I feel like most music systems, Spotify too, does a kind of violence to the album structure, with all their playlists and shuffling and whatnot. The very idea of "streaming" is vaguely antithetical to the album structure and to the idea of possessing discrete artifacts... If I designed the perfect music player for me, it would almost be a kind of simulator of a record collection with a record player.
Anyway, I am also completely uninterested in Spotify's "social" features. I think their metadata interface is pretty poor and their "Related Artists" is totally haphazard compared to the actual musical knowledge embedded in databases like AllMusicGuide (which I adore).
I also get irrationally upset about Spotify's prominent display of what I call lifestyle propaganda, like their playlists of the day like "Saturday Beach Party Bonanza" or "Yoga Morning Zen Relaxathon" or whatever. (For some reason I never see "Technical Death Metal Tuesday" or "Zappaesque Hell Jazz Extravaganza" or "Lonely Bong Haze Headphone Friday".)
So I dream of a music player with another type of appeal, more album orientation, more facts and knowledge based relational metadata, and better catalogue curation (Spotify's artist pages are overloaded and unorganized and the metadata for classical and jazz especially are messy).
A digital music manager should be at least as good as a physical shelf of albums that you sort, browse, and select; otherwise what's the point? No digital music player has accomplished even that.
Some enhancements a digital album-centric manager would provide over physical items on shelves are: searching and sorting via metadata, putting albums in multiple "Shelves", and tracking listening statistics (not as an aggregate of track statistics, but at the album-level).
My would-be media manager also supports "Mixtapes" (like playlists, except in set order and ideally with a length limit) which can be placed on Shelves alongside released Albums. Similarly, long "Live Recordings" have first-class status like Albums and Mixtapes and can be put on Shelves (even though they may be a single "track"/file). Finally, dynamic playlists of tracks are replaced by "Dynamic Shelves" of Albums/Mixtapes/Recordings, so you can quickly get to your recent-most-played or highly-played-you-haven't-played-recently, but always as sets of songs that should be listened to together, in order.
