribed
- lawgimenez 3y agoI don’t agree with the author too. My Release Radar is totally on point with my type of genre, it has been this way. I’m curious if author has a generic taste in music?
- madeofpalk 3y agoI feel like both of you are correct. It feels to me that Spotify's recommendations easily gets stuck in a 'local maxima' where it just keeps recommending the same music over again with little variation. I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated. Music just ends up feeling a lot more bland with Spotify, in my experience. I don't even know what the Discover Weekly playlist is supposed to be. It frequently puts in not-new songs from not-new artists Spotify know I've been listening to.
- bamboozled 3y agoSame experience for me. I think the parent might be a new user. It was good for me for a few years but now it’s just stale as shit.
- 6581 3y ago> I think the parent might be a new user. I've been using Spotify since 2015.
- notthatdavid 3y agoI'm thinking about canceling it as well but note sure about an alternative. What are you migrating to?
- andrewingram 3y agoI miss the Spotify 3rd-party apps, I discovered some great music through them.
- colund 3y agoI feel the same way about Spotify. It reminds me of Netflix in that it's hard for me to find interesting content to consume. I wish there was a way to become a power user, enabling me to better organize my audio library and delve deeper into their extensive collection to uncover new, intriguing music. Moreover, the fact that artists seem to be paid so little makes me increasingly inclined to consider leaving their service for something else, like Tidal, or simply using YouTube Music. By the way, if anyone is working on a Spotify killer, feel free to reach out. It would be fun to help out.
- piva00 3y ago> I feel the same way about Spotify. It reminds me of Netflix in that it's hard for me to find interesting content to consume. I wish there was a way to become a power user, enabling me to better organize my audio library and delve deeper into their extensive collection to uncover new, intriguing music. I have the exact opposite experience on Spotify, I canceled my Netflix subscription because I got tired of being stuck scrolling trying to find something to watch. On Spotify I have my playlists, including an "Inbox" playlist for sorting later when I find interesting new music. On playlists it used to be able to start a "radio" for recommendations based on the playlist's content, that has moved to the "Enhance" feature which will interleave some tracks on an existing playlist, I can add the tracks I like to the playlist and ignore the ones I didn't like, then refresh the "Enhance" feature to get new recommendations. When I'm listening to some weird ass music that I want to discover more artists/tracks on a similar genre I will start a track or album radio, when I stumble upon a track that I like I will add to a matching playlist or simply put into my "Inbox" one to sort later. I've done that for the past 10+ years and have discovered many, many artists and songs this way, even completely new genres that I liked.
- neuronic 3y agoI dread the interface of Spotify. What do they employ massive numbers of UX people for? Nothing regarding Spotify's interface is any better than 2012. Cards, auto-play TikTok'ified video bullshit, weird navigation of menus and playlists, hidden core functionalities, lack of customization, funneling of user flows into garbage marketing content... It's like they are sitting in a lab and professionally try to find out how to annoy people and make their lives harder. In the end, I understand that they need to bullshit their way out of shareholder expectations but it's sad to see the enshitification of Spotify over the years. Let's see how long it takes them to nuke account sharing like Netflix and now Disney.
- RedShift1 3y agoUX people just do what they think is right and follow trends. They don't do real research like how it was done in the 80's and 90's. And there's also dark patterns...
- theshrike79 3y agoFrom what I've heard the Spotify UI is made by multiple teams. Each team makes their own section and other teams don't need to (nor can they) interfere.
- jamesear 3y agoThe post notes that Spotify pays $0.003-$0.005 per stream, and compares that to the average exec making $200k/year. If Spotify diverted all that exec money to artists, I wonder whether the $0.003-$0.005 figure would change, or if that would be too only amount to <$0.0005 difference. It might be fair to criticize Spotify's deal with rights holders of music, but the above line of critique doesn't hold so strong to me. As it happens, $200k/year for an exec seems low? Disclaimer: I don't use Spotify and instead manage my own collection.
- nicce 3y agoIt depends what is defined as exec. If there are hundreds in the company, that could make a difference. In 17% layoff, the numbers was around 1500 employees fired. It means there are around 7300 employees left. So that includes some execs. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/04/tech/spotify-layoffs-third-round/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/04/tech/spotify-layoffs-thir...
- troupo 3y agoSpotify doesn't pay the artists directly. Apple Music doesn't pay the artists directly. Youtube Musice doesn't.... You get my gist. All those pay to the rights holders. Why does no one ever question the rights holders: EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group why the artists are paid pennies?
- threeseed 3y agoIt isn't just the big labels. Apple Music has a list of distributors they work with: https://artists.apple.com/partners https://artists.apple.com/partners CDBaby is popular where 91% of revenue from Apple, Spotify etc goes to the artist. So then it seems that the price per stream does make a difference.
- troupo 3y agoSpotify has the same distributors. But the absolute vast majority of money goes to the big labels.
- Tor3 3y agoI don't use Spotify anymore for random listening either. I use it only for very specific cases where I search for one particular song (and that's usually because I'm looking at a score at the moment and want to listen to it too, i.e. a very specific use case). For everything else I only see a mess, basically what the author described. Bluntly speaking, it's become useless. Now I actually put on a CD at home when I want to listen to something. However, I do listen to a particular podcast, on podcasters.spotify.com (10-minute Japanese listening practice), and at least there aren't any ads there.
- throwaway220033 3y agoI can't stand Spotify's redesign anymore. Looking for an improved Winamp-like app with very simple interface and playlists. What should I try? Apple Music is a joke as well. I can't even play some of my custom audio files (they're not music, custom sounds) because Apple thinks they are not allowed to play in my country. I can't play my own audio files because of some buggy software Apple doesn't care about maintaining anymore.
- RedShift1 3y agoWinamp still works.
- throwaway220033 3y agoThe new Winamp has nothing to do with the spirit of the Winamp we loved and used.
- RedShift1 3y agoUse the old one? I still do...
- yashasolutions 3y agothere is still QMMP
- Kiro 3y agoI don't find Spotify that much different from Winamp. Everyone says they hate the interface but apart from the suggestions or the front page (which I don't use), what are the problems exactly? I have playlists with songs that I can double click to play. What more is there to it?
- itsoktocry 3y ago>I don't find Spotify that much different from Winamp Say what? Have you ever used Winamp?
- waihtis 3y agoSpotify is one of the prime apps for "mass consumption", should be given the UI, UX and other aspects are geared towards your average nerf herders - not the tech savvy, independent-thinking-valuing crowd.
- throwaway220033 3y agoNerf herders were totally fine with Winamp. I remember old people using Winamp back in the days.
- fylham 3y agoI’ve felt similarly for many years, but remain trapped using Spotify due to a lack of decent alternatives. Tried Tidal, but it wasn’t really any better. Would love to hear what leavers migrate to.
- mmmeff 3y agoBeen using Apple Music for months now after being a paying subscriber to Spotify for nearly a decade. Very happy I switched. The new windows app is well built, too
- 10729287 3y agoI Love how Apple Music is still the same iTunes interface, almost. It's a great app if you just want to listen to albums.
- solarkraft 3y agoI do find Tidal to be a little better. I migrated due to comments on here and found it to not be the "no bullshit" experience that I hoped for, but it is a bit less obnoxious at least.
- cyberpunk 3y agoAre they still pushing MQA?
- SushiHippie 3y agoI switched to https://qobuz.com https://qobuz.com, mainly for the high audio quality (it goes up to 192kHz 24bit, which is worth it for me as I have the necessary equipment to make use of this), but it also supports "Spotify quality" i.e. mp3 quality/320 kbps, but I stayed for the experience. It does not really have an algorithm, there is one playlist "My weekly Q", which updates each week with songs that you could like. The only other algorithmic thing they have are song/artist radios like Spotify has, which also work relatively good. Their front page features handpicked songs from people at Qobuz and songs that are trending on qobuz (these won't look at all like Spotify charts most of the time, as the audience is different). But you can customize the front page by filtering the genres you want to see. But as mentioned I stayed for the experience, and this includes for some (by far not all) albums you can download the whole PDF of the CD inlet or see a description/history/backstory about an Album provided to you by Qobuz, also the choices that Qobuz handpicks are very often excellent picks which I immediately add to my favorites. And as these picks are not some algorithm that decides this, I don't end up in a rabbit hole of recommendations like on Spotify, but more often discover really new things that I would've never through Spotify. They also have their own magazine https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/magazine https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/magazine. You can also buy songs, and they will be yours to keep forever, as you can get the songs directly as FLAC, WAV, ... without DRM and whatnot. There is also an unofficial qobuz downloader, which is against their ToS, but works. Though I still have not stopped using Spotify, as I'm in a family plan and don't pay anything for it, and sometimes Qobuz does not have some songs. FWIW I also use https://last.fm https://last.fm for recommendations, and Qobuz can automatically scrobble to it. All in all Qobuz has more of the "sitting in a Living Room and listening to vinyls/CDs vibe" rather than the TikTok/Instagram vibe that Spotify gives to me. Otherwise, I found Deezer to be quite a good alternative to Spotify.
- fabioborellini 3y agoSpotify's suggestions are horribly bland and insultingly unoriginal compared to Apple's. I keep getting Black Sabbath's Paranoid, the song, in various "deep cuts" and "new music" themed lists and suggestions. It's from 1969. Apple's lists and suggestions may actually have new music.
- bamboozled 3y agoI feel the same like, I cannot get away from some songs even when I dislike them. I got some AirPods and have a few Apple Music subscription I’ll try instead. I’ve also just started listening to some good radio stations like FBI in Sydney Australia. Best way to find new music in my opinion. I add what I like on Spotify and it spices it up a bit.
- __alias 3y agoI had never heard of FBI radio but it's right up my alley, and I've actually lived in Sydney for many years. So cheers for the inadvertent recommendation there
- emmelaich 3y agoYes, I request various bands from the 70s and I get live versions, bootlegs, covers. Never the original. Going the artist link, it doesn't even list all the albums. YouTube Music on the other hand has everything and more.
- salzig 3y agoSpotify did a good job until lately. Apple is quite unusable for me, since they can't distinguish between me and my partner - whoever starts something on a HomePod, it's done with my account. We tried to reset Siri often, but gave up on it. Another downside is the ~4000 Songs shared Spotify Playlist with some friends&co-workers which is not available on Apple Music, and sadly they make it (IMHO) ridiculous hard to import Playlists from other Platforms.
- code51 3y agoThe crux of Spotify was the acquisition of Echo Nest back in 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/06/spotify-echo-nest-streaming-music-deal https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/06/spotify-e... I tend to think whatever good bits we see (Discovery being good) is sitting on the shoulders of that base work. Yet, the product values of Spotify do not align with these people or musicians anymore.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoPeople may not know what Echo-Nest is. Since I once worked quite deeply with it, here's my thought on how Spotify might be dislodged. Echo Nest is a set of music analysis routines that provide high level information about songs, like tempo, time signature, key, chordal modes, and other features best thought of as compositional/musical. Beneath it is a deep stack of low level signal processing parts, libaubio for example, for onset detection, spectral flux, timbre analysis, pitch estimation. These build into intermediates like chord analysis, rhythm classifiers and whatnot. Above that you can build "genre" and "mood" then cluster into a similarity space because there's few enough parameters. It seems to me, more as a "mathematical intuition" at this stage, that advances in NN for generative work could be targeted at blind classification, bypassing the whole expensive parametric layers and do machine listening on the raw audio. Are there any recommendation and music search systems that work this way. I expect the training prospect is terrifying, but whoever works it out first will have an alternative and possibly better route into music recommendation.
- vintermann 3y agoIf Echo Nest were as important as you say, then that's bad news, because Glenn MacDonalds, the Echo Nest chief engineer, was one of those who were fired in the recent downsizing. I'm not so sure they deserve all credit for Spotify's discovery features - those where at their best right after Sander Dieleman and Aäron van den Oord were interns there, and both those guys were snapped up by Deepmind and have a ridiculously good publication history by now. But that Spotify is going to get a ton worse without MacDonald, is pretty certain.
- salzig 3y agoNot sure what Spotify does, but I gets worse in all kind of different aspects. I don't take a look at the start page anymore, just noise. I hear quite diverse Music genre, so it was quite nice that Spotify has Mix-Tapes so I could randomly pick one or the other. Release-Radar was a cool mix of new stuff. But lately it feels like they are pushing only on genre. Verschlimmbessern at its best.
- Rochus 3y agoProbably the fate of each popular product.
- mittermayr 3y ago> Instead, my subscription is probably pooled according to some black box formula and ends up paid to some of their top performers like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, or The Weeknd. While the indie artist I have been obsessed with gets literally nothing because they don’t meet a certain arbitrary threshold. Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically. If I upload my music to a platform that pays me 100% of the royalties, I will get to keep the most of 0 dollars, because nobody will be there to listen to it. I would argue that the issue is mainly relevant for indies who are past the "much-needed exposure" phase, starting to blow up, and now don't get a good (fair) share of it. That would be a great moment to go off platform, and take the audience with them, but many can't (won't) do that, because it may mean less exposure. So, after all, Spotify seems to bring something of their own to the table (a pool of listeners) that they want to be paid for. To get more exposure, they need bigger artists, to get those, they need money and crooked deals to convince the big labels to license it. So, while unfair at first glance, comparing a Taylor Swift deal to what I'm getting off of Spotify perhaps (I'm only guessing), I am happy to accept the deal for the random exposure I am now enjoying because of it. I feel like I am betraying all artists just saying this, but I keep coming back to wondering why everyone feels like they deserve the exact same deal like a big-name artist (who bring their own audience I am benefiting from).
- schnitzelstoat 3y agoI mean they are revenue-share deals. So each label will get paid a % of Spotify's total revenue according to the number of listens they have and how well they negotiated the deal. So labels like UMG are going to get a better deal than some indie artist who just has to sign up normally. How much the UMG artists end up getting paid is up to UMG. The problem is really that 90% of people listen to a few big artists that are owned by these mega-labels. And that distorts the entire economy of the sector.
- iamsaitam 3y agoIt's like if income tax brackets were inverted and the higher your income the less taxes you pay.
- danialtz 3y agothank you for the post. The recommendation engine becoming generic and main page of pushed content were also the reason I moved away from Spotify Family to Apple Music family - added I was keen to see apple 3D sound which is not that great today. Pushing the age limit, even Apple Music seems uninteresting and I keep listening to the same music over and over. The UX of Apple Music is also terrible: - awkward Music interface that you keep mixing library and cloud versions, and my kids still don't get it. - Testing my intelligence and memory on each menu item to find where my Pink Floyd album I keep playing is. - I don't care about any albums they push on the main page and no way to tell them Beyonce or Rap is not for me AFAIK. Why don't they offer simliar artists I can explore than generic categories? - no way to remotely access my kids play options when they fall sleep (got Spotify for this feature) - With the above items, low return value per Euro I invest, listening on the same albums over and over. Curious if there is a better way...
- _thisdot 3y agoCan very well relate to being annoyed with Spotify being an all-encompassing audio platform. I guess there is a market to that. YouTube Music is also bringing podcasts to their app. But for someone who actually consumed a lot of audio content, that’s a terrible idea. If they had separate apps for these and showed hints to get you to download others, it’d feel way more organised. I’ve completely moved to Apple Music for my music needs. The search is horrible and the suggestions are okay at best. But the UX and the audio quality is amazing. I’ve also adapted to searching and listening to Albums instead of searching for one track and letting the platform decide what I listen to for the rest of the day. Completely unrelated. But what Apple Music does with popular Album Arts is also incredible. I don’t have a problem with existing still image album arts. But there’s a real chance that animated album arts are the future
- yreg 3y agoYep. I'm a very happy Overcast user, so I will never use Spotify to play podcasts. The podcast panel in Spotify UI makes that part of the screen useless for me. It bothers me about the same as an ad banner would. Furthermore I'm annoyed at them calling whatever they are doing 'podcasts'. To me, a podcast means an open RSS feed. Even Apple, the king of walled gardens respects this.
- wkat4242 3y agoI don't think an all-encompassing audio platform is a bad business idea. After all audio is not a big market as it is. But it should be possible to turn features on and off. I have zero interests in podcasts and audiobooks either - I have no patience for that stuff. But it's important to note that at least with (paid) Spotify you can simply use a different client which doesn't offer any suggestion. This is what I do. Outside of music the one thing I would want in audio isn't there though :( It would be erotic ASMR-style content. But as usual big companies stay away from anything under the belt. Oh and I would love nature audio also but I don't think they offer this either (and it's pretty repetitive so usually a short clip on repeat works fine).
- qqj 3y agoI dunno why people seem to have these weird relationships with commercial companies where they get disillusioned, feeling betrayed even, and then have to go through what essentially is a break up with these tax entities. Is there a term for this psychological phenomena?
- weberer 3y agoI've seen slides from marketing agencies where they're called Brand Fanatics. Apparently if customers are emotionally invested in a company, they pay 3x more or something like that.
- xnorswap 3y agoI feel like I'm in a weird alt-universe. I've heard frequent complaints about spotify pushing podcasts but I've never once had spotify show me a podcast above the fold that I haven't myself followed. Only if I scroll really further than I've ever scrolled before could I find it. Spotify shows me: "Made for xnorswap: ": 5 "daily mixes" which have always been a bit rubbish because they're not really mixes, they seem to pick a song I like then they're that song's radio. The "Discover Weekly" mix is decent, the daily ones are not. "Jump back in:" Continue listening to various playlists or albums. "Recently Played": Similar, but for things I finished the first time. "Your Shows": Podcasts I've actually subscribed to. "More like bdrmm": Picks an artist I've recently listened to and suggests similar. Only then we finally get to suggestions for things I haven't actually engaged with: "Audiobooks for you": recommended audiobooks. "Editor's Picks:" Suggested playlists "Episodes for you": Episodes of podcasts to which I've subscribed. "New Episodes": More episodes of podcasts to which I've subscribed. "Shows you might like": Finally the recommended podcasts, about 5 pages down, and similar to podcasts I've listened to. Still no sign of Joe Rogan. "Popular with listeners of Battleground": More recommended podcasts, again similar to a podcast I do listen to. Still no sign of Joe Rogan. "Popular with listeners of Oh God What Now": More recommendations based on a podcast I rarely listen to. "popular with listeners of TRiP": More similar podcasts. "Popular with listeners of Scott Hanselmann": ditto. "Spotify Original Podcasts": Finally, deep below anywhere I've scrolled outside of an exercise to look for it, I finally get linked to the Joe Rogan podcast, under a section where they link a bunch of Spotify podcasts. Is Spotify UK totally different? Or has spotify put me in a "Likes music" category that has all the music recommendations above all the podcast recommendations? Because I didn't even know Spotify Original Podcasts were a category until I scrolled 10 pages down to look for it.
- daveoc64 3y ago>I feel like I'm in a weird alt-universe. >I've heard frequent complaints about spotify pushing podcasts but I've never once had spotify show me a podcast above the fold that I haven't myself followed. That you have followed or listened to a podcast in Spotify is what makes you different here. I have never listened to a podcast on Spotify, despite being a user since the invite-only days, yet the UI recommends podcasts at the same frequency as you've described. I imagine many of the other people here do not want podcasts to appear anywhere in the Spotify UI.
- chx 3y agoThe day I cancelled was May 19, 2020 and should've been yours too.
- iampivot 3y agoSame. It's trash now.
- jamesear 3y agoFor context, this looks to be https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-05-19/the-joe-rogan-experience-launches-exclusive-partnership-with-spotify/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-05-19/the-joe-rogan-experi... > should've been yours too Different people like different things. That's okay.
- chx 3y agoI like being alive. Different people like different things.
- joduplessis 3y agoLove Spotify, saying that as a UI guy as well as a music lover. I've tried Apple Music, Deezer & recently Tidal - but find Spotify's music discovery alg. is killer for what I listen to.
- OJFord 3y ago> Love Spotify, saying that as a UI guy Really?
- joduplessis 3y agoReally. :)
- meonmyphone2 3y agoCurious to know how a UI person would appreciate Spotify UI.
- joking 3y agoI prefer multiple times to buy an album each month, and make the conscious decision of what I am going to listen instead of relying in algorithms. There's time for random playlist based in genre. But really, in this case, less is more.
- NoLinkToMe 3y agoLong article for a single comment: I quit Spotify because I can’t customise the home page which pushes podcasts and music I’m not interested in. For me I navigate my music via My Liked songs + my own playlists for particular moods. If I open the app and press play it defaults to where I left off. The fact there is a home page which shows options similar to what I like is fine, sometimes useful. Yes I’d prefer to customise it. Yes the recommendations aren’t perfect. Not a reason to quit, I love Spotify and haven’t found a better alternative. The one major gripe is not being able to upload my own songs, I love listening to remixes and covers, youtube, spotify or tiktok has plenty of songs I’d love in my library. But it’s a nightmare for a business model that respects artists and a cost structure that needs to be covered. Again, no real good alternatives that do this well + have a normal library + be legal.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoIt's a critique/criticism of a service that has degraded, and why the author understandably is unhappy. What is with the growing trend on HN of just being overly negative about posts that are shared here?
- cantSpellSober 3y agoCriticism is welcome, wrapping it in LimeWire nostalgia and extra 20 paragraphs of fluff to make it long enough for a blog post is makes it harder to find.
- piva00 3y ago> The one major gripe is not being able to upload my own songs, I love listening to remixes and covers, youtube, spotify or tiktok has plenty of songs I’d love in my library. But it’s a nightmare for a business model that respects artists and a cost structure that needs to be covered. Again, no real good alternatives that do this well + have a normal library + be legal. But you can, if you have the audio files you can use them as local files [1] in your Spotify library. [1] https://support.spotify.com/us/article/local-files/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/local-files/
- wkat4242 3y agoI never use spotify's suggestions at all. I don't even see them in my client (spotify-qt). I don't want "discovery". I just want to listen to the stuff I already know I want. Which is one thing I really like about Spotify, if you have a subscription you are free to use whatever client you wish <3 It also seemes to have avoided enshittifying itself, moving from free with ads to paid with ads like many TV streaming services have done. They still get a thumbs up for me.
- gargs 3y agoBad design is slowly becoming an industry trend, which is surprising because Twitter today has more design influencers than ever before. Personally, I feel that the marriage of design with data has created such a huge mess that there’s just no good escape hatch. It’s all about simplicity and the 80/20 principle today, which means that designers are bound to look at usage metrics and clicks as evidence of a successful design. Upper management doesn’t have to care as long as the bottom line is doing well and they’re able to kill competition in other ways. From a user standpoint, though, once you get attuned to the basic functionality you want more power features that cost a lot of effort to build but don’t really make you pay more for them. You just can’t win. This is why we need competition.
- 65 3y agoMy theory of software design is that the designers who are designing software don't really understand how software works. They got into "product design" because it sounded creative and fun. They're glorified graphic designers rather than people who think about "products" as software. They think of software as sleek consumer goods. They're not engineers. Perhaps that's why nearly every software engineer's blog that gets posted on Hacker News has significantly better UX than the websites of professional product designers, if those designers even took the time to make their own website in the first place.
- marginallen 3y ago[dead]
- jamesear 3y agoI know this isn't a practical option for many, but there are still many simple audio players for self managed music collections. I use VLC on Android, and Amberol on Linux. They're both folder oriented, and stay out of the way.
- thriftwy 3y agoDuring the golden age of mp3/flac KDE's Amarok was awesome, later it had a subpar upgrade to 3.x and was forked off as Clementine, and now Clementine is also becoming creaky...
- ethagnawl 3y agoI recently started using Navidrome to stream my old music collection and it's been a pleasure. It's also nudged me to actually download the music I've purchased on Bandcamp -- before that option inevitably goes away.
- zdw 3y agoSame here - Navidrome has been a revelation. Simple to run, nice UI, only issue is that browsers can't support gapless playback, but lots of apps out there to help with that.
- Zambyte 3y agoI know you didn't ask, but I recommend the Vinyl app on Android. It also lets you manage your music in a directory, but a bit more streamlined for listening to music IMO.
- nzoschke 3y agoI’ve moved to Tidal and Bandcamp. Tidal has roughly the same catalog as Spotify plus high quality / lossless playback options if the album / artist supports it. Tidal also integrates with a lot of DJ software like Rekordbox and Djay. These apps let you play from Todal but disable recording when using a streaming service. Bandcamp is the real way to support labels and artists by buying music directly. You download the files and own them and can use them in DJ software and record, take them to the club, etc. Spotify is a bummer. I made a jukebox app https://jukelab.com https://jukelab.com with their SDK but the SDK, developer TOS, catalog and whole experience continually is trending away from giving you control over the music.
- speedgoose 3y agoCan you do the difference between 320kbits/s OGG Vorbis, 16bits at 44100Hz, and 24 bits 48000Hz lossless audio? Using the same master, I don't.
- nzoschke 3y agoI’m an audiophile skeptic too, 320 kbps ogg is great for most casual listening. But as a DJ and audio/video artist, I absolutely can tell the difference using lossless sources vs lossy in some contexts. Again Bandcamp is great because you can get FLAC or Wav and take those to the club sound system or remix them in Ableton or Final Cut. Then record the output and compress it for SoundCloud or YouTube. Recompressing compressed files is the main place I notice differences.
- Workaccount2 3y agoI felt this same way until I did a mixed blind listening test: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx (Take a high quality lossless track, re-encode a copy as whatever lossy format, load both into the tester.) Hurt my ego, but at least made me understand that I am just wasting money paying extra for lossless stuff. This was with a high quality DAQ and a range of high-end headphones too. But perhaps the results would be different on a full blown high end stereo system.
- puttycat 3y agoI'd like to point out the particular enshitification of the left side bar on the Desktop app. I do not understand which human is able to understand the logic of this thing or navigate to a particular item in O(1) without exhaustive search.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoYup, I quit spotify for similar reasons. Overall, it seemed like with every update, it more aggressively was trying to strongarm me into listening to what they want me to listen to, making it harder and harder to make my own choices and have my own tastes. Really sucks. Spotify used to be pretty good.
- parasti 3y agoAs a mostly happy Spotify Premium user I expected to disagree, but OP is actually on point. I realize I only use "search" and "like" and basically ignore the rest of the app. Spotify on mobile probably has the worst UX out of all the apps that I use regularly. This might sound harsh but it is actually bad. The home screen is beyond useless. I literally have a three year old album under "Popular new releases" and it's been there for two years and I have been listening to it regularly. Why is it there? A section titled "Discover picks" shows me albums that literally have in my library and have listened to for many years. If I scroll long enough, I get to a weird story-inspired feed that snap-scrolls with content that seems to have no relation to what I've been listening to.
- fhennig 3y agoI think the feeling that it's bad is made worse if you've been a long time user, because I remember that it used to be better. I dislike that they pushed so much for the liked playlist thing, and that it's now a bit tedious to navigate into just looking at my playlists. I also really dislike their annoying push for podcasts, and this would really be a super quick and easy opt-out section in the settings of the app. And I think from here it's a good transition into what this makes me feel: I feel like Spotify doesn't give a shit about me anymore and they are just trying to squeeze me. And that really rubs me the wrong way. But I also have no alternative lined up.
- exitb 3y agoIn modern capitalism, the larger the company, the more it needs to grow in order to exist. Some, like Apple, manage to continuously expand into new markets. For now, at least. Others, like Spotify, are not positioned for that - once they reach their potential, they start to franticly juice their market destroying their product along the way.
- toyg 3y agoSpotify is actually trying very hard to expand in different markets - audiobooks and podcasts were big moves. Unfortunately, these markets really don't play well with their core proposition. I honestly don't understand why certain giant companies are obsessed by integration; instead of trying to stuff everything in one UI, why not integrate backends (to leverage economies of scale) while keeping UIs separate? So you can cater for each audience in different ways, and keep everyone happy. It's basically "MVC for businesses", just build a different view for the the models you already have. The savings supposedly obtained by unified UIs are so often offset (or worse) by massive losses of core customers.
- skydhash 3y agoWhen you have engagements as KPI, that's what you get. Everything stuffed inside the same platform and the user have troubles with their workflow. I keep thinking that Winamp had the best music player interface, because it lets you turn off parts of the UI you don't need (I did not use the media library, because my files were barely tagged), and the UI was very informative. I've just setup MPD and NCMPCPP and the experience is miles better than Apple Music.
- tsukurimashou 3y agospotify apps are cancer both mobile and desktop (but the mobile app is the worst), spotify connect doesn't work well, you cannot show / hide lyrics from spotify connect, lyrics are bad and often don't match or have no sync but spotify also has very few songs missing from its library and the suggestions made me discover a lot of new songs / artists good content but bad product
- wolframhempel 3y agoI believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember those - the headphones hanging from the wall with 5-10 albums pre-loaded) never had Metal Albums. My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. The entire backwall of my room was taken up by a stereo and an ocean of CD stands. That was expensive. Really expensive. At somewhere around $15-20 dollar for an Album, buying an Album a week took up about all my allowance - and most of the measly income from side jobs I've made as an adolescent. Would you have told me back then, that for just 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. And I would have a super knowledgeable entity that suggests new stuff to me. And I could just listen to a track or two without buying an Album. And it wouldn't take up space. And it didn't have CDs that could get scratched - I think I would have fainted. Long story short - yes, Spotify isn't perfect - but dear god, is it (and related services) amazing relative to what I had when I was tiny.
- rldjbpin 3y agoi had different experiences with music, partly due to the time frame, but i share your perspective. however i don't think spotify helps with discovery for me any longer. it did play a major role until last couple years, even when my tastes changed drastically. now it is hard to find something new that is closer to what i like and is not pushed by the artists trying to promote their work. even using shuffle on a large playlist results in same set of tracks playing every day. i think these sorts of sentiments are shared by the others here. from price perspective, i actually started spending on music with spotify premium. i still feel that it is worth the money after entering into a much better economic condition.
- lawgimenez 3y agoI was born in 1986 and we have the same story but my road leads to punk and hardcore. Which I believe the records (CDs, cassettes) are very hard to find compared to metal. I listened to a lot of Dead Kennedys when I was young, so I really don't mind if the quality is lossless or shitty. I am just glad that I could listen to it on repeat.
- bowsamic 3y agoI get Spotify for free because my dad's phone contract comes with a family plan, but right now I'm trying free Apple Music that I got for a few months for reasons I can't quite remember, and it's really not much better, in fact it's worse in many ways, particularly in terms of buggier UI and lack of remote control functionality. I don't think I'll switch to it any time soon. All of the music apps seem to suck in their own ways.
- subpixel 3y agoThe best Spotify playlist in my world was curated and constantly updated by a small business I had bought things from. It lasted about a year or so - I don’t think Spotify wants that sort of thing to be created. Today there’s a certain DJ at a certain community radio station that streams online from whom I discover much of my new music. That said I do catch new things via Spotify but only by creating “radio” feeds for songs and artists I like. I ignore the home page, I interact with Spotify via my liked songs and library.
- blackSnake 3y agoThe worlds music at your disposal, and not satisfied... LOL You can spend the rest of your life listening to all sorts of music, just by using the search bar and clicking around. Thats incredible! I feel like after a while, we can take things for granted that are incredible and weren't even possible not too long ago. Not that we shouldn't strive for a better ideal.. Reminds me of a fortune cookie note I read a long time ago that I never forgot, mostly. Something to the effect of: "I spent the time prepare the song, while the song is not being sung" I do agree that artists should get a bigger share. Im sure if Spotify were super transparent about cost allocation, we would see room for improvement. Where there's money, there is greed.
- occz 3y ago>I do agree that artists should get a bigger share. Im sure if Spotify were super transparent about cost allocation, we would see room for improvement. Where there's money, there is greed. What are you referring to that is not transparent from Spotify's side?
- ethagnawl 3y agoSure, the UI/UX has degraded over time but I canceled my subscription when they started paying Bro Rogaine hundreds of millions of dollars to traffic disinformation and conspiracy theories. There are countless examples but here's one from last week: www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2024/02/15/joe-rogan-provides-a-platform-to-hivaids-denialists
- nubinetwork 3y agoI've been considering cancelling my subscription as well. It first started some months ago with the fonts being corrupted on Linux, and more recently they removed the "I don't like this song" button (or made the program ignore it in other instances). I'll agree with the sentiment of "we know what you really want" UI-wise... going really wrong. I might give them a couple more months to turn things around, but to be honest, I really don't want to go back to downloading music.
- ErneX 3y agoI might cancel it just because they keep showering Rogan with money, been testing alternatives already.
- SeanLuke 3y agoI'd like to call attention to the incredible situation regarding Benn Jordan (The Lightbulb), Spotify, and TuneCore, which just beggars belief. Jordan uses TuneCore to distribute his music to major streaming services. He has posted a series of videos critical of Spotify among other streaming services, including the most recent, entitled "How Money Laundering W/ Spotify Works", attacking fraud on Spotify. Very soon thereafter Jordan's music was pulled by TuneCore from all major streaming services due to, incredibly, supposed "high amounts of streaming fraud". Lots of finger pointing have since ensued. Spotify insists it didn't tell TuneCore to do it, but it's looking pretty murky. They did it over the weekend so there was no recourse until Monday. They've since backpedaled and pseudo-apologized. To me (and others) this is very suspicious. As far as I can tell, Benn is (1) beyond reproach here and (2) was only able to get both of them to admit error because he had a big enough audience. Smaller musicians would have to resort to, you know, posting to HN asking for help.
- toyg 3y agoIt's shit, but musicians really critical of "the system" have always had trouble with mainstream channels; nobody likes to work with someone who bites the hand that feeds them. Hence the whole punk thing - self-production, indie labels, etc etc.
- djantje 3y agoI like Spotify, not because of the algorithm, but because of the availability of music and the ability to listen to it, I know how it was with casette decks, cd's and napster. I think Spotify did set and still sets an example how content can be distributed and made available for a pretty acceptable price, I still have to see somthing like it for video. And algorithms can be a nice feature, but fastly can become generic or a bubble, being able to actively choose what you want to listen to, that does if for me.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoGoodness, feels as if I could have written this post :) I have Spotify premium because I got a year long offer for less than 1/10th the price. Since I anyway used ad-supported Spotify I went for it. I really didn’t see any improvement: - The UX sucks, more so - there’s nothing much to say here really - They still push podcasts and different languages down my throat, more vehemently - The recommendations still drive me mad - They keep adding things, like that short video, that doesn’t let me listen to music peacefully, rather violently distracts me. - So much so that I kinda limit myself to Liked. So that I don’t really have to interact with the app. Then why I stay and stayed with Spotify? Because I don’t use Google (so no YouTube Music for me) and Apple Music sucks trucks and rails when it comes to India/Pakistan music, more so when I am looking for some old music. Everything else is worse than even Spotify. But still it’s not worth paying for! I thought of heading back to the high seas. But after W.CD that part is lost as well (no, nothing could replace that; O and R are not even a fraction of its shadow).
- boraoztunc 3y agoUX def sucks. I don't understand how a design-focused company that invests so much into its design teams (www.spotify.design) can create a user interface so cluttered and hard to navigate to find music. After years of using it, I've recently discovered (on mobile) that they've hidden the search and sorting on top of the playlists. My home page is full of things I'm not interested in; there is no way to customize which are displayed. And enough of pushing podcasts. I've created a (free) web app using Spotify API, Echoes, with a simple interface to see your top artists and songs, it also has a New Discovery section to generate playlists based on your listening algorithm. https://echoesapp.io https://echoesapp.io
- Vorh 3y agoWas going to try this out, but the permissions required are too much for me. View your email Add and remove items in Your Library Create, edit, and follow private playlists Create, edit, and follow playlists Manage who you follow on Spotify Stream and control Spotify on your other devices
- advael 3y agoIt's kind of crazy that everyone freaked out about "piracy" in the 2000s but every form of music filesharing in that era was materially better for music artists than what is by far the dominant platform for streaming music today, and that this is legal because it's been done in cooperation with the entrenched monopolies who own the right to make money off of music instead of in spite of them
- egeozcan 3y agoThey have technical problems: Offline doesn't work sometimes when you seem to have a connection but it's not really working. The popups sometimes do not close and requires a restart. The client is heavy and can show videos and display lyrics, which is nice when properly implemented but it's a buggy mess. They have algorithm problems: Suggestions became useless since a long while. The silly podcast push. All those generic placeholder playlist... They also have conflicting interests with their users and the non-megastar artists. Therefore I also cancelled Spotify a long time ago.
- pimlottc 3y ago> Offline doesn't work sometimes when you seem to have a connection but it's not really working. Definitely had this problem when you have a weak connection. Even if you have already downloaded the music, it still hangs trying to connect, in order to... I dunno, download the lyrics or something? Get related tracks? So I end up having to go into airplane mode just to make it play. Just play the saved files, and wait on the API calls in the background.
- latentcall 3y agoSpotify has a "offline mode" setting somewhere in the app last I knew. This will force it to only show releases you've downloaded.
- bakugo 3y ago>I listen to what it suggests and just accept that it will go away when it decides to rotate it out. Spotify trained me not to look too hard, to let the flow be, and if that awesome song is gone or removed, don’t worry, we still have a million more. I just can't understand this mindset. The amount of people out there nowadays who simply listen to/watch/etc. whatever some algorithm tells them to consume, and fully accept being told "you know that one song you really like? well it's not available anymore so you can no longer listen to it, too bad", actually boggles my mind. I can't imagine an existence like that.
- smallstepforman 3y agoI shouldnt endorse Google Premium, but they have replaced Spotify and iTunes for variety, remixes, covers and such. When I like a song, I also get alternative versions of it. And I can avoid Toutube ads.
- arthurofbabylon 3y agoSpotify's virtues became table-stakes last decade. What was once deservedly lauded as top-quality design and an incredible, high-value product has become... well... just normal. This phenomenon interests me broadly, beyond just Spotify. In the worlds of hardware, architecture, and human organization, innovations become iconic. They're remembered and studied for decades or centuries. There's an incredible staying power, where the implementation becomes the backing metaphor for the next iterative leap. In the software world, this just doesn't really happen. For a few years a sizable portion of emerging consumer brands asked their design team to "make it look like headspace," and that gave way to the generic, faceless cartoons of corporate animations (ie, it just dissolved into the next trend). We've seen countless clever teams introduce clever tactics that quickly proliferated, leaving the original step in innovation largely forgotten. Spotify was (for an entire decade!) a shining star of impeccable product design, but now that's just normal. In software, culture just quickly and seamlessly moves on.
- meonmyphone2 3y agoCouldn't agree more. I hate Spotify and its UI. Like many modern big apps, user experience seems to be an afterthought. Recently it started showing me some related playlists that makes no sense - I now have to ignore a big portion of the UI because it's useless, feels like I'm using an app with ads. But it's hard to go back to downloading albums after trying the convenience of a service like that. I tried Google Music, but somehow it was even worse than Spotify, but that's about of what I expect of Google these days. I'll be trying Deezer, Tidal and Apple Music soon.
- S0und 3y agoHonestly, I'm kinda tired of the constant whining about Spotify. But in many ways, it showed me, that when you have a wide customer base and your product is a simple "wrench", you will be surprised how different each people try to use the same tool. Most of them don't understand that you can't drill with it, nor you can weld with it. Ok, what do I mean by this? People want to turn a streaming service into a music streaming and organizing tool that can fit every user's weird OCD. I mean there are people out there, who create a new playlist for EVERY ALBUM they listen to, removing and reordering songs in the album for their taste. This person was requesting a feature to be able to hide and reorder songs in an album because they're tired of creating a new playlist for every album. I don't want to judge people, ohh boy there are weird people out there... Same thing with recommendations. You might see this all the time, you have a group of people who have a bad experience with Spotify discovery system, and then you have people like me, who are happy with it, and works perfectly well, for ME. But I listen to a specific genre of music, and if I like an artist I "follow" them on Spotify. I try to do my best, so Spotify has a chance to figure out what I like. Hence, Discover Weekly is mostly good, every 4 or 5 weeks (for whatever reason) it's fucking great. > I might have been naive, but when I started paying for Spotify Premium, I thought my money was going to the artists that I was listening to. Let's track back a bit... > Growing up in Tunisia, piracy was the norm. Our debit cards didn’t work internationally, and publishing companies never thought of us as a viable market to bother with. Harrr, surely there was no way to buy a single music CD in the whole of Tunisia. But I'm not judging, I did music piracy in the past. But thinking that your €5-10 monthly subscription magically will feed every artist that you listen to is idd naive. I've been a premium user for the past 10 years. During this time I've spent x20 more money on concert tickets, merch, and music CDs than before. If I have a good year, I usually go to 10-15 concerts a year from clubs to arenas, and even travel abroad if I have to. Because this is the only way you can support your favorite artists. But let's just spend nothing on them, use Spotify, and complain about how Big Corp pays nothing to artists. Meanwhile, record labels are standing on the side, laughing at this, wiping the tears of joy with a banknote. There is nothing more exciting than Discover Weekly showing you a brand new band (for you) and you realize the band will play in your country in 2 months. Without Spotify, I would not know about them, let alone go to the concert.
- Xeyz0r 3y agoSpotify has removed several popular features over the years, such as the ability to view lyrics while listening to music and the option to sort playlists by date added. These changes have angered many users. Spotify's recommendation algorithms have been criticized for becoming less personalized and more repetitive. While Spotify remains one of the most popular music streaming services, it is clear that many users are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the platform. Spotify needs to address these concerns and improve its service if it wants to retain its user base and maintain its position as a leader in the industry.
- probably_wrong 3y agoIs this comment auto-generated?
- Xeyz0r 3y agoMy way of thinking
- projektfu 3y agoIn the future we will have to fail Turing tests to prove our humanity.
- jasonjmcghee 3y agoTake a look at their comment history- so many are clearly LLM. Oddly they claim it isn't, when they are called out. Very odd. Why bother commenting at all? Certainly won't get karma.
- 946789987649 3y ago> the ability to view lyrics while listening to music You can still do that? Am I missing something?
- skrebbel 3y agoI rage-quit Spotify some years ago for similar UX reasons, and switched to YouTube Music. I can warmly recommend it, and that's from a Google-hater. Truly, it seems like all 3 competent UX designers at Google were put to work on YT Music. There's no pushy podcast crap, recommendations are rather decent, "play album" button actually plays the album, playlists and queues work as you might expect, playback is gapless by default, you can turn off autoplay (yeah, really, a Google product lets you switch off the AI), it's all very nice. Just, all the stuff that should be table stakes is actually right. And, of course, they got the biggest catalog of all because any YouTube video that the AI thinks might be a music video is indexed too! Lots of weird indie bootleg shit in my playlists. It's not perfect by a long shot, but oh boy is it better than Spotify. Note: I'm really only talking about UX here. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that YT Music pays artists like 10x less than other apps do, and the artists put up with it because YouTube (not YT Music) brings exposure and Google made it a package deal. Not sure how true this is btw.
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoLet's hear it for the slightly less sucky Apple music! https://artists.apple.com/support/1124-apple-music-insights-royalty-rate https://artists.apple.com/support/1124-apple-music-insights-... I'm a fairly content Apple music subscriber. The apps (iPhone and MacBook) suck - although it keeps podcasts and audiobooks elsewhere, but there's a good chance I can find even obscure tracks and I can also listen to the old CDs and unpublished music I uploaded with iTunes Match on any Apple device.
- projektfu 3y agoI was reading a book by a bassist (View from the Bottom, by Harvey Brooks) and it was nice that pretty much everything he talked about was on Apple Music. Some things, even famous things, just eventually get lost. It is nice that lots of music has been digitized and will be preserved both because of profit motive and by the Internet archive. I'm eager to try the Apple Classical app but it's iOS only. My iPad is not my typical listening device.
- benf76 3y agoDrop Spotify and go back to RSS which is having a revival. Podcasting 2.0 has brought tons of new features all open source. https://podcasting2.org/ https://podcasting2.org/ Grab a new podcasting player with over 20 new features and move away from big tech: newpodcastapps.com
- cynicalsecurity 3y agoNothing beats good old local MP3 library.
- CrypticShift 3y ago> It was a pain > all worth the hassle for the teenage me My perspective is this: If I accepted (like the OP) how "difficult" it was to set up a system for discovering music before, why wouldn't I accept a little "hassle" with Spotify? because I'm paying? No, personally, I'm paying for the music DB, not the app. dashboard? Ignore. Official playlists? Ignore. How difficult is that? It takes way less effort to get around Spotify "pain points" than any prior system, and none of these offer what Spotify does best: enriched API access to "unlimited" music. But of course, we do need to complain to make things better (especially for the artists).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vertis 3y agoI stopped using Spotify a long long time ago, for much more selfish reasons. I would try and "download" a bunch of songs before an international flight only to hop on the flight and discover that despite saying they were downloaded they wouldn't play. At the time I was flying internationally from Australia once a month. I no longer take as many international flight but once you've left the platform it's hard to go back. Google gets some of my money, but only because they bundle the ad-free experience and the music. Deezer could have had my money today, I forget they exist. But I'm in Romania currently, and when I try to use my UK credit card to sign up it decided not to let me, so I guess not.
- pshirshov 3y agoJellyfin + torrents
- pierat 3y agoSpotify was always a fools errand. You pay $12/month for an ever-worsening, always degrading, profit-funnel and expect to have new visibility of stuff and a happy environment? Just like the RIAA members before, they figured out that controlling the music AND how people consume it - they could steer music and profitability as they see fit. This is now just Spotify doing the same. What can you do instead? AirSonic is a great server platform that you can throw all your music in, be they ripped from CD's you own, or bulk piracy. And use MusicBrainz Picard to properly identify your music. Also finding torrents is super easy with Yandex. Stay away from Google. Yeah, it's harder initially, but you own your own path if you do this. Else, you're gonna be jerked around by what choice today scrapes more profit for Spotify. It's all 'fuck you, user'. (And also piracy and Spotify pay pretty much the same. If you feel bad, go buy their MP3s or albums, and then pirate.)
- JazCE 3y agoThe Author doesn't understand how the streaming business works, and as far as I can tell, no one in the comments here has shone a better light on it. There is and there isn't just a pool of money that goes to beyonce, the weeknd and taylor swift... i say there is because what actually happens is, the collecting societies will collect the money, then distribute it based on streams correctly to the artists/writers/producers etc that are registered. now if it so happens that a collecting society can't find the correct person to distribute to, the money might sit for a while before it is divvied up between the biggest players, so that would mean taylor swift, elton john etc might get a share of any unclaimed royalties. When i worked in the business, we would often have many a drunken night talking about how we should just record the rain on the roof, upload it and use the "royalties" as beer money. for the most part, being on spotify does pay, but i think people don't really understand how the pie is cut and when the artist actually gets a slice. there are many routes to being on spotify (or any streaming service), the router for taylor swift will be different to the route for your dad's garage band, as will the payout.
- koonsolo 3y agoSince you seem to understand how it works, can you explain the following to me: Let's say I pay $10 to listen to my favorite indie band, for 1 hour each week. Let's say another user listens to Taylor Swift 24/7. Does my favorite band get my $10, or do they get $0.12? You see, when I pay $10, I don't expect $9.88 to go to Taylor Swift. Or does my favorite band actually gets my $10, like it used to be when I bought CD's?
- knutzui 3y agoIf you listen to a single band for 1 hour a week, then you should not be paying for a Spotify subscription, but rather buy the music of that band. This situation is obviously constructed, but if you were in it and unhappy about it, it would be your own fault for misunderstanding what you're paying Spotify for.
- JazCE 3y agopeople seem to be confusing the $10 spotify premium sub with actually giving money to music. i think there's an over-simplification of how this works going on. When you buy a $10 cd from let's say your dad's friends garage band, that $10 is going to your dads friend, and obviously they might have expenses before they really see that $10 (buying CD-R's, printing, etc etc). you spend $10 on spotify premium, and exclusively listen to your dads friends garage band, that $10 is not going to your dads friend, it's going to spotifys bank account which will then be used to pay for execs, macbooks, operating costs etc, but also be used to fund the artist pool. so your $10 and some other persons $10 that they use for elton john records, all sit in the same account. Elton John via EMI or whoever, might have negotiated a 0.000005c per stream deal and so gets that. your dads friend might be on a very basic rate of 0.000002c per stream (numbers made up), and will receive that. so yeah elton or taylor or other big names will get a better deal.
- Hartgeld 3y agoI'm genuinely surprised why noboby is mentioning online community radios as a source for music. Why would an algorithm of a billion dollar company provide a better selection of music than a real human being who dedicated his life collecting, playing and producing music? When listening to music I want to be surprised and discover new music. Spotify and its competitors only please you with stuff u already know or sound most similar, delivering the most boring experience one can imagine. Whereas with online community radios you even have a chance to interact with the selectors and the audience through chat or calls. Most of the time they even provide the playlist for the show. And if you so keen on buying the music, why not support dedicated record stores instead of these mulit-billion dollar companies which are killing the actual music and ripping of the artists? Heres a very small collection only scratching the surface Community radio stations: https://www.nts.live/ https://www.nts.live/ https://kioskradio.com/ https://kioskradio.com/ https://dublab.de/ https://dublab.de/ https://callshopradio.com/ https://callshopradio.com/ record stores: https://hardwax.com/ https://hardwax.com/ https://www.oye-records.com/ https://www.oye-records.com/ https://clone.nl/ https://clone.nl/ https://coldcutshotwax.uk https://coldcutshotwax.uk
- suddenclarity 3y agoWhy would an algorithm be better? Because it has 15 years of my listening history and can offer music based on my personal taste. You can even get the radio experience with human public playlists with the added advantage that you can skip songs 10 seconds into them if you don't like them. Start a niche human curated playlist with death metal and Bieber. No ads and you can skip a song whenever. 10 minutes later you can change to a playlist with movie music and 90s rap. All in one app. You can even add your store purchased music. Spotify does everything a radio station does, just better. The one exception is having a living person talk between songs about his day. They do have an AI generated DJ though if you're into it and want to hear the names of the songs.
- mlrtime 3y agoYou answered your own question with a bunch of links most are not going to click on. Most people don't care, they want to pay 10/mo, have a "reasonably" good UI and play music. They don't want to keep track of 6 different URLs to find music. Note: I probably listen to Somafm through Sonos just as much as Spotify and I donate.
- rajishx 3y agoI moved to youtube music lately after being like 10 years i think on spotify (or since when it started in the UK)... the youtube premium + youtube music was too much of a deal for me to take... I still use spotify sometime with an app that remove the ads... but I don't get the attraction anymore
- infinitedata 3y agoIn YT music, is there a way to spot regurgitated videos as ‘music’ versus actual tracks that provide a decent streaming quality? My problem has been that their bitrate is so bad, like their videos. Thanks for any advice
- boppo1 3y agoAll I know is I pay for ad-free spotify and it fucking serves me pop-ups for things I'm not interested in. That's an ad you assholes! As soon as I figure out how to export playlists in a aay that I can import to apple music, I'm gone.
- aheckler 3y ago> As soon as I figure out how to export playlists in a aay that I can import to apple music, I'm gone. SongShift[0] is the gold standard for doing this I believe, so much so that Apple is beta testing an integration with it.[1] [0] https://www.songshift.com/ https://www.songshift.com/ [1] https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/19/apple-music-spotify-playlists-music-transfer/ https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/19/apple-music-spotify-playlists...
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoYou can supposedly move playlists with tunemymusic, but I haven't done it myself.
- projektfu 3y agoI pulled up the Spotify app on a Samsung TV (haven't tried it on other smart TVs) and your options were a handful of playlists or search. When you pull up a song, there's no real way to drill down into the artist and their work, or explore the same genre. Just listen to that song and a playlist based on it or a playlist for the artist. Discovery is what makes music interfaces cool.
- gubikmic 3y agoI think Spotify is still quite good overall. They sometimes make very bad UI decisions. But the latest home screen desaster (of huge, almost full-screen size tiles) was luckily already rolled back. My main gripe is that it carves overly deep channels around what I've listened to before. For discovering new music I find Shazam more valuable. I wish Spotify had some clever randomness. A good example are Tarantino soundtracks with songs from all over the genre landscape. I've never seen Spotify create playlists like that. When staying within a genre the autoplay can be amazing though.
- mihaaly 3y agoThat was a gloomy Saturday afternoon perhaps, several years ago, when I cancelled. I agree with the author completley. And Spotify is just one of the practically all mainstream black pattern conglomerates ruining a nice idea and the entertainment with pushy and greedy selfish rhetorics, useless for me, driving me away. When you have little chance finding content you care about, when there is severly limited navigation with no reliable structure but secretive algorithms push mostly garbage or hype into your face and the 'improvement' of the UI is more like serving the companies need, sacrifying usability for you, then I better get back to the stone age of content access (end of '90, beginning of '00, others call it golden years actually), put in the effort building my own entertainment for the sake of own enjoyment rather than swallowing what they cook for me with secret ingredients, satisfying only those arrogant folks cooking it. I built a home music server and a good HiFi system using Raspberry's and files (actually the immediate reson leaving Spotify was their stubborn unwillingness introducing HiFi quality after years and years of empty promises but degrading UI meanwhile, putting effort into that and other never missed rotted deliveries). With fairly basic player with its own annoyances, but at least those are unpolished incompleteness not intentionally forced through destruction of good old functionality along stupid self serving hollow sounding strategy, appearances instead of essence. Now there are no disappearing favourite songs anymore, re-learning behaviour of the software at each update annoyed out of me, no more feeling that I am for the software and not the software for me. I am more satisfied now. Movie/TV streaming, watch on 'demand' (HAHH! more like watch on shoving it down your throat!) TV apps, music streaming, but I could count here all social media with their opaque and orderless presentation of not finding those I need but getting what other push at me kind of operation that repelled me enough not to get involved with them in the first place (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube after a while, and a lot more newer that is not considered stone age stuff by modern folks riding the trend like Texans ride bulls), most news sites or simply manufacturer web too that is not for informing you but to shove their whatever down your throat with force. I do not need that, thank you, try the others. It is a much better feeling to settle myself into a quiet but cosy corner of the Internet (HN included) than consuming what is poured at us.
- dangravell 3y agoThere're decent communities of people who like to manage their own tech (example: r/selfhosted) and those that like to assemble their own library (r/musichoarder) and then everything in between - so there are options for this.
- _chu1 3y agoI was born right into the age of streaming since I was born in 2008 (didn't this website exist before me?) and this is why I love CDs. I actually control decent quality music, I can pay the artist directly for their work and I control it without any ridiculous copy protection like AACS. I tried Spotify, Amazon Music, TIDAL, everything else and I cannot get used to it. I really hate subscriptions, and prefer to own things.
- crtasm 3y agoFor things you might like to buy digitally there's Bandcamp, Junodownload, etc. that will sell you lossless files you can do whatever you like with.
- rchaud 3y agoSummary: Spotify was better when it was a dumb pipe for music that used the canard of "supporting artists directly" to get people to upgrade to Premium. Spotify is a middleman for the Big 5 record labels. They and advertisers are the customer, not the scrubs paying $12/mo. They cannot just show you music, they don't make any money on that. It's podcasts all the way down because they can stuff it with ads, and don't have to kick back 90% to the rights owner.
- justinzollars 3y agoI also have trouble finding new music on Spotify. I find its nearly impossible and have a strong preference for the old design.
- iamsaitam 3y agoThe reality for musicians is that if you're on the middle of the bell curve in terms of ""quality/popularity"", in comparison to other professions, you earn the same as the people below the bell curve of other professions. This is massively unfair. Imagine if all the software developers that make a living, had to be "10x"..
- Triphibian 3y agoReading "Choke Point Captialism" by Cory Doctorow I learned that Spotify uses playlists to prioritize songs that cost less for them or pays out to artists they deal with. That notion, that the algorithm is more concerned with cash savings than serving you the songs you want to hear, really changed the way I think about these services -- and the idea of music recommendation writ large. I currently subscribe to Apple Music, which I am sure is up to similar shenanigans. But to me their user front end is less egregious. It seems like Spotify barely wants to acknowledge that the 'album' is a thing. While Apple still offers me full records by artists I like or most like. This, currently, is the be scenario for my habits. But yes, I would love a streaming service with a fully customizable front page a recommendation engine that allows the user to tweak the kind of suggestions they get, beyond the extremely vague "more of this or less of this" options.
- antifa 3y ago> It seems like Spotify barely wants to acknowledge that the 'album' is a thing. I can't get Spotify to give me a simple list of all an artist's songs, it only gives me a list of albums, so I have to manually click into each one, and most have one song or duplicate songs anyways. If anything, Spotify grossly over emphasizes albums.
- burnerthrow008 3y ago> Reading "Choke Point Captialism" by Cory Doctorow I learned that Spotify uses playlists to prioritize songs that cost less for them or pays out to artists they deal with. Gosh, that sounds horrible. With such a large market share and such monopolistic business practices, how did they escaped being named a gatekeeper for the purposes of the DMA?
- nicgrev103 3y agoI suspected this practice and ran a very rudimentary test which concluded they were not doing such things. I made a playlist with Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Justin Bieber and then an equal amount of songs from obscure artists with fewer than 1000 followers (this was back when followers was the main popularity metric, now it's monthly streams). I then played the playlist on shuffle, expecting for the 'popular'/ expensive artists to be played less. I tallied each song for a day of listening (that's as much as I could take!) and the popular songs were played equally as frequently and the non- popular. Like I said, very rudimentary but didn't yield the result I was expecting.
- 015a 3y agoI pay for, love, and use Spotify to listen to music. And, I buy merch from the artists I really like. Sometimes that merch is e.g. LPs/Records, but usually t-shirts/sweatshirts/hats/etc. I think the whole "buy MP3 from bandcamp!" thing is such a yawn. Sure, I get the whole "ownership" angle or whatever. I'm not about to run two apps to listen to music on my phone. I already have a Plex server. I could just load the MP3 onto that. But I won't. I want variety. I want Spotify to constantly be throwing new artists at me. I love this. Spotify singularly helps me discover so many fantastic new artists, who go on to become my favorites, I go see them live, I buy their merch, Spotify does this to such a better degree than anyone else in the industry that its become literally impossible to quantify how much a "fair" amount Spotify should pay artists actually is. I never would have discovered `INSERT_BAND_NAME` on Apple Music. So sure, alternatives might give bigger pieces of the pie; but Spotify is the only player actually making a bigger pie. I think the author would just prefer Apple Music. If you're boring and predominately only listen to the same few dozen artists, then absolutely you should be using Tidal or Apple Music, or buying MP3s, as these services will pay artists better.
- vsharma2430 3y agoTry this application to download all your tracks: https://github.com/vsharma2430/YtubePlay https://github.com/vsharma2430/YtubePlay
- jncfhnb 3y agoI find the complaints kind of lame. I don’t like the podcasts, but it’s very easy to not click on the podcasts. The music recs vary over time but music is a diamond in the rough thing. Every niche band I listen to is from a chance find on Spotify and that’s cool. Power user tools for exploring stuff would be cool
- aramndrt 3y agoNo, you are simply more accepting of a certain interface being pushed onto you. I find the podcasts incredibly frustrating because I like to keep my interfaces streamlined and minimalistic. I would much rather have my homepage focused on my content than a bunch of podcasts I don't care to listen to and a bunch of playlists in which I have no interest. In my opinion, the app is frustratingly bloated. Your opinion is valid, but this complaint is as well.
- jncfhnb 3y agoShrug. I click search, and the search is good. It also quickly suggests New Releases which is the only playlist I care to explore.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y agoThis was 25 years ago: https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/, and nothing has fundamentally changed about the music industry in the interim. More and more digital tools are at hand for anyone to make professional-sounding music, yet it's harder and harder to be found in the "long tail," and it's a wash. Big corporations continue to monopolize distribution, performance, and search. We need a renaissance of anti-trust legislation and enforcement in the US. IMO, companies should be kept small enough to have at least a dozen competing players in a market. We already see what it's like to have a half dozen (which are colluding), so let's try forcing it to be double -- and suing the pants off of their officers for colluding -- and see what happens.
- freedomben 3y ago> The lack of customization feels like a slap. Like Spotify designers telling me “you don’t know what you want, we know better,” but the problem is they don’t, and they haven’t for a long time. Warning: extremely broad stereotyping to follow. This is macro level stuff, not micro level stuff. Real individual humans are far more complex and nuanced than what I'm about to say and don't fit neatly into these categories. This pretty much sums up all of my feelings on modern software. A good designer can be a real asset and make for a much better product. The problem is, only maybe 20% of designers are actually good designers, and the humility required to make you a good designer often makes you less pushy. The opposite 20% of designers who think they know better than everyone else happen to be the loudest and pushiest, so they often get their way. Everybody tries to copy Apple because Apple has had great success with telling their users how they should use the software, but this is a mistake unless you are only targeting Apple's user base. Please stop looking at your app's UI as a work of art. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a beautiful looking app and I know the joy that comes from creating something beautiful. But remember, it must have form and function. Look at it first as a functional machine, and then beautify and polish it. A great designer can work wonders with what they have! If your boots are beautiful but your toes are getting frost-bitten, they aren't good boots! In closing, I love designers and I'm glad we have them now. They are important and can be great assets. We just need a mindshift, much like we did in engineering.
- jszymborski 3y ago> If your boots are beautiful but your toes are getting frost-bitten, they aren't good boots! Reminds me of a saying that a Scottish woman taught me: "All fur coat and no knickers" Although, as a Canadian, I can relate to your idiom a bit more.
- Adrig 3y agoSadly it's not only designers but sometimes the whole product org who is biased… I lost on a potential design contract earlier this year because the company wanted a paid case study. 3 hours to improve their onboarding and customer activation. I showed an outline of the direction I thought was best, highlighted the core concepts to watch for, and opened to further tests we could do to achieve the target KPI. They told me my concepts were not “bold enough” and I wasn't defending it as hard as they'd like. It seems that to them, a designer should be confident enough to impose his vision after 3h of work on one of the most important flows of a B2B app. No hard feeling against them, I was probably not a good fit. But it's not the first time people expect me to come in and “do the design thing” like it's dark magic.
- garaetjjte 3y agoTangentially related: I switched from Spotify to YT Premium just because YT was only marginally more expensive and bundles ad-free YT app. If I were Spotify I would be furious and yelling antitrust all over this. Maybe the reason Google removed YT Premium Lite was so you couldn't point out that for some reason Premium is much cheaper than Premium Lite + Music standalone.
- cushpush 3y agoPlanning on doing a show HN soon for our project Shomp: [https://shomp.co/timeline.html https://shomp.co/timeline.html] we are a US nonprofit with the goal of covering transaction fees so musicians selling their music online will keep 100% of the proceeds.
- rglullis 3y agoJust this weekend I wrote a "Ask HN" post about an alternative funding model for musicians. [0] The TL;DR: it would be a Patreon-style platform where people can choose what artists they want to support directly, but instead of the artists defining "support tiers", it's the users who define a total fixed monthly contribution and how to split this among the many artists they want to support. The idea is that there are many people who would like to support many individual artists, but can not afford to give $5-$10 to each of them. With the contributions being fixed, the average contribution might be lower, but the total payout would increase. Another advantage of this model (compared to Spotify) is that it evens out the playing field a lot. The superstars already make most of their money from touring/merch/extra deals. The ones that are just starting and do not have the means (or the audience) to go on larger tours can rely instead of a more steady income from their (relatively) small fanbase. A quick look says that Spotify has > 600M users and ~1.5M artists. If this platform manages to get 400:1 ratio of users:artists, and each user donated $10/month, this means an average of $4000/artist/month. It wouldn't make everyone a millionaire, but it could certainly make for a lot more healthy industry than the status quo. [0] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39399121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39399121
- kjkjadksj 3y agoEvery time I get on an airplane and go to listen to my downloaded music on spotify, most of my downloaded library is gone and needs to be redownloaded. Sometimes when I play music on lte connection the app also would rather use my poor data connection to serve me a choppy buffering track of one I already downloaded locally, that apparently spotify app won’t chose over seeking a new download even on a cellular data connection. I have to put spotify into offline mode to force it to use downloaded music everytime, at which point you can’t search the rest of spotify because the switch is like an app specific airplane mode. If I catch it dropping my downloads one more time, I’m done and going back to pirating flacs and transcoding that to my device. Convenience is king, I don’t care about being legal or not. The only reason why I was using spotify was that it was slightly more convenient than pirating music. If they keep dropping the ball on the one job the app is supposed to reliably do, play my music, I’ll just build a library myself over a weekend and save myself years of future headache.
- marliechiller 3y agoI experienced all of this on a recent flight, much to my frustration. Once fully exasperated at having the podcasts id predownloaded not actually play, I turned to my audible app. This too spent the first minute of booting clearly trying to contact servers to call home with a locked up, unusable screen, despite me having a large local library for access. App developers clearly rarely test their code in airplane mode these days, much to our annoyance!
- walthamstow 3y agoIt will forever drop your downloads, or fuck with you in offline mode in some other way. I ride deep tube lines in London so offline content is a must have. I built an extensive library downloading flacs from Deezer with Deemix and serve it with Plex/Plexamp
- latentcall 3y agoI remember Spotify when it was a small upstart company from Sweden and their service wasn't available yet in the US. Using VPN's, proxies, anything to try the service out was fun. I paid for a Spotify subscription for many years but cancelled in 2021 when I found I didn't like the recommendation system at all. Not to mention, if you listen to a lot of electronic music there are a lot of releases missing. I previously had a FLAC collection sitting idle on a NAS and now use Roon to listen at home and use Roon ARC to stream away from home and it works very well. This along with a sizeable vinyl and tape collection works well for me. Also want to mention Bandcamp if you can afford it. Artists see more money from a purchase than a stream, and it's an invaluable service.
- antoinebalaine 3y agoThe shocking thing about Spotify's UI was that it was never modeled to be a record collection or a record store. It was always modeled to be a database front end. The ui design and the business model always reflected that prerogative: poor discoverability, poor user-favorites, poor classification, absolutely no blobs, credits or liner notes. An artist uploading is just another entry in the database - the service sells access to the DB, it doesn't sell music. By extension, the user is also more and more a "yet another entry" in the whole process of "consuming" the data. It's just dehumanizing, yet consumers would rather this than having to deal with the friction of purchasing records (which are outrageously expensive, which also points to the record industry's responsibility in this...) or pirating under they eye of copyright trolls. Long story short: they'll fail, sooner or later.
- parpfish 3y agoi think this is largely due to the fact that spotify has shifted from being a streaming platform to being a content creator AND streaming platform. they've got misaligned incentives now because one half of the company is trying to make the best audio streaming platform that they can, and the other half is creating content and trying to get it injected into as many ears as possible. the big round of layoffs in january included pushing dawn ostroff and de-emphasizing the podcast moves, which (fingers crossed) will lead to less emphasis on the content creation side
- lamontcg 3y ago> Instead, my subscription is probably pooled according to some black box formula and ends up paid to some of their top performers like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, or The Weeknd. And Joe Rogan, which is why I cancelled my subscription and switched to Tidal.
- ornornor 3y agoI like pandora so much better than Spotify but it’s very difficult to purchase and access out of the us. Their recommendations and ui are so much better, it’s a shame.
- okmg 3y agoJust canceled my premium subscription.
- KTibow 3y agoIf you want something that just works: YouTube Music + uBlock origin Some may dispute the algorithms, others may note it's not as easy to get it to work on mobile, but it has an extremely large collection
- stockhorn 3y agoI once submitted a bugreport to spotify regarding a problem with the chromecast integration. The support-agent asked me the following questions in turn, which I all followed: - Can you reinstall the app and try again? - Can you describe step by step how to reproduce the bug? - Can you make a screencast showing the problem? - Can you factory-reset your phone and check if the issue persists? I've never heard back after doing the last step. They probably didn't think I would report back again. (Thanks god I had an old phone lying around...) Needless to say the problem is still there today...
- avidiax 3y ago> Can you factory-reset your phone and check if the issue persists? This is a big red flag for organizational dysfunction. When the QA team puts up a big roadblock to even filing a bug, wants to play 20 questions for every bug report, it's a way to just avoid taking bug reports. But why avoid the bug reports? Someone in QA is being measured on them, or a 2nd layer (the engineers) are being pressured by a 3rd layer (management) to ship new features at high quality and not "waste time" fixing bugs. Maybe the bug reports won't be fixed anyway.
- andelink 3y agoSpotify doesn’t recognize the album entity. It’s the most shocking and offensive thing a music platform could do IMO. For anyone who catalogs their music and actively grooms their library, Spotify is unusable.
- billy_bitchtits 3y agoI just want a feature that plays new music I've never heard, based on things I've liked in the past, and doesn't have a bunch of bullshit suggestions based on their advertising, or a stupid fake DJ voice interjecting.
- Lestertucker 3y agoSpotify seems to be the only service that offers remastered or re released songs from the 70s and 80s. Some aren't available on CD either.
- thwonp 3y agoI canceled Spotify in favor of Plexamp. I was sick of the algorithmic content funnel, and have been collecting albums for better part of 20 years. I find myself listening to and enjoying music from my own curated collection much more than I valued having every song at my fingertips. It helps that the plexamp app is slick and feature rich, I especially like the exploration features made possible by discog tags and sonic analysis.
- perryizgr8 3y agoThe worst part of using spotify today is their random pop ups that interrupt you right when you want too quickly choose a song or Playlist and play something. Instead they block you with a random full screen dialog box with some unwanted bs in it. Oh and the dismiss button is a tiny hard to find text. Feels functionally similar to using an ad supported service, even though I'm paying.