No other company do I hate and love so much. I love their discovery algorithms and find new music through them so often. I look forward to my new Discover Weekly every Monday.
But in every other way they drive me crazy. The UI is terrible and basic but I've learned to live with it. What I absolutely can't stand is inserting podcasts and audio books into the app with no option to opt-out.
I get that they want to put these things in front of as many people as possible, but it's a shame that happens at the expense of those of us who don't want that cluttering up their libraries. Let me turn it off. Why can't I turn it off?
Software interfaces in general have regressed severely since the mid-2000s. Media players are a perfect example. There was 10x more functionality in Winamp or Windows Media Player than we get in Spotify or Apple Music today.
What is going on? Why are things getting dumber? Are we just optimizing too hard for the lowest common denominator and the average user wants things to be dead simple?
I don't want to believe software has to be this basic. As software has become mainstream I think we've created a self-reinforcing myth that it has to be simplistic for people to want it. I think we can afford to ask users to think for a couple of seconds about the interface they're using.
Same for Netflix. A basic UI like Popcorn time is all that most people need. Instead we get a situation where both the UI and content is randomized, constantly shuffled. The simplest of use cases are barely supported or completely missing.
It's not just incompetence, they are intentional dark patterns. Netflix doesn't want you to structurally browse their catalog in easy ways as you might conclude that it falls short. So it throws random things at you, auto-playing videos, etc. Giving the inflated impression that there's always something interesting for you.
Likewise, user reviews, an absolutely basic community feature, is simply not there. Because if it would be there, and assuming they are fair reviews, you could filter by rating. Which once again could reveal a lack of quality content. Best to mask that.
It's sad to consider that the output of hundreds of engineers and some very high-tech data science leads to something a single engineer in mum's basement could do better.
>There was 10x more functionality in Winamp or Windows Media Player than we get in Spotify or Apple Music today.
Except for the extremely useful functionality of putting a large percentage of the world's music at your fingertips ready for instant listening. Spotify also makes curated playlists ("This Is _[Artist Name]__" playlists), artist pages that show their most popular tracks and discographies, offers professionally mixed playlists, social sharing of playlists, sharing of songs, and works on mobile, desktop, web, and tablets.
It also lets you have a library made up of both local files and Spotify licensed files on the network. It has selective download of songs you want to listen to offline (even licensed songs). It has both regular playlists and ad hoc queues. You can make playlists public, share with certain friends, share with all friends, make them collaboratively editable or not.
It's actually kind of a staggering achievement.
I get that the player could be better, and maybe Winamp had some features it should steal, but let's appreciate that it has solved many, many problems that no one was addressing 20 years ago. (And I must say, I can't conceive how Winamp could have had 10x the functionality as Spotify or Apple Music - this seems quite an overstatement, as someone who used it c2000 and uses Spotify now. Maybe you meant it had more of the functionality that you care about (presuming you only care about listening to files you own and have downloaded).)
I agree with the GP. Yes, the infrastructure is great, but the client itself is trash. Winamp consumed 1% of my CPU twenty years ago, Spotify consumes 10% now. Not only do they mostly do the same thing, but Winamp did much more.
This is a major, major regression, that we have machines thousands of times faster but the software is an order of magnitude slower and more resource-hungry than back then on the much faster machines.
99% of what you described is the same basic playlist system.
It's a virtual list of songs that can be shared/edited by multiple accounts and where the songs themselves are just pointers to the copy-protected bitstreams on the Spotify network.
If we could legally do so, a p2p music player would do even more, so from an engineering perspective I'm not impressed, this is the price of doing things legally I guess and even with the legalities, there is still some pushback against spotify.
I suppose the only way forward to having an actually good application is to rent a catalogue. Streaming a set of things and the application tries to organize the best it can. Decouple the application from the provider. Instead of the mess we have now... but alas, that's just wishful thinking.
Offline songs is my biggest gripe, they are impossible to find / filter for. To find them (i.e. on a flight) I pretty much have to go into my settings and switch to offline mode.
As a frontend dev I blame it entirely on the "co-design" fad and the rise of A/B testing. When I started 10 years ago the idea was that a designer can objectively produce a good UX using their skills (of course validating it with real users).
These days it seems to be treated more like social science with never ending broad discovery work to answer questions like "How do our users feel"? This stuff is important but I feel is often used to justify decisions poorly compared to a more quantitate approach.
But largely I think A/B testing is to blame, we get more conversions this way (or maybe with spotify user's listen to more tracks / have longer sessions with this particular interface). Often the metric measured is profit driven rather than user enjoyment as well.
> Are we just optimizing too hard for the lowest common denominator and the average user wants things to be dead simple?
Yup, but note that things can be both simple and powerful. I think there's also for some reason the expectation that people want fewer features on mobile than on desktop devices.
I used to love the Discovery Weekly list as well. But since a couple of years, my account recommendations went into some strange niche solution and they recommend the same rubbish over and over again.
I even get annoyed at certain genres that I used to mildly enjoy before.
If you try to look for a solution, apparently the only way is to cancel the subscription, delete the account, resubscribe and start over ...
I wish there was a way to reset the "intelligent" recommendations for an existing account.
The only workaround I found: put a couple of similar and interesting songs into a playlist and let Spotify continue with recommendations.
I've heard that their algorithm now prioritizes lower licensing cost songs even if their algos rank them as a lower possible match for you. It also seems like their curated playlists prioritize lower quality songs now too, so I try to find better user generated ones.
Why does everything go from good to the lowest mediocrity companies can get away with?
This has always been the problem with Spotify for years but I guess it got worse and more blatant now. There has never been any incentive for the platform to be recommendations neutral and nowhere did they specify how they treat songs and labels from different artists.
Whats particularly egregious with Spotify is that their recommended method of improving your recommendations is to just "listen more to things you like". It's so disingenuous.
Literally: they keep recommending variations of the same song over and over. And if I'm not mistaken, not even variations, but the same song over and over.
Each time I mark it as "remove".
I visit my Discover Weekly about once a month because there's almost never anything of value in there. I'd find more gems with a random list of 30 songs.
My biggest pet peeve with the Spotify iOS app is the offline mode - it’s total garbage.
- Every time you open the app you get a “turn on wifi to enable downloads” alert. This may or may not be an iOS thing
- I try to navigate to an artist or album I’ve downloaded and I just see loading spinners until it finally times out and shows me my offline content
- Music I’ve previously downloaded just…not available - i.e. It needs to be redownloaded. Well thanks a lot Spotify - leaves me shit out of luck when I want to listen to something you’ve deemed as “expired”. My most recent one being Taylor Swift’s Midnights this evening, an album that came out and I downloaded on Friday.
But in every other way they drive me crazy. The UI is terrible and basic but I've learned to live with it. What I absolutely can't stand is inserting podcasts and audio books into the app with no option to opt-out.
I get that they want to put these things in front of as many people as possible, but it's a shame that happens at the expense of those of us who don't want that cluttering up their libraries. Let me turn it off. Why can't I turn it off?