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I switched from Spotify from YT Music solely for UX reasons. Spotify is a weird flimsy thing to me (or at least was, back when I rage-quit it). Things like, the

I switched from Spotify from YT Music solely for UX reasons. Spotify is a weird flimsy thing to me (or at least was, back when I rage-quit it). Things like, their Android app didn't even have a "play album" button. Random simple stuff just was made needlessly hard. Queueing was weird, it seemed to nudge you to shuffling / algorithmic playback, they had this weird podcast thing going on that was just in the way, and so on. YT Music on the other hand, has excellent UX in my opinion. This surprised me, given Google's generally mediocre UX design, but they really got a bunch of competent people on this one. All the basics work the way you'd expect (and that's not trivial to get right). Play, queue, play next. Play album, shuffle, it all just generally does what I expect it to do and I can mostly find the buttons I want easily. You can turn off autoplay. Gapless album playback is on by default. It.. just works! Also I find the algorithmic autoplay to be pretty great, found some great new artists that way. The fact that the catalog is bigger because it includes weird bootleg recordings and live sets and anything music-y ever uploaded to YouTube, is a nice bonus. But for me, the UX sells it.

Mindwipe 2y ago
The YouTube Music UI fails at very basic things. Play a track that Google seems is "for children" and you are unable to navigate to another track or browse without it stopping playing, because the service inherited YT's clumsy COPPA compliance solution. The UI can't cope with long titles. It uses space badly. It doesn't surface content well (no Christmas playlist on the front page during December). It's a UI mess. I tried switching my family to it since we pay for YT Premium anyway and faced a total revolt.
nunez 2y ago
I found Spotify to be very playlist-oriented. Not great for people who listen to albums straight through. Things like pushing albums to a queue were not possible on the platform (IIRC the best you could do is play albums "next").
- prpl 2y ago
  you can add albums to the queue. Have been able to for a long time.
- gadders 2y ago
  I believe there is some royalty-related reason why Spotify prefers playlists over albums.
- antifa 2y ago
  Spotify is so playlist oriented, we need a button to turn a search into a playlist just to make search usable...
Iflyblue 2y ago
I just learned that Spotify apparently likes to charge you for Taylor Swift while their algorithm pushes their own AI generated music into your ear buds which costs them nothing. That's how CEOs sell a couple billion dollars of stock options. Question is... Are you gonna continue to support him/them/they? I'm not. I'm gonna go for a bike ride right now and leave the ear buds home and listen to the sounds all around me. Take care y'all.
- jamespo 2y ago
  Where did you learn this about AI generated music on Spotify?
  - mutagen 2y ago
    Not OP but there's both accusations of AI generated music [0] and the slightly overlapping issue of Spotify owned music in playlists [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42526803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42526803 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530
  - Iflyblue 2y ago
    I need to correct my comment. I had read the ghost artists story here on YC and that was my referral. I didn't know Spotify was hiring musicians to create music that Spotify then owned the rights to and they pushed onto the consumer essentially paying themselves.
    - dghlsakjg 2y ago
      Spotify hires creators to create content that Spotify owns, then uses their platform to push it onto their own playlists. They aren't subbing out real artists songs for ghost artists when you ask for a specific song. Literally the exact same thing that every video streaming service is doing. Isn't Netflix the biggest production company on earth at this point. At least if its a cover of a song the original artist still gets royalties.
NBJack 2y ago
Especially compared to one of their core competitors in the US market: Amazon Music. I don't know who pissed off who in the world of Amazon, but I'm shocked at how broken the Amazon Music app has been for the last few years. Random stops in the streaming, weird behavior on flagship phones after the app has been in the background for a while, their app store reviews tell more. At the very least they fixed a (long-standing) bug that caused the scrollbar to conflict with side panel UI elements, making it stop/halt when you tried to view long lists of songs. Their fix was: remove the scroll. FWIW, I prefer YT Music simply because the same app on the same phone works beautifully. It ain't perfect (my favorite is the random cross-talk with YouTube at times on 'likes', or when I occasionally see the interface change for a particular song in my play list), but I don't have to reset stuff just to listen to a few tracks in a row.
- throwup238 2y ago
  Oh my lord, reordering the queue or playlists on Amazon Music on iOS is one of the most frustrating interfaces I have ever used. It makes me so mad just thinking about it that I can hardly even pinpoint what’s wrong other than “it is almost but not quite completely broken.”

Mindwipe 2y ago

The YouTube Music UI fails at very basic things. Play a track that Google seems is "for children" and you are unable to navigate to another track or browse without it stopping playing, because the service inherited YT's clumsy COPPA compliance solution. The UI can't cope with long titles. It uses space badly. It doesn't surface content well (no Christmas playlist on the front page during December). It's a UI mess. I tried switching my family to it since we pay for YT Premium anyway and faced a total revolt.

nunez 2y ago

I found Spotify to be very playlist-oriented. Not great for people who listen to albums straight through. Things like pushing albums to a queue were not possible on the platform (IIRC the best you could do is play albums "next").

prpl 2y ago
you can add albums to the queue. Have been able to for a long time.
gadders 2y ago
I believe there is some royalty-related reason why Spotify prefers playlists over albums.
antifa 2y ago
Spotify is so playlist oriented, we need a button to turn a search into a playlist just to make search usable...

Iflyblue 2y ago

I just learned that Spotify apparently likes to charge you for Taylor Swift while their algorithm pushes their own AI generated music into your ear buds which costs them nothing. That's how CEOs sell a couple billion dollars of stock options. Question is... Are you gonna continue to support him/them/they? I'm not. I'm gonna go for a bike ride right now and leave the ear buds home and listen to the sounds all around me. Take care y'all.

jamespo 2y ago
Where did you learn this about AI generated music on Spotify?
- mutagen 2y ago
  Not OP but there's both accusations of AI generated music [0] and the slightly overlapping issue of Spotify owned music in playlists [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42526803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42526803 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530
- Iflyblue 2y ago
  I need to correct my comment. I had read the ghost artists story here on YC and that was my referral. I didn't know Spotify was hiring musicians to create music that Spotify then owned the rights to and they pushed onto the consumer essentially paying themselves.
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago
    Spotify hires creators to create content that Spotify owns, then uses their platform to push it onto their own playlists. They aren't subbing out real artists songs for ghost artists when you ask for a specific song. Literally the exact same thing that every video streaming service is doing. Isn't Netflix the biggest production company on earth at this point. At least if its a cover of a song the original artist still gets royalties.

NBJack 2y ago

Especially compared to one of their core competitors in the US market: Amazon Music. I don't know who pissed off who in the world of Amazon, but I'm shocked at how broken the Amazon Music app has been for the last few years. Random stops in the streaming, weird behavior on flagship phones after the app has been in the background for a while, their app store reviews tell more. At the very least they fixed a (long-standing) bug that caused the scrollbar to conflict with side panel UI elements, making it stop/halt when you tried to view long lists of songs. Their fix was: remove the scroll. FWIW, I prefer YT Music simply because the same app on the same phone works beautifully. It ain't perfect (my favorite is the random cross-talk with YouTube at times on 'likes', or when I occasionally see the interface change for a particular song in my play list), but I don't have to reset stuff just to listen to a few tracks in a row.

throwup238 2y ago
Oh my lord, reordering the queue or playlists on Amazon Music on iOS is one of the most frustrating interfaces I have ever used. It makes me so mad just thinking about it that I can hardly even pinpoint what’s wrong other than “it is almost but not quite completely broken.”