- You cannot shift+click select to easily add playlists into a folder.
- Any podcasts you follow cannot be moved into folders to tidy things up. They just clutter the sidebar.
- You have to click on a tiny arrow to expand a folder. Clicking on the folder navigates inside the folder.
The fact that podcasts are in the same Spotify mega-app is terrible too. And the podcast experience is a complete mess.
I listened to an interview with the head of Spotify product, and he talked about how great it was to have everything in this mega app. I just feel the opposite of everything he said.
It's one of the most popular services in the world, but has one of the worst user experiences of all the apps I use.
And they actually think they are doing a good job at it.
This is really common. It's a sign that the value isn't derived from the software itself, but what the software enables you to do. It doesn't need to be good. People pay to access Spotify's library of music and podcasts, despite the UI.
When you run a startup having people hungry to use your MVP despite it's flaws is a classic signal that you're on to something valuable. I could list hundreds of shockingly bad apps that have awful user experiences that I've happily used over the last 40 years because they all did something I really wanted or needed to do. Almost every 'enterprise' app is a total mess from a UI perspective - but they make a fortune because the value that users get from them make it worth putting up with.
People think a beautiful UI is something that every app needs, but really every app just needs to do something useful. None of them need a good UI until there's a competitor with an equivalent service that has a better UI. Only then does the UI actually matter, because it becomes something users will use to choose which service they buy.
For things I am (and maybe most normal users?) interested in, it works really nice: choose a song, listen to it, listen to the bands other songs, listen to their "radio" with similar songs, find new interesting bands, repeat.
I switch between listening on my phone, my computer, other computers, and my google home devices all day. With Spotify, I can choose which device to choose to from anywhere, and I can also control it from anywhere. I can play music from my laptop, then change songs from my phone, then send it to my google home speakers whenever I'd like.
Tidal didn't have that. Didn't even have google home integration. Didn't even have a desktop app on Linux. I switched back in less than a day. As annoying as Spotify's app can be sometimes, it's the service that works across all my devices, and can switch between all my devices.
How do you use Spotify to discover new music? What am I doing wrong?
Anyway it’s a complicated subject. I read somewhere nobody wants the same out of their music app and that’s why most of the time they end up being weird pieces of software in order to try and satisfy everybody.
Also, their AI DJ makes no sense. The worst part about radio is the DJ saying nonsense between songs, and they added AI to say nonsense between songs. I was just looking for a way for it to play songs I’d probably like based on other songs/artists I like. With Apple I’d simply tell Siri, “play good music” and it would play a radio station with my name on it (without an interrupting fake DJ).
Yup, sounds exactly like what a DJ does. I was driving, waiting at a traffic light, watching the minutes go by. 8 minutes. DJ still kept blabbing. Every radio station I turned to, there was a DJ saying nonsense. There's more DJ nonsense than music. That's the point I downloaded Joox, which I later switched to Spotify, and then later to YouTube Music.
I guess at some point, people listen to so much music that they want to hear a commentary or alternate view on that music. Spotify is probably at that maturity level where its listeners don't even want music anymore.
If it was actually giving me some backstory or saying something interesting, I'd get it as a feature. Like VH1's pop up videos. That wasn't what was going on.
I didn't know Spotify did this. Who on earth would want to listen to that nonsense by choice? That's like making a recipe app that removes all the random pointless SEO filler from before each recipe, but then uses AI to add it back in.
If you've got a broad music taste I'd recommend using the song radio for a song which fits the profile of what you're looking for. I've found it much more effective for building playlists of new music then some of their other discovery tools.
Thanks. Being new to Spotify, I wasn't sure what key words I was looking for in the UI to trigger this kind of thing. I see where to do that now.
"Start a Jam" sounded like it would be it, but after looking it up, that wasn't what I wanted at all.
Apple Music isn’t perfect, but it has a more focused UI that makes it easier to find music.
I wish Spotify/Deezer/Apple had an SDK like libspotify used to be so that one could just write a simpler & faster client.
Fun fact, AFAICT the fastest growing major podcast platform is re-uploads of podcasts to youtube. Which makes no sense on most mobile platforms, but at least the visibility of entries to the public will be high.
Why? I watch a lot of podcasts on youtube, it's interesting to see the interaction, so the visual component is not a negative.
In fact, the vast majority of podcasts I've heard aren't audio-only. The only one audio-only ones I've listened to are the old Opie and Anthony show uploads.
The other one, I was not able to "teach" the algorithm what I like even after 3 months.
FWIW, Tidal isn't all it's hyped up to be either; they also do some dumb stuff. But it's a solid competitor that at least isn't Spotify.
For example why is there no "stop after song" feature, sometimes I do not want to be "engaged" but really just listen to one song/podcast and then no more, without having to stop some random shit afterwards.
It's barely usable for radio plays (favorites, queue, last played, ...) as it does act on songs not albums in general.
I migrated to Deezer then started downloading flacs from Deezer and serving them with Plexamp.
I'm now actually trying out other services, the official youtube music app won't even launch since I don't have google play services. But there's a lot of free/open-source clients too so I'm currently going through these.
i suspect the client is loading "something else" (artwork, lyrics, canvas animation) over the network
On Linux is even worse.
You can add albums from the Apple Music catalog to your library. In iTunes on Mac you can change the tags if you want ("Making Movies (2020 remaster)" → "Making Movies" or something). You can easily star music, download for offline use, listen in lossless, create playlists, on Mac create smart playlists ("All albums where artis is "AC/DC" and year is between 1980 and 1990") etc.
I purchase FLAC on bandcamp and add them to my plex library. The mobile app lets me stream and download to the device from anywhere
It’s the modern day equivalent of collecting CDs. These releases will never leave the platform and you own it outright.
They even launched a suggested playlist feature based on ML analysis of your library. It’s not half bad
And since they often encode from the 24-bit studio masters you will get better audio quality than ripping from CDs yourself and likely from most “pay as you go” sites.
Also find it curious that there's apparently no Bluetooth hot key to "like" the current song, only single click for play/pause and double for skip. Bit maybe that's a Bluetooth headphone protocol thing?
Not using the mobile version that much, so I can't give feedback on that, but the desktop player is getting worse and worse for the past few years: searching, discovering (by browsing), library/playlist management etc.
It's like the Spotify guys are not even using Spotify anymore :)
Not great when you’re trying to listen to a 700 episode series!
With the mobile app, I would often notice Spotify loading album artwork, lyris, artist information and even video before playing the music. It's network prioritisation is deeply disconnected from the users wants.
I remember when Spotify heavily optimised to play music in the quickest possible time. Enshittification indeed.
My biggest bugbear is how the web app is just as atrocious. If you leave it open too long without playing something, it just won't play the next song you select (just keeps loading forever) until you reload the page. That and the general latency in UI responsiveness (Is this a server issue because I'm in Africa?)
For a company with so many engineers, designers, etc, they really miss enough low hanging fruit that they turn into papercuts. All of what I've mentioned have been issues for years.
All that being said, I haven't moved off. I still like the Discover Weekly list and the algo is pretty well tuned to my likes so I can't be bothered to train YT Music/Apple Music/whatever to find me new stuff.
"I'm totally lost in this shitty UI, I have no idea how it's supposed to work" looks very much like "I love this interface, I could spend hours just looking at it" if all you have is analytics data.
Spotify optimises for music/podcast/audiobooks hours consumed or songs added to playlist/downloads etc. Being lost in the UI would very much be a negative signal in the data, and easy to separate out from "I love the app and am able to play the content I want" for any analytics team.
No correlation implied.
When you have investors pushing money to spend, project managers that have to show something, and hordes of developers under your employ, even the best software experiences will succumb to feature bloat, change for the sake of change, and tooling churn.
Windows, Slack, and Spotify are perfect examples of once decent products that somehow get buggier, slower, and more confusing with every release.
Very few companies have the wherewithal to just pause, evaluate their product, and say: "nah, this is good".
* $ sudo apt install vlc fzf
* $ rvlc "$(ls | fzf)"
