Spotify was down (opens in new tab)

We've been conditioned to just accepting that random outages and corporate decisions can take things away from us, but it is a ridiculous proposition that only benefits the bottom line of the service providers. I understand that the "convenience" angle might be attractive to some, but personally I don't think it's worth the trade-offs.

And this is not just about music, or movies. It applies to all forms of data that we have collectively agreed can just live in the cloud, because the cloud will always be there and we don't have to think about it. Until one morning you find that the cloud is unavailable, and so is all your data.

Physical media is inconvenient in a lot of ways, but to me is still an infinitely better proposition than trusting a bunch of random companies to provide me with access to digital media.

From another perspective living in the US I'm pretty grateful that the power is super stable because so many things I rely on need power and they almost always work. In India it's common to have rolling blackouts so people are quite adapted to outages daily.

Again, a temporary issue and one that happens quite infrequently, but if you already may have conflicting opinions on whether it's better to own or rent your music, this is certainly a valid point.

edit: mobile typos

Sadly, the list of such sites seems to be shrinking with every passing year, and I've found many artists I'd like to support by buying their stuff, but they only offer streaming options. I've noticed it happens more frequently with artists that have been scooped up by a major label or one of its subsidiaries, unsurprisingly.

also, show me how my monthly subscription is divided up while you're at it.

Alas that's illegal in the UK

Explain please, in what way do I not own the media I bought?

EDIT: responding to your edit:

> Now of course, technically, Warner can't go after your CD collection

and non-technically, what's the "subtle but important" difference here?

I use it a lot while driving, and have to reach down to swipe the screen to skip a song. This is a pretty mindless, natural motion. Sometimes though (till I found out you can disable it) it would switch into car mode with no warning, meaning I need to look down, see the difference, and push the skip button with some precision, potentially dangerous. Why the car mode couldn’t use the swipes is beyond me, or why it exists in the first place.

I’ve since turned that off but my frustration is now from the lyrics feature. It’s neat, and interesting in very specific scenarios, but I wish I could turn it off. A diagonal swipe brings it up, meaning I have to check it, swipe down, and then try again, too much for a previously thoughtless action.

Yeah I don’t use it for its “intended purpose”, but these are little ux roadblocks that could improve others experiences. I don’t see why it can’t be slightly different.

It really pisses me off that they charge what feels like a disproportionate amount (certainly more than I've ever spent on music elsewhere), offer a very simple service only passably well, then waste their revenue on SV dev salaries (with no obvious benefit to the users in features or stability) - and of course their illustrious podcast hosts.

Trivial example: the Home button that doesn't reliably take you home. It's some sort of home/back hybrid where you're never quite sure what it's going to do (this is on iOS). Instead have two buttons: one for Home and one for Back. Then we'd all know what to expect when we pressed one of them. Not difficult, is it?

More substantive example: poor integration, to the point of being dangerous, with Apple Carplay, and a generally crappily optimised, unresponsive and, yes, dangerous experience for driving with or without it. Every time my Apple Carplay connection fails it's due to Spotify. Every. Single. Time. Screw you, Spotify: I couldn't give a damn about Joe Rogan but if you don't fix your poor quality, dangerous user experience I'll cancel, because it's not worth a horrific car accident just to switch to a different playlist.

(Tangentially, since I mentioned Joe Rogan already, I'm unpleased that a bunch of songs have disappeared from my playlists because of Spotify's poor and purely reactive handling of his podcast. I like the fact that he talks to people from a range of viewpoints, many of which I disagree with: I don't like the fact that it took a social media fiasco and a bunch of artists leaving to label and tag his episodes more responsibly. You should have known what you bought when you acquired rights to his podcast: it's called due diligence. You should have had, and implemented, a business integration plan, in place from day one. Who spends $100M+ without doing this? I'm guessing all you saw is subscriber numbers. Stop being lazy.)

I wish I could reincarnate Steve Jobs so he could go and work at Spotify and fire Daniel Ek and Gustav Söderström in an elevator because I honestly can't think of two individuals more deserving of such a fate.

(Btw, I realise the thinking here is likely that if you have the artists maybe the product doesn't matter so much but, as the Rogan incident shows, having the artists isn't guaranteed. You need subscribers onboard too, to ensure that artists are less tempted by other platforms an options, which means the UX needs to be solid. Clearly it's not at the moment.)

That's why Spotify has been slow on introducing new features or fixing existing ones.

For what it's worth, I have had good results with Apple Music. It works great as a "custom jukebox in the sky" for me.

I use iTunes installed from the Windows Store and just drag my own music files onto iTunes. It syncs them to Apple Music where the files stand right alongside the streamed tracks from the paid service. I can put them in playlists together, edit metadata for my own tracks or Apple Music ones, see (and add!) lyrics, and so on. They even have an Android mobile app.

The trade off for that very cheap renting model instead of owning it, is you can get kicked out anytime for any reason.

To be fair to Spotify it never happened to me before. Maybe it’s their DRM that just locks you out if it can’t reach the server with a timeout of 1 hour or so (1 hour conditional on the last attempt being a failure).

Dunno if "combat mode" GPS is a thing anymore with GLONASS etc.

Perhaps they assume I'm overqualified, but that seems odd, especially in this climate.

This is Sweden too, where the situation is a bit more dire w.r.t. engineers.