This is a big frustration of mine, too. The other is that Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful.
The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface, which is actually what I recently started doing: https://i.imgur.com/ar7VrYy.png.
It's still work in progress but actually works perfectly well already. It's not ready for public use yet and also isn't open source yet though. If you want to follow development I guess the best place to do that is my twitter: https://twitter.com/tom_j_watson.
15 years ago when I worked in the music streaming space we also had to push users to playlists instead of albums. The reason, in Germany at least, was that a playlist only payed 1/10 the royalties to the GEMA [1] than an album playthrough. Playlists were classified as ¨radio¨ and thus a performance of the radio station but an album was the performance of the original artist.
Our interface was optimized for low royalties, not the end user. Maybe it is the same situation now.
I was getting the feeling that search has become increasingly crappier. Not just Spotify, but also in other places like Google, Facebook and DuckDuckGo. Search for anything and you'll get something "pausibly deniability" close to what you typed, but optimized for metrics that are way beyond the user's comprehension.
I feel like singling out Facebook, the worst offender: Their search is optimized for "engagement", i.e., distracting you from what you originally looked for, without you immediately realizing it.
Hah, I searched “cam” in the windows search bar the other day looking to open the camera app, but windows decided I was actually looking for “Calculator” or a handful of other things that didn’t have a single “M” in it listed ahead of the actual camera app.
Getting a bit off-topic here but YES, this drives me bonkers.
Worse yet is that if I pause there for a moment, the search results continue to reorganize themselves, so that by the time I'm ready with a screenshot, the wrong answer has vanished. I can only catch it on video.
This has been the absolute biggest surprise from me switching to MacOS after years in windows land. I can hit enter on my spotlight search results before they’re rendered and be confident. I don’t event need cmd+tab anymore. MS on the other hand STILL doesn’t have a search right, and they have a search engine. FYI this was a running joke at MS when I worked there, there is no search in any MS product that is functional. If you’re lucky you’ll get exact string matching, sometimes not even that?
Not enough people complained, and/or voted with their dollars and/or attention.
The few people who do complain are inevitably answered with the ever-present refrain of the Windows fan club ("You just don't like change!"), which effectively cuts off any avenues for argument in favor of the perfectly-good status quo. The only way forward from that point is down.
A related issue is when autocorrect “corrects” things that I’ve spelled correctly, which drives me absolutely nuts. The other day I was texting someone about music and I wrote “melodies” which was “corrected” to “Melodie’s”. In fact on iOS this is still happening as I write this!
> I was getting the feeling that search has become increasingly crappier.
Whether that is a consequence of it becoming harder, or by design is the important question. I can think of a few reasons an uninformed or misinformed general public would benefit some people.
AFAIK royalties are paid out for every stream over 30 seconds long. The 'context' (album, playlist, single play) doesn't matter. "royalties [are] based on an artist’s share of overall streams across the platform" [1]
My guess is that playlists lead to more engagement than albums. Users listen longer, and discover new music, which leads to more listening in the future.
Same, I love Bandcamp, and I am truly worried that Epic will find a way to ruin it. It is one of the last places on the internet I know of where you can easily buy music for download (i.e. you actually own it).
I use Bandcamp. I started because many of the artists I listen too, put their music on Bandcamp. I briefly considered paying for Spotify, but at every turn they make it difficult to get to the music I want to play. Why would I pay for that?
On Spotify the reason is similar but structurally different. With algorithmic playlists they can tinker with the mix of songs - they can choose what the average royalty payout should be as a target variable for the song mix, so that both more expensive and cheaper songs are used.
>Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful.
Does anyone else get a dystopian vibe from this statement? I feel like the old guy in the SF movie pulling his hair and exclaiming, "But what have we lost?!" We used to have vinyl, tapes, finally CDs, and even the ability to rip our library to a computer, which we could carry with us. It was naturally artist/album/track organized, required no internet, came with no tracking, centralized control, or subscription.
(A year ago I bought a (now very cheap) nice CD player, a (now very cheap) separate amp and speakers, and a nice (somehow not very cheap) turntable, and it's great! I even kind of like the strong bias toward playing the same album multiple times - good music is complex, intricate, and it rewards relistening like a book rewards rereading. And listening the way the artist recorded is, IMHO, far superior to the digital dystopian DJ of spotify.)
Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?
Not really, there is a lot missing from Spotify, and not just obscure music. And you have to accept the fact that music may (and does) go missing at any time.
Plus, even for songs that are on the platform, you are forced to listen to what version they have, which is almost always a "remastered" version. Example: early Beatles songs have vocals hard-panned to one side, which sounds terrible on headphones. It sounds way better on the original mono version.
Spotify is a mediocre experience at best for music nerds, which is probably what the person you're responding to is (has an amp and speakers, vinyl, etc).
Worse is that the missing stuff is constantly shifting. I'll add a whole album (worth of songs) to a playlist, and a few months later one of them is grayed out but the rest still work.
The Spotify forums seem to suggest this is because someone licensed that one song differently and conditions have changed, so I'm no longer entitled to play it.
That seems bonkers to me, but regardless of the reason, the effect is infuriating.
I ditched Spotify a while back and I'm slowly clawing my way back into physical CDs, ripping and encoding (or not even bothering to encode; storing as plain WAV still doesn't take that much space given modern hard drives), and trying to ensure that songs don't vanish out from under me ever again.
Yeah, you're right in that sense. Honestly my post is a little over-dramatic because I'm venting based on these experiences I've had with Spotify. Overall, it does offer a lot and I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it.
Poorly. Quantity may be a quality all it's own, but that quality is poor. There is a lot of music that is not on Spotify, while other music is there but only inferior versions.
I’ve found the combination of Apple Music and a nice script to quickly import stuff from bandcamp to navidrome has all my needs met. Music discovery? Talking to people and going to gigs has me covered.
Anything I like I can easily access in ALAC on any device from anywhere in the world.
True, I have experienced that. I love the apps, but I ended up switching to youtube premium due to that.
Anything that isn't in youtube music as a song, usually is available as a video either uploaded by the artists themselves or as a "not so legal" upload. Not a fan of the apps though.
> Example: early Beatles songs have vocals hard-panned to one side, which sounds terrible on headphones. It sounds way better on the original mono version.
Somewhat agreed, although I suspect that may be more of an Apple/Beatles decision as to what versions to make available. Having 3-4 versions of each song may create more confusion for people. But... it's a shame that many of those versions aren't available (original mono, original stereo, remastered mono, remastered stereo, etc). I do see that Apple Music has some more options (US box set, for example), but even then, those are the US stereo/mono, and the UK mono/stereo mixes are, in some/many cases, different.
isn't that.. exactly what a dystopia is? The archetypical dystopia is superficially utopian, often driven by tech progress and excess of comfort. They're not torturing people in cages in Brave New World, they're giving them too much Soma
There's a previous post/survey about where HN readers are located. A large amount are in California (me included). The Bay Area in particular does pay > $100k for most tech jobs. That said, taxes are so high and real estate here is so expensive that it's really hard to get a place you own.
The difference is who controls the software, and ultimately what their incentives are. Back then, you imagined the software serving you - details you hadn't thought of were to be be fleshed out in a way that made sense to you, to serve your interests.
Now it's like our old dreams in name only. It hits all the bullet points, but the functionality is all wrong because companies want to make users the dataset rather than operators in control. And while one of their incentives is user satisfaction, it's competing with engagement, revenue side channels, price discrimination, etc.
> I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button
Yes, but the OP's point is that it's not really at the "click of a button" because the search appears designed specifically to make it easy to find playlists of songs but not individual songs (likely for royalty reduction reasons).
When I was a kid, I naively imagined when I was in my 50s, as I am now, we'd be much closer to many of the visions of future painted in media from Popular Mechanics magazine to science fiction. Today, I understand and accept why we don't have the proverbial "flying cars", but I am disappointed when stuff we already recently had (and could easily still have) is unavailable for bad reasons. As a technologist, I find this especially frustrating.
Audio quality was garbage then too. We have rose-tinted memories of people with hundreds-then thousands-now worth of audio equipment. The average tin can radio in a car or in your house in the 80s was so comically bad compared to now that you'd think it was anachronistically bad. Frankly phones sound better than those cars LOL
For the same money as your glorious 80s stereo, adjusted up, you can still get glorious audio today.
My wife has a 1983 Panasonic turntable/radio/cassette player that she uses sometimes. We're talking about low build quality, hot pink, designed for the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl who will listen while simultaneously squeeing on a three-way call on a Garfield phone. It's not bad. Neither of us have perfect hearing, and are far from audiophiles.
The key is the right media for the right device.
When she's playing brand new, 180-gram, super-hipster vinyl, her expensive modern gear in the living room is where it sounds best.
But when she's playing a 1983 copy of Girls Just Want To Have Fun, it sounds best on the pink Panasonic. Pretty much any record made before 2000 sounds better on the period-correct turntable, compared with the high-end player, and vice-versa.
She will only listen to cassettes — new or old — on the 1983 machine, even though she has a Panasonic cassette boom box that she bought in Japan in 2019. The old gear just sounds better.
More and more she's been finding music on Apple Music during her lunch hour, then buying the vinyl or cassette to listen to the music at home. Again, she's not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but she finds the sound of analog much more pleasant. To me, it's pretty close, but less "sterile," for lack of a better word.
You'll be hard pressed to buy comically bad earbud nowadays. In terms of fidelity and price, average earbuds beat an average 80s stereo so hard, it's not even funny.
Um, what? I mean, sure wired $15 earbuds exist that sound amazing, but their existence does NOT preclude the existence of terrible earbuds, especially of the BT variety.
Err, no? I have a pair of cheap airpod imitation, best selling on Amazon with 4 stars (and reviews looked REAL), and they suck so hard that I had better quality with my walkman copy with its earbuds in 1988.
Yeah but I don't care about 99.9% of that, and a lot of that other 0.1% isn't even on Spotify.
You could say the same thing about an all-you-can-eat buffet. You won't end up eating the whole restaurant, and if you do they'll kick you out.
"Basically every song ever recorded" is a red herring to strip you of ownership of your media.
To say nothing of all the playlists I've made that have holes blown in them like swiss cheese because the streaming rights got revoked. What if Spotify turns the way of Netflix?
I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. In the streaming era, it's easier than ever before to discover new artists and listen to an unprecedented variety of music with minimal investment. If it's slightly cumbersome to listen to albums on Spotify, it's still much less cumbersome that going to a store to buy a CD or purchasing online and waiting for it to arrive + keeping your collection physically organized and in good condition. I don't absolutely love Spotify but I'm not going back to a CD collection.
We've lost: cover art, liner notes, the ability to share or sell your music without 3rd party permission, music stores, and in many cases local music scenes that formed around music stores. Bret Victor has been harping on this for years, but we've also lost a great deal of tactility - putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play it uses your hands in pleasant ways that screens just aren't.
As for discovery, the promise is greater than reality. I used Spotify for a while specifically for this purpose, but I didn't discover a single new artist through it. YouTube, by contrast, has introduced me to new artists, as have a few radio stations like KCRW and KQED (who both have excellent YT channels too). And you know what? Music discovery is a different mode of listening than enjoying my library and ne'er the twain shall meet, IMHO.
Spotify does have cover art for albums, at least for me it does.
> Music discovery is a different mode of listening
For me it really is the same mode. I regularly discover new artists when my handcrafted playlists finish playing and it starts to play music based on the playlist I just listened to
> I didn't discover a single new artist through it.
That's surprising. I've never used Spotify for this, but 10+ years ago used Pandora for that purpose. I was overjoyed with the new artists I learned about.
someone who very clearly hates Spotify for ideological reasons
Why would you say that? It's a pretty harsh dig, and it's not justified. I tried Spotify and didn't like it. I never said I hated it. I don't like it because I weight its trade-offs differently than you. I mean, have YOU tried the alternative I've suggested? If not, is it because of your ideology?
1. Cover art / liner notes - any given digital album can include links to these notes or even a website with the cover art, and if you're referring to the physical component I would argue that's just less trash that comes with the predominant reason for me purchasing music... which is the music.
2. Ability to share music - I frequently share music from Spotify all the time, either using the Spotify link and sending it to my friends over Chat, or even just telling them the name of it and they can frequently find the exact song on YouTube.
3. Ability to sell music - since I'm not really purchasing the music on Spotify I don't feel like this is a fair argument
4. Music stores - i'll give you this one though for a lot of us we simply don't have the free time to physically browse for music in a brick and mortar store.
5. Discovery - anecdotal of course but I've had the exact opposite experience, the Discover weekly list that Spotify provides invariably introduces me to new artists that I would've otherwise never even heard of, and if I like a song I can look for playlists curated by users that contain that song, which is an additional avenue of discovery.
Man I used to put CDs in players all day long, I don't miss it a single bit. I was one of the first MP3 player adopters and never looked back. I also used tapes. Was happy to ditch those for CDs too. Never used vinyl though. Maybe I would have liked that more than tapes and CDs. Seems plausible enough, but then again maybe not.
As someone with mobility impairment, putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play was never pleasant. In fact I was often stuck with whatever five CDs were left in the player. CDs actually haven't gone away, and you can still use them today. I am glad the world has moved on though.
Many people bring up the "discover new music" argument. It is probably subjective, but for me this has never been an issue. There are so many way to discover new music today, there are tons on youtube and people recommend in the comments, you see a mention of something and head over to Wikipedia, follow some links, and so on. I don't need an algorithm for it, an algorithm that most likely is more optimized for revenue than anything else.
Streaming has sacrificed so much at the altar of "discovery". Sometimes you want discovery and sometimes you don't. More and more, I'm finding I don't care about discovery and just want to listen to my music. If it's a choice between my old late-2000s era iPod loaded with my carefully curated list of albums and streaming services which are optimized for "discovery" and "engagement" and require the network to be online, I pick the iPod any day of the week.
Other people like streaming, and want The Algorithm to feed them discovery, and that's fine--it's just not for me.
> an algorithm that most likely is more optimized for revenue than anything else.
Yup, that is the core issue. We have all this great tech, but then deploy it against ourselves. The peak is when FB optimized for polarized (ahem fake) content, because that is what drives "engagement".
I'm not sure what is the solution here. Regulations around more algorithmic transparency? "Low tech" alternatives? User education?
it's easier than ever before to discover new artists
Not really.
It's easier than ever to be exposed to a select group of pre-selected songs by a small subset of artists churned out by a computer program for the purpose of getting you to continue your subscription. That's not discovery.
Go into any real music store, like Louisiana Music Factory in New Orleans, Amoeba Music in Los Angeles, or Electric Fetus in Minneapolis, and you'll find thousands of albums and artists that are not on streaming, never have been on streaming, and never will be on streaming.
The tech companies have made people believe that they're seeing everything, but they're not. They're just looking through a keyhole into the world of music.
For example, Apple boasts something like 90 million songs on Apple Music. The reality check is that's probably less than 1% of the world's recorded music.
People on HN rail against "walled gardens" in app stores, and then wall themselves into one streaming service or the other because they bought the infinite music hype, and don't even know it.
I'm not sure I understand what your point is, that since digital discovery doesn't provide every single artist in perpetuity throughout the universe that it is somehow not useful as an avenue of discovery?
I can spin this argument directly around and guarantee that if you go to the Louisiana music factory in New Orleans, that for every artist and album they know about, there are 1000 international or country specific artists that are available only online to listeners in America via online channels.
My results from discovering new artists have been far superior on community oriented places vs spotify or any streaming service. Algos just suck at this.
I'm not really arguing that Spotify has the greatest music discover system but if you read about an album, it costs you nothing to try it out. Prior to subscription services and digital music it would be a 10$ investment that you may or may not make.
It is not actually easier. It is theoretically more available. Practically, current tech is designed to keep you in one bubble and makes it harder to step put of it.
The physicality of cassettes/records/CDs/mini-disks was fun, and listening to an entire album sometimes was really cool - but almost entirely not. Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off. Remember, an album in 1985 cost $40 in 2022 dollars. Sure, there were occasional albums that the artist really thought about, including the slipcase, and the physicality of that I miss. But you can still great albums and listen to them in their entirety. Revisiting that nostalgia in 2022 recently, and I've found the joy from an album isn't really what it used to be - mostly because we aren't trapped anymore.
Want to listen to albums? Stop using Spotify. I honestly don't get why people choose that one. Youtube music blows it out of the water, and you can get ad-free youtube with it as well, and share all of it with your "family". Plus it has whole albums as one of the options when you search for artist/song.
> Most albums were padded with crap to fill it up so people didn't feel ripped off.
This may be true, but you could always just buy the good albums. I owned a number of CDs/cassettes back in the day and I would listen to them and enjoy them front-to-back, over and over.
Another aspect of it is that very often what's familiar sounds good, so by listening to the whole album, all of it (or more of it) would start to sound good, not just the radio tracks you were already familiar with.
Finally, there are tracks on some albums that may seem odd, or not even particularly musical out of context, but still add to the overall experience (e.g. "Fitter, Happier" on OK Computer, or the instrumental filler tracks on Ill Communication).
I 100% agree about the different experience of listening to good/great/amazing albums and the benefits of doing so. It's just that it is a pretty rare experience, particularly these days! A definite downside of our current music situation is that making an album like that is something that is really exceptional, since people rarely listen to music in that manner anymore. However, I wonder if the total number of "holistic" albums are greater now, just because there is far more music being made? :thinking-emoji:
I wore out my Synchronicity tape back in the 80s :) Listened to the album randomly a couple of months ago and it is spooky how the experience re-asserted itself into my being. I just know every nook and cranny of the album.
>I 100% agree about the different experience of listening to good/great/amazing albums and the benefits of doing so. It's just that it is a pretty rare experience, particularly these days!
Yes - I suspect many kids who are happy with Spotify haven't had the experience. (It's actually a similar trade-off with broadcast TV - I'm realizing now with kids the downsides to having on-demand every episode of every show ever made, versus having to wait until next week and having to be there at a particular time. Gives you time to digest, anticipate, and enjoy. And I always muted the ad breaks, which made them tolerable.)
>Revisiting that nostalgia in 2022 recently, and I've found the joy from an album isn't really what it used to be
Maybe you haven't found the right albums? You should listen to St. Vincent's first 3 albums - they are really good. More recently, Emma Ruth Rundle "On Dark Horses" is fantastic, or anything by Lisa Hannigan. Recording artists are more and more aware that people are not consuming albums in one sitting, but that's still how music is produced! Vinyl is one reason but another, I think, is that "album" is the most useful abstraction for the artist to think in when it comes to making a thing.
> Want to listen to albums? Stop using Spotify. I honestly don't get why people choose that one. Youtube music blows it out of the water, and you can get ad-free youtube with it as well
For me at this point it’s mostly porting. I have a ton of playlist and some are quite large and it would horribly tedious to port over by hand.
I’ve tried some automated tools in the past, but YouTube doesn’t always have correct of necessary title/artist metadata and there were a lot of bad matches.
Yes I get a dystopic vibe, but for an entirely different reason. As for what we lost, I would say a gradual loss of the social element. Music used to be something that everyone did. Then become something that musicians did and other people listened to, but at least you got to see them perform and create a shared experience. Then we started recording music so you could listen to it at home, but there was still the social element of listening to the same music and sharing recommendations and forming subcultures based on listening to the same music. Now with dj spotify you don't even need to discuss music with other people.
Now don't get me wrong, of course there are still lots of people doing music for the fun of it, people still go to live performances, people still share recommendations. So it isn't fully lost by any means, just a question of degrees.
Why should the medium not matter? I actually feel that's the shallow take
Quite often, historically, music comes as part of a complete experiential package. Gatherings around fire, singing and dancing in groups, celebrating life's milestones, getting dressed up for concerts, excitement at buying tickets, journeying in and out of the city to pick up new recordings.
All of those things are valid aspects of musical culture for me. Stripping the meta musical aspects from the musical experience is inherently lossy and in some ways diminishes the full spectrum of what music can be.
This is especially true for music that was created outside of and/or before the streaming milieu.
Some things were lost, yes, and some things were gained. My list included both types of things.
Some things are lost again with the move to streaming and, again, some things are lost.
I was uncomfortable with the idea that the meta musical aspects of one milieu were shallow and that the music should be something that can essentially survive being stripped of them if it was ever of value at all.
> Enjoyment of music linked to a specific physical item seems incredibly shallow to me.
To a certain extent, but across the arts there's always artists that want to play with the format, so a changing of format can result in something being re-contextualised.
For example, you can have [multisided vinyl][1] with hidden tracks, or loop a track onto itself so the record plays forever (like Sergeant Pepper). Neither are really possible with MP3 (there's a Brian Eno record that does both (the track bifurcates and loops at them end), so you get a random sample looping at the end of the LP).
I am not saying this means the enjoyment of the music is lessened when you listen to it digitally - just that plenty of artists have written and produced pieces with the physical format at the front of their minds.
I see no reason why all of that could not be done in software. Same as DVD menus.
For the record, VLC supports DVD menus and the Matroska container format (mkv, mka, mks, and the basis for webm) supports all of the features imagined so far. I believe the demand for the content far outweighed the demand for the presentation layer.
All of these forms of interactivity however didn't prove popular in the digital world. Think of DVD's again. How often would you have ripped a DVD into a 4 or 8 GiB ISO in order to preserve the full experience and how often would you have rather ripped just the video file ~400 MiB, reencoded using a modern codec. Netflix optimises for the latter.
If you allow for programability, all features of music albums and more can be recreated.
What people want is no fuss instant access to the popular music of the moment therefore we have streaming services with good enough quality for most people and vast enough but incomplete collections of music. All while navigating the maze of licensing internationally.
How many listeners do you believe would rather open Spotify/iTunes/WinAmp and press play to hear music and how many would rather navigate a album specific experience.
If experience is so important, it can still be done in the streaming focused world of today (without standardised formats like Matroska). Just package it as an app (native or web), publish it on the app stores and let the app store take a 30% cut. Apps do not appear to be a popular format for music albums or for movies, even though they were attempted.
I suppose then you're a proponent of photographing all famous works of art and displaying them on a webpage somewhere, because if the painting is worth looking at, the medium shouldn't matter at all, right?
I guess going to a museum to view artwork is an incredibly shallow experience for you?
Exactly! Also, if a song has parts you don’t like, simply cut those out! I don’t care what the artist intended - I only keep what’s worthy of my attention!
I know! CDs are such a great format, and as long as the ink doesn't corrode the aluminum layer, they can last a very long time. They are more compact than vinyl, they don't suffer from lots of vinyl's error modes but they still have things like liner notes. Plus they represent an album at a theoretical maximum of fidelity and reproducibility. What's not to like?
My laptop is smaller than any collection of CDs and can store an entire building of them in the space of 12 jewel cases.
If you include my phone and a cellular connection for streaming, the entire world of music can be accessed in a device smaller than any portable CD player. And the speakers in my iPhone are better than most stereos from the same era.
We truly live in the world where science fiction has become reality. :D
Right, I think people have no idea that home hifi speakers and amps even in the 1960s could sound essentially as good as today when fed with a good source. However that does not mean that one of those systems found in estate sale will sound ok today. The materials degrade and sound nothing today like they did when sold.
I remember my dad's mid-60s KLH speakers sounding good with a mid-70s Sansui solid state receiver in the early 80s, before one of the tweeters fried and the paper woofer cones really deteriorated.
I remember how beautiful his early 60s Citation tube amp sounded in the early 90s, after we rebuilt it with new electrolytic capacitors and tubes, hooked it up to mid-80s Infinity bookshelf speakers, and drove it with a Sony CD player that had a built-in volume control for its line-out. That amp was based on a video amplifier circuit design and so had decent characteristics not just past audible but nearly into MHz (if it weren't for the low-pass filtering effects of the final transformers and speakers).
I remember how those same Infinity speakers, despite poly woofer cones, also degraded by the mid-90s due to the endemic fungal rot that took all the foam speaker surrounds of that era. A power spike or transport damage also killed one of the tweeter coils. I lived for a while overseas and found an affordable shop where a guy hand rebuilt these speakers for me, replacing the rotten woofer surrounds with contemporary butyl rubber and rewinding the tweeter coil. They sounded just like new again, and I was happy to confirm that my ears were not to blame. I left those behind after another move, so cannot report on their longevity.
It amuses me to think that my "new" hifi setup is almost 15 years old now, with tower speakers and a class D Yamaha receiver that I use as the DAC whether driven by HDMI or TOSlink from a USB audio peripheral. Just like my earlier hifi setups, the limiting factor is room acoustics and practical matters like not upsetting nearby cohabitants or neighbors. I continue to be somewhat boggled by the atrocious sound people are willing to inflict on themselves with phone, computer, or little bluetooth speakers that don't even sound as good as an early 80s "ghetto blaster".
>class D Yamaha receiver that I use as the DAC whether driven by HDMI or TOSlink from a USB audio periphera
I'm sorry to say I wimped out and, despite the low price and power efficiency, didn't try one of these, and opted for an older power hungry design. What did you get? I actually have an extra pair of the B&W speakers I got for my main system and was thinking of using them for the TV, but I don't want another clunky amp out there.
I might have been too casual with jargon here... I used class D as a name for modern IC switching designs in place of the old class A or class AB designs that traditionally provided decent fidelity. I guess there are really quite a few classes here now and I don't really know which I have.
I bought a rather mid-level Yamaha home theater receiver with Dolby and DTS decoding back in the late 2000s, It is labeled as an HTR-6140 and must be discontinued for many years by now. It has a bunch of DSP scenes/modes. Other than wanting surround decoding and HDMI + TOSlink inputs, I did not geek out on specs. I merely assume it is class D because the whole receiver is pretty light, so no big heat sinks, and it doesn't seem to produce much waste heat compared to older receivers I've used.
A while back, my wife and I went for a week way out in the sticks. We live in Oregon, and our favorite place is out in the Ochoco high desert National Forest. And nothing works there. I mean nothing except for AM radio late at night.[1]
After a few days, our hearing settles back to what is supposed to be normal. City life is loud and our hearing system compensates in various ways that reduce our ability to really appreciate sound.
After hearing that our ability to listen has relaxed into high potential mode, we decided to get the MacBook out and watch a movie. We had been saving this experience for a good time and it all came together nicely!
We were blown away![0]
Seriously. The amount and quality, fidelity of sound coming out of that MacBook was insane! Of course it all was soft on the low end. Not too much we could do about that because physics, but otherwise the whole experience was a real treat!
I find it difficult to communicate the impact. Here we are, gentle noises from our camp fire a modest distance away, various crackles, pops, hisses and an equally gentle breeze and our own bodies were the only sounds present outside of the movie sound track.
Mixed in nicely with all that was our movie. Actually a couple of them because we repeated the experience a couple times. It was so damn good!
All I can really say here is you should definitely give this a try!
So much engineering, better materials, better software, and it all adds right the fuck up. I really did not expect what I heard at all. Very highly recommended.
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[0] And to be clear, I am talking about all that we did hear when we did not expect to. Truth is, we were camping with a MacBook. The sound we heard wea respectable, despite it being small speakers and all that goes mobile devices.
It seemed sci-fi like to us. The tech advances, engineering all add up. And that's the blown away part. Experiencing a sum like that, rather than incrementally. The context really helped raise the impact.
[1] And that is a great experience! Any radio will be fun, but if you can get hold of a 70's maybe 80's era one with multiple frequency bands, say short wave, broadcast, and any others, the isolation means getting to connect to the world old school tuning stuff in from all over the place!
AM, on a good radio, is an interesting experience and again on a good radio optimized for what the tech actually does, will sound better than you think. And how it colors the material is something I crave. Comes from growing up listening to a fine Zenith "Trans Oceanic" radio with almost god like performance, but I digress...
Great story. Sounds like nights at Joshua Tree, where I am more familiar. Apple's laptop speakers are the best in the world. But even the best laptop speakers aren't "good hifi system good", especially in bass and stereo separation, but these qualities are not needed by lots of music. Even cheap modern portables with li-ion batteries and rare-earth magnets are startlingly good, a real feat of engineering, and perfectly acceptable to blast Pharrel at a pool party. But if I'm listening to Dark Side of the Moon, I want good headphones!
In a more normal office setting, I am far more inclined to use the built in speaker and mic combo myself when using my Apple device.
Otherwise, my goto is actually the Samsung AKG pack in earbuds that came with my Note phones. Mic is great, audio quality also great. Those have a wire.
>my goto is actually the Samsung AKG pack in earbuds
Me too! They are falling apart at this point, 3 or 4 years later, but wow. They have so many nice little features like a cloth braided cable that helps keep them from knotting themselves, and very comfy ear pieces. And of course they sound great, and because they are cheap (~$15) I never worry about losing them. AKG found some sort of global minima of price/performance, and it's cool Samsung recognized that. I will admit, though, that not having a wire is really nice, it's just all the trade-offs are awful. In particular the cost is high AND the likelihood to lose a component of them is very high (for me). Plus the rigamarole around keeping them charged and getting them paired...to all that I say "bah humbug!"
I like CDs. I just don't listen to music on physical media enough to really justify having a dedicated setup anymore.
My boss, on the other hand, collects the damn things. He's got an entire large bookshelf filled with vintage CD players...
To me, vinyl is a collectible, or at least, a way to show "yes I appreciate this music and want to show off that I enjoy it". If I like an artist/album enough, I'll buy the vinyl if I can. But it usually just sits on the shelf looking pretty. I got lucky and my player (nothing special but it works so long as you have a good cartridge) was from my dad. When I actually listen to said album, it's usually on my phone over bluetooth (earbuds or in the car), or even if I'm listening on the "hi fi" it's streaming.
Not to say that I never play albums on the turntable, it's just not that often.
Now I feel old. I remember the first time I saw and heard a Compact Disc. It was a rainbow colored object straight from the future. It was magical, the whole family gathered around the little boom box like thing playing some classical music CD.
Also, I hope your boss doesn't actually listen to any CD player built before about the mid 00's or so. Maybe mid-90s if you're talking mega-bucks (at the time) like a Mark Levinson or Theta Digital. But advances in DACs in the last ~20 years made everything prior very obsolete. Nowadays you can get commodity chips in the single digit dollar range that are for all intents and purposes faultless.
Tapes seem to have made a comeback in certain Punk/Rap scenes, but a lot of it seems mostly aesthetic/an attempt to replicate some period l (see Memphis phonk: where home recorded tapes were a cornerstone of the genre and have had a bit of a revival in the last years)
Honestly I like physical media because manipulating them is pleasurable especially vinyl but the issue with playlist is only a Spotify UX issue. Apple Music doesn’t have it. YouTube Music doesn’t have it.
It’s just that Spotify has decided that the way to optimise revenue is to focus on being an exclusive provider of some original contents in the form of podcasts and has slowly started making the listening music side of the application worse and worse since.
You can still buy music in physical form, so nothing has been lost. If you like that method, you can still do it.
Most people don’t, however, because it is much cheaper and easier to stream. Clearly what we have lost is not worth the price to maintain what we had, or people would still be buying music instead of streaming.
The media of the day have always had an outsize influence on the format of music. The modern album _exists_ because LPs became available, and the format just kinda persisted because the media after were also limited to a particular length. We're used to this, but we just happened to be born well after the point where listening to music required hiring a chamber orchestra, and the music listened to was designed for that format.
I don't like the playlist (and now, TikTok)-driven market--I too prefer listening to a full album straight through--but there's not really anything more inherently musical about the formats that came before. For better or worse, that's just the nature of the industry.
make a comment or thread about spotify/pandora/tidal and sit back and wait to see how long it takes for some “audiophile” to come along and to admonish you and tell you a story about their setup and music appreciation “workflow” and how it is better and somehow more correct.
we lost nothing. it is all still here. and, apparently, the added bonus of droves of sweaty people telling you you’re doing it wrong. life is grand.
You might reasonably call me a Luddite, but an audiophile? Not in the sense you mean. I don't claim I can hear expensive speaker cables (I got mine at Home Depot btw). Great gear from the 90's and 00's is available cheap, and it's great. It has buttons. And I don't have to pay someone to continue accessing my music and I can listen to music in an album centric way.
Nor am I claiming I'm more correct (although I guess I'm pretty proud of having found a somewhat contrarian path to take the trade-offs I think matter most.) You want to listen to spotify on your phone and bt headphones - all of which is subject to decay, decay of money, battery, connectivity - meanwhile I'll listen to my library with wired components that run smoothly and no latency without drops or a monthly bill. You get all-in-one go anywhere convenience, I get old school tactile control. Neither of us is doing it wrong. But yeah, I like mine better which is why I do it that way (and I assume the same is true for you, unless you're a masochist, and if so I say great, keeping doing you.)
Looks like we lost the ability to go through a list of songs from an album, episodes from a podcast, or podcasts from a collection, which is the subject of TFA.
Slightly beside the point, but it is a problem that just doesn’t afflict Apple Music: those folks seem totally happy to make the kind of software that plays albums in sequence. The true surprise is that a century-old function has become a differentiating feature.
> The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface
In most big web services, actual functionality in the API normally seems to leads to its eventual deprecation. Will be interesting to see how this one plays out.
7 years to go from announcing the deprecation to actually removing it seems fair to me. Miles difference from what I'd expect any other company to do (looking at you Google, who seem to announce a deprecation and go through with it in the very same month).
Oh, they're releasing an alternative SDK? That's great, I don't like being tied to the official client and releasing an alternative SDK ensures I'll stay with them.
libspotify != their API. Libspotify is a long-deprecated client library that allowed local playback. If you are OK with running one of the official clients for actual playback you can use the API to build an alternative browsing/controller client.
With some caveats though as I mentioned in another comment. Their API for controlling playback doesn't work well with Sonos players for example.
If you combine their API with their web playback SDK, you don't need an official client running. That means my app is completely standalone whilst being built only using officially supported endpoints.
I've deliberately frozen my Spotify on the April 30th, 2021 version largely for this reason. It's one of the last versions that still supported the "classic" UI, which is much snappier and has a proper, compact songs table and a decent albums view.
Still works great with zero compatibility issues that I've noticed.
Album listener here too. I really liked the "Shuffle albums" feature in iTunes so I built a tiny webapp to give me a random album from my library - https://shuffle.ninja
How do you deal with playback? The Spotify web playback SDK requires browsers DRM support, and baseline Electron does not include Chrome's Widevine CDM libraries. I know there are alternative Electron "distribution" which try to workaround the problem but it only makes the whole thing even more complicated :/
Recently I've been going through artists by genre and decade, clicking into their discography, looking up their official studio albums on Wikipedia or Discogs, then adding those albums to a playlist for the artist, just for my own listening convenience. Maybe I should be listening by album instead?
It would be awesome if you could support "album playlists/groups/tags" which are stored on Spotify servers using the first track for each album in a standard playlist.
I'm pretty sure they're just targeting the widest demographics where people no longer care about albums, especially in the age of streaming, singles and EPs.
FWIW, I prefer playlists to albums. Way back I used to make mix tapes, then burn my own mixed CDs. I love the variety in a playlist, and I can pick just the songs I like.
It's just a website as it depends on the web playback sdk. It could be wrapped into a desktop app with something like tauri easily enough, which is something I'm considering. Would always be available as a web app, though.
It's not just yet, but a quick look at my GitHub - https://github.com/tom-james-watson/ - should tell how that's likely to work out. The good thing is that the app is all client-side and so there's no need to monetize.
I use Winamp for my MP3 collection that I downloaded of my T1 line at the office.
When I turn that mother up on and my CRT monitor starts smoking because of the Winamp addons that spikes all kinds of shit whenever the tune is changing, then I know I have found the right track.
Then I get cracking on the floor. Break dancing and caps flying around. The neighbors come jumping in the door and starts clapping and the music just keeps going.
Everybody can understand a list of songs, even my grandma who's pushing 84. So we battle out songs on each of ours computers, but we don't use Spotify any more.
Spotify's UI is a case study of the negative impact of assigning single screens to single teams, designers and managers. There is no cohesive vision. The useful functionality is all obscured by esthetics. I am perpetually annoyed at how poor spotify is at it's basic purpose. They have leaned way too far into recommendation systems and over designed layout. 99% of the time, I know what I want to listen to. Spotify's UX is designed for people to 'browse' the app. That doesnt resonate with me, at all. I know what I want.
My biggest gripe with spotify is it's inability to reliably answer the question of "what playlist or source am I currently listening too?". A constant flow that spotify fails to deliver on is this: Search for a song, play the song, then the rest of the album, on repeat, without shuffle. It's annoying to have to load multiple slow UIs to navigate from search to album, visually search the album's track list and play the song your after.
Itunes and Windows Media Player set the standard for how media should be navigated and Spotify should use some of those old standard concepts.
EDIT:
Try browsing Armin Van Buuren's massive discography on Spotify.
I do not work for Spotify. The following are a bunch of educated guesses based on how 'old standard concepts' drift towards 'new concepts'.
1. They test their UI with their target users (assumes they have a handle on who pays $$$ for the service besides ad revenue)
2. People who just want functionality are not a high percentage of users or use cases
3. A good number of users/use cases value visual feedback via simple, larger imagery over condensed information displays (condensed displays are also harder to design well)
4. There are halo and competitive effects, and all apps of a certain class end up looking alike and imitating each other's visual languages and decisions, with design gradually drifting towards a new set of rules that become 'standard'.
I might be having rose tinted spectacles but I remember when Spotify first launched in the UK, maybe 2010. The app was _screaming fast_ in comparison to iTunes at the time, and I think it had a similar interface to itunes as well (although could be misremembering) with a table-like layout [1]
I really don't understand what happened between then and now, it was really a big deal at the time where the UI was snappy and playing a song was almost instantaenous. Nowadays, while the playback speed is still just as snappy, the UI feels much worse
It's no longer a native app, it was rewritten in 2015 to be non-native. It's the same story everywhere, they're using Electron (or similar) so they can maintain one codebase for everything written in HTML/CSS/JS.
I'm definitely becoming one of the tin foil hat lot but since the redesign I've gone from perhaps 40 hours listening per week to almost zero but am too lazy to cancel the subscription.
By that metric I think the redesign has succeeded, I've soft churned but they get the subscription and pay out no royalties.
Never assign to malice yadda yadda yadda... but there's no way such an atrocious redesign doesn't have an ulterior motive. The designers have done their job well it's just optimizing for something else.
I am similar to you, in that most of the time I know what I want to listen to... but it is worth considering that your personal use case of Spotify might not be the same as everyone else's. Spotify is doing pretty well making money so my bets are that your use case which you say isn't served well (and I'd agree) is much less common than others which Spotify does cater better to.
Spotify is horrendous. Their UI is subpar. Their mix of podcasts with songs is odd at best (seriously, I never listen to podcasts, why can't I switch it off completely?). Their shuffle is just not. Imagine listening to the same 20ish songs from a playlist of nearly 2k songs. How can you mess up shuffle that bad?
It's also not easy to move away from it. It requires time and effort. Time that many don't have.
> Their shuffle is just not. Imagine listening to the same 20ish songs from a playlist of nearly 2k songs. How can you mess up shuffle that bad?
I thought it was just me! I did notice that sometimes when this happens the numbers being skipped are “this song is currently not available for playback” or some such message.
I seem to listen to the same music a lot actually so just buying the CD would be more cost efficient.
Spotify shuffle is indeed not (uniformly) random, as confirmed by this blog post[1]. The post is eight years old, so it is highly possible the algorithm has changed.
I recently switched to Tidal. Same price, better audio quality, better user interface. I try it out for a couple of months to see how it goes.
By the way, I'm always tempted to go back to pirating, and use these services just to discover new music. Given the cost of storage today disks I can easily get 1Tb of FLAC music on my NAS, and discard any streaming service. So I can also get music in a quality that you can't get on a streaming service, all you find is remastered albums that doesn't always sound as good as the original.
Spotify was promoting a podcast to me for a while called “c*m town” (add a u). It was so gross, the album cover was written in white liquid. I could not make it go away! One of the worst UI experiences ever, actually made my stomach turn.
It’s worth noting that said podcast is (or was, at least) #1 on Patreon in terms of number of people paying money to the creator(s). I bet that makes it really popular on Spotify, and if you have explicit content turned on, that’s probably why it was recommended.
There should still be a master “turn off podcasts” button, although since it’s the only way Premium subscribers are still exposed to ads, fat chance of that happening.
Not the only way. There are also promotional pop-ups every now and then and I've heard of them introducing an option for artists to pay for better rankings.
Cum Town can be a fun podcast, but it just doesn't belong in between music. "I want to focus on somebody talking about something" is a very different mood than "I want to tune out with some music".
I get the business incentives, but I have to imagine some manager somewhere going "Perfect, it's both audio content!".
Initially I though “oh cool neat”, and although I never noticed inaccuracies, I was willing to let it to, lyric listings aren’t always 100% accurate anyway, especially for older underground stuff of people who have indecipherable vocals at times (Mike IX Williams for example)
However as time passed I noticed in a ton of the songs I was listening to, the lyrics would be missing entire verses, hooks, choruses or in occasion show the lyrics to a 100% unrelated song. There were also blatant typos, that looked like someone was quickly typing the lyrics on their phone and didn’t check to read and bad autocorrects or anything.
Lyrics are provided by Musixmatch, and are user contributed. If lyrics are missing or bad, it's because Musixmatch has it like that. You can contribute!
My guess is they pay per play. So to minimize plays, they try to play songs you won't skip, which, naturally are songs you didn't skip the last time they popped up on shuffle.
I'm sure their stats tell them that this gets people to skip less, but it's infuriating when you actually want to shuffle a big list.
Can you elaborate please? I thought their revenue was from users periodic subscriptions. Do you mean there are certain songs with lower licensing costs that the algorithm will prefer?
Despite whatever revenue model(s) are employed, every song that is played generates a fee for the host. Generally, popular media come with higher fees that cost them more to stream, while less popular media are cheaper to license and net them more. The algorithm tries to increase the margin that comes closest to their perception of your preference(s). In theory.
I find it pigeon holes me into a category that may or may not appeal to me, and I get to listen/view what they want me to experience, rather than let me choose & explore without manipulation. No, thanks, is my response.
I've never understood the Spotify love. I tried it long ago and didn't like it at all. Ended up on GPM until Google pushed me to YTM. Now on AM, and it works fine with how I listen to music.
I wonder if it's just different ways that people listen to music that lead them to prefer one service over another?
I started using it when it was launched or shortly after, before most of the alternatives (including Youtube Music) even existed. It was great ~10 years ago.
I still use it because I'm invested into it: we have our premium family account, with all smart speakers configured to play songs using it, we have playlists, out of the music I like I know what's available and what's missing and I have acquired what's missing by other means (but switching to another service would mean different songs/artists would be missing, etc.)
Compound that with lack of time (work, parenting, etc.) and while the Spotify UX has really gone downhill, it would have to get really, really bad for me to switch...
I know what you mean here. I used to download and meticulously tag my music and listen on an iPod classic. Sure maybe Spotify might not be ideal, but I do not have the time to fiddle around with all that anymore, and especially don’t want to spend tons more time on the computer than I already do. I am the same as you too with the smart speakers and family account too. The alternative is so much more effort, for not a huge amount of benefit.
That being said I have started collecting vinyl, which I do enjoy, but don’t often have the extra money laying around each month to buy more. One day I hope to have a nice dedicated setup for it :)
The worst UI offense to me is the new playlist view that came with their new desktop UI last fall. They went from having seperate columns for Song Title and Artist Name and bundled them into two rows within a single column. Not only does this make scanning through a long list of songs/artists much more difficult, it means they've taken away the ability to sort a playlist by Artist which seems like a major downgrade in my opinion as someone who keeps most playlists sorted by Artist most if not all the time.
I've switched to Youtube music and never looked back, better (simpler ui), live music, (no ads in Youtube since I have to pay anyway cause otherwise it becomes unusable).
For some people Spotify is the next best thing since sliced bread, but I think I'm onto the pattern, Spotify is great if you like to vibe with what other people are listening to, all the suggestions seem to lead to the mainstream. I don't mean it in any kind of dissing way, I honestly think it's great that there's a sort of communal feeling where people are listening to the same things, but for my particular tastes it drives me crazy to start with my obscure weird hipstery song and 6 songs later it's suggesting Reggaeton. YT music seems to flow in the direction of similar songs way better.
I know I honestly sound like a Google shill, but I honestly pretty much dislike (I was going to use despise but it's too strong of a word) what they have become, but my pragmatism just makes me keep going back to them (unfortunately?).
YouTube music’s integration with YouTube is too weird for me. I used a service to try to import my Spotify into YouTube music, and it did two things that I can’t stand:
1. Subscribed me to every single artist in my artist library on YouTube. It took a long time to clean up my YouTube subscriptions.
2. All my playlists are also YouTube playlists, which isn’t what I want.
3. The tool was fully incapable of transferring my library over, because YouTube music’s API is limited. So no albums or artists can transfer to the library section.
If I can’t transfer my library over, keeping a semblance of organization (such as maintaining a chronological list of “date added” for my songs), I’m gonna struggle to use any alternatives when Spotify does good enough.
Spotify’s been making a soft pivot into podcasts (as original/exclusive content, they can be more profitable plus you don’t have to deal with record labels). So they’re trying to promote those.
I honestly don't care about the UI design at all as much as it be absolutely infuriating because it's extremely slow on my still fairly new android phone.
Spotify's algorithm doesn't do "songs I haven't heard in a while", it does " here's 20 songs from your playlist, have fun with it for the next few weeks. So even if I "songs I haven't heard in a while", Spotify's garbage algorithm is not it. At this rate, I'd much prefer an actually random playlist.
I've been having to work around it by copying over the playlist I was shuffled, running it through shuf, and then putting it in to a separate playlist, and lastly, disable shuffle. It's garbage, but it's better than what Spotify produces.
Yes, and isn't generating a random order, then playing the songs in the album/playlist in that generated order the best way to do that? Ie, no repeats until every song has been played. That's how the MIX button on my car CD player works, that's how my MP3 player works, and that's how the Phonograph music player on my phone works. Why should Spotify be any different?
I don't know if others saw the same behavior.
I'm on Android. And I feel like I'm in some sort of a big A/B test regarding their app.
One day, the interface changes one way, couple days later it changes back.
Constantly some menu or behavior changes. It's super frustrating.
Lately it seems to have stabilized, but it really made me feel like a guinea pig. And maybe that's my inner old person speaking, but most of the changes really made it worse.
Thinking about movie streaming apps maybe that's on purpose to make everything require just a couple more clicks. But this is music streaming. Most ppl wanna turn it on and then it sits in your pocket.
Wait till you see how much Instagram A/B tests everything. I found a debug menu in it one day when reverse engineering it to get rid of the ads, and so enabled it as well. Among other things, there is a complete list of all server-side settings (or "quick experiments" as they call them) with the ability to override them. There's at least several hundred of these, possibly a thousand or more. It's insane. The kinds of stuff they're A/B testing, too — wording, button colors, bug fixes, animation durations...
I have no doubt Spotify is doing the same. Every large company does it. This practice of data-driven development is such a disgrace to the IT industry.
It's amazing how much thought and effort seems to go into Instagram's UI while it looks completely unplanned and is, for me, pretty unusable. Nothing makes sense. The UI is similarly weirdly designed to Snapchat and Discord, so maybe it has something to do with targeting "the kids".
I don't get how people can be comfortable using that stuff at all.
Honestly, blame humans. If our species wasn't susceptible to changing our behavior due to these seemingly-inconsequential changes, A/B testing would return to a more sane baseline; however, these "silly" changes (when statistically proven to be effective long-term) can lead to 8 figure shifts in megacorp revenue so they will continue to be made.
This is what happens when you let "the data" drive design. The data becomes an abstraction between your users and your goals, leading to a paint by numbers exercise where the only thing that matters is getting some arbitrary metric to go up.
The results are quite predictable: numbers that go up, and UX that goes way, way down. Eventually this falls over because your model ends up in local maxima.
Yeah I switched to Tidal when I learned about Spotify’s data sharing and privacy concerns a little over a year ago, but I was also so frustrated with Spotify’s UI always changing in frustrating ways and making it worse. They’d break features that I used often (playlist sorting broke, for example). I’d contact customer support and they’d go through this whole “uninstall and reinstall the app, does it still happen?” …YES, it’s another bug for no reason! Stop breaking my shit!
With Spotify, it would often be an update that looks pretty but was harder to use, which is the exact opposite of what I care about… I’m here to listen to music as fast as possible and get on with my life, not scroll through giant menus with way too much spacing, when it used to all fit on one screen.
There are still usability issues with Tidal that are similar to Spotify (hard to find something specific, etc), but they basically never change anything about the core UI, it just always works the exact same with some minor additions here&there. And honestly it’s reduced my frustration dramatically.
I gave up on my Spotify subscription of 13 years because of this. The interface kept changing and making it more difficult to use. All I want is to listen to albums and Daily Mixes, and keeping up with all their unrelated app changes became too frustrating.
I've switched to Deezer which I find saner, but I fear these streaming companies just aren't incentivised to produce simple interfaces.
AB is the worst. I don't know how long it's been going on, but on YouTube’s homepage it keeps alternating between "Hover to expand video and see Watch Later button" and the regular always-visible Watch Later button. https://imgur.com/a/70p07Ku
Great! I can also disable "in-video info cards" which are the user-picked videos overlaid on the video, almost always covering the last few seconds of whatever I'm watching unless the video has a 10s ending card. Super annoying.
Weird, I actually love that feature. Especially on my browser if there are multiple videos on my feed that I wanted to watch then hated open multiple tabs for them and in most cases I never ended up going there or bloating the number of tabs open.
I f'ing hate spotify with a passion. The shit UX and them pushing JRE and other bullshit podcasts I dont want or need in my life was bad, but for me the final straw was that they decided to show me popups for their shit playlists when I was trying to put on one some music.
Found out they have been doing it for years to people, and if you complain they basically refer you to the suggestion box and to go f yourself. I don't get it. Why would you want to torment paying customers like that? Just leave me alone and let me play some music you psycopaths.
So I switched back to Apple music. It's pretty shit, but at least I get to decide what I want to listen too.
Hey something about this comment just seemed a bit over the top negative/angry and didn’t sit right with me. Hope you remember not to take all these small frustrations too seriously in life. Wishing you well and sending positive vibes.
Fuck Spotify. Any user problem gets referred to the suggestion box where you'll always be told to go fuck yourself. That's the only attitude they know: fuck you with a generic smile.
There's this feature that they think is neat, and nobody wants, where they'll switch to whatever device you pick up and pick up where you left off. The problem is that for many users, the only thing it does is persistently switch to whatever device you're not using, including your neighbor's, thereby rendering the whole app 100% unusable. And you can't turn it off.
There's a 7-year-long thread on their support forum - the only recourse - going right up to the present day, of people begging them either make the feature optional or fix it. And the only response they ever give is a straight "We are not going to fix this."
Jeez all of my friends and family and I use Spotify and not once have we had issues like this. Luckily there are plenty of other streaming services to use mate
>> So I switched back to Apple music. It's pretty shit, but at least I get to decide what I want to listen too.
I love and hate Apple Music. The library style interface is great. But for a company that hangs on about the virtue of native apps the Music app is complete dogshit. Even with the recent slightly more native “rewrite” I still spend ages waiting for screens to load. Spotify is so much snappier.
Surprised by this comment - in my experience, Spotify is the only application I’ve used which takes a noticeable time to render its window when I alt-tab to it.
I mean alt-tabbing to it isn’t really ‘using’ it. I was referring to searching, clicking links to albums/playlists etc. with Apple Music these all load like a webpage so you get a white screen while they load.
My biggest issue with it is that every time my phone connects to bluetooth Apple Music starts playing my entire library on shuffle wasting all of my data and battery and there is no way to turn off this feature.
It seriously has me contemplating switching but the alternatives are not appealing.
I actually hate this thing Spotify does. Before they had a way to sorting songs by playcount and it made it easy to find songs youd instantly like.
To increase cross sell with underrepresented artists or whatever the strategy is with this UI its quite a detriment when looking for songs you want.
If i wanted to discover artists id like to be able to do that myself, not have it be imposed on my search because of the way the designer thought it up, to increase cross sell to things i had no intention of listening to.
I used to really like Spotify when I first installed it long time ago, but over the years they worked really hard to make me hate them with passion. It feels like their motto is "Change for change's sake", they seem to remove and add stuff randomly, shuffle UI elements whenever they want to, etc. In the meantime, the basic functionalities regress. I had the app bug out on me countless times in weird ways; offline stuff disappearing, freezes when clicking on an album, that one time when I was listening on headphones and suddenly Spotify changed volume from minimum to max and almost gave me hearing damage, etc.
Some time ago I moved to Tidal. It's not perfect, the search is inferior, the app bugs out sometimes too; but at least they don't seem to change it that much.
It's fun (scary maybe?) how ones experience can be so different with the same software. I use Spotify daily on a number of different platforms (iOS, Android, Linux [Arch + Ubuntu], Windows and macOS) and never experienced any of those issues. I also can only remember ~3 redesigns since I started using Spotify back in 2007 or something like that, none of them have significantly moved around the playback controls, although the overall browsing experience has changed a lot.
Edit: Continuing to read the HN comments, it seems some people (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31618177) have a constantly shifting UI, possibly driven by Spotify doing A/B testing. Could be that some locations (the US?) are subjected to this while others are not. I've used a total of 5 accounts since I started using Spotify, and never had anything change day-to-day when using it, so doesn't seem to be account-based.
The truncated text is a huge peeve of mine with designers. I get that it’s hard to design a nice grid if you have to account for text that wrapped etc, but not everyone is called Tom Smith, and not all titles are 20 characters long.
A designer I know advocated that users should be coaxed into using shorter titles and descriptions so that the UI looks good. It just makes me seethe.
> A designer I know advocated that users should be coaxed into using shorter titles
My collection is 99% classical. The problem is especially bad for classical tracks. “Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op…” What opus, what movement? what tempo marking? Yes I’ll go back and tell Beethoven to change the title to something shorter and catchier. “Joy, Bros!” Is that better?
It’s some kind hubris to think your UI (itself the result of design laziness) is a bigger priority than the integrity of the composer’s intent.
I have been building websites for over 20 years and this has always been a problem. 99% of the designers also design texts that perfectly fit the design.
The end result is a bad experience for both the developer, the customer and the end user.
Well sure, if we were building something towards general audience I’d say yes, let’s bias our UI towards editorial rules that can be enforced, since incentives align.
We’re building enterprise-internal software. There’s ton of jargon that is in play that we can’t really shorten or guide. It’s insane to think that the users, experts with decades of experience in their domain, should editorialize to fit a design goal. Sometimes, the users do know best.
I found it incredibly amusing to sit through spec discussions of {big company's} new shiny long-term A/B success metric a few years ago. Hundreds of inputs, ML-based modeling, etc.. all to decide if change #574843 will eventually make more money or not. CX scoring was hotly debated as a model input and was ultimately voted against. Companies don't care if you enjoy your experience, they only care if you engage and spend money. Streaming, social media, retail, gaming; they're all full of dark patterns that lead to bad experiences so the company makes an extra buck. Honestly, I'm tired of this industry.
It's why I'm being driven back to piracy, because the UI/UX is do horrible on these platforms, that and believe it or not because Content discovery is easier a couple of the piracy apps look at what I have in my collection, and do recommendations off that... And guess what.. it's really good.
So a bunch of people in their spare time seem to be doing a better job than Netflix, why is that? Because I don't think Netflix is trying to achieve the same goal
They are trying to push content Netflix wants you to watch. Not content that you want to watch.
I have the same issues with all of these services. But I'm wondering if it's some kind "expert mode" issue which is only a problem for a small advanced-user minority - many of whom will be reading HN.
Do most users want to be told what to consume?
Circumstantially I'd guess so, because otherwise it's a lot of effort to add friction for no reason.
But I don't know.
Possibly Spotify and Netflix do. Or possibly not. Perhaps they're just dysfunctional?
A better question is can most users be inconvenienced into preferring to be told what to consume?
As a sibling commenter says, these issues are not an "expert mode" problem, you can see regular people facing them too. But they usually give up and eventually comply, watching something else. The frustration is still there, but we bitch about it and try something else, while a bunch of people just go watch Trending Show #229.
(I realize it might sound harsh/pretentious/"sheeple", but it genuinely happened to me last month. I wanted to watch Truman Show with my nephew at my sister's house, and it was a genuine clown show to try to find a service that would play it. Netflix didn't have it, their ISP's service didn't have it, it was available on Apple TV but we couldn't get the device to work because it required an update and we didn't have a computer at hand to be able to pair it or whatever, I was there so we even tried casting from a piracy app in my phone, but their Smart TV only accepted some weird proprietary method that was not available on my phone, so we ended up watching El Camino, a terribly mediocre Breaking Bad spinoff, my nephew was bored halfway through and went to play Fortnite instead)
I like "lean-back listening" and that's the whole reason I'm still sticking with Spotify. They (almost) always have something to accompany my mood both out of songs I already like and new ones I often also like (yay!). The drift in mood is minimal. I can listen to calm piano music for a whole night while Apple music can shift over to loud metal within only a few songs (what a joke).
It may be getting worse, though. Especially a few songs keep playing over and over, sometimes despite me explicitly blocking them. Both a lot of new or familiar songs often show up at times at which I want just the other - and of course you can't choose (what a joke! The algorithm is great, just badly tuned, let me change it!).
> If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
Nowadays I exclusively pirate movies and shows, because just the thought of having to spend 30 minutes to figure out where some movie is, then trying to navigate the respective service's interface, just to be presented with a not-empty-but-actually-doesnt-show-what-i-was-searching-for-because-stats-said-people-might-watch-more-if-you-mislead-them-in-search-results-pages because it is not available on my region, and then trying to figure out what combination of VPN and region incantations won't block me behind a million captchas, is too much work to be bothered with.
Instead, I just open Stremio, put in the movie or show name, and even if it is some obscure Javanese arthouse film from the '20s (I don't know if such a thing exists, but you get the point) it will find it. Sure, finding a source with good availability is sometimes not the first-click experience, but it's still at least 10 times faster than all the above. And I can put on screen sharing to watch it with my friends without DRM blacking out the screen.
Worst of all, the pricing structures of streaming apps are very opaque, so if I were to do the still-illegal-but-morally-correct thing of paying for the official product and pirating anyways, I don't think any of my subscription fee would actually go to the company that made that film.
I wish we had a functioning rental model still. Go to some storefront, pay a small amount of money to get any publisher's title, get a video file to play "at home" (in your preferred video player), pinky swear you didn't rip it, done. The closest you get is the Youtube rental thingy, but at least over here it is incredibly overpriced, costs more than a cinema ticket. Or buying physical media, but then you have to pay the physical distribution costs, keep around shiny plastic donuts and specialized machinery.
---
And besides, I'm still not sold on algorithmic recommendations, and watch things mostly based on meatspace recommendations.
Subscription services have one simple goal: provide just enough value to keep one from cancelling their subscription. There is no real incentive to do better if all the competitors have the same goal and behaviour, which is the current situation. So they raise the prices a little bit, skip on user-motivated UX, and double down on mediocre "just good enough to idly waste time on" content, and slowly bring down the user expectations about content and how to find it, placing them in a "learned helplessness" state of not being arsed to find what they like themselves.
The beauty of piracy is that people go through an effort to share what they like, not what some company wants to push on you, which rewards high quality.
Agreed, I feel that in the case of Netflix et al., it's just orders of magnitude more ridiculous -- may I just get the list of the films instead of being force spoon-fed crap content, please?
I don't even know how to begin to tell the recommender engine that it's completely missing my preferences. That would be somewhat digestible if their search experience wasn't terrible as well -- no facet search, no dynamic category browsing? What the heck.
It feels like these design choices are there to hide the fact that their catalog is tiny (maybe especially in Europe). The majority of what I search for just displays things that are similar to what I actually wanted to watch. For example if I search for Family Guy I get some off-brand Netflix cartoon in the "irreverent" category.
Yeah, they can't even tell you they don't have it. I wanted to watch лучше чем люди (Better Than Us), which was recommended to me by a co-worker as available on Netflix.
It looks like I was too late and it had left their catalogue again, but anything I found on the internet was either "look at this nice show available on Netflix" (posted 2 years ago) or, very very rarely, a Netflix page with a grayed out play button. Again, no explanation.
It was the first time in a long while I had opened it and also the last.
One more thing I've also noticed. I wanted to exchange movies with a Turkish friend. We both realised that the best movies/series from our regional Netflix offerings are not available in other's Netflix feed.
The only available movies were either regional Netflix productions (of contestable quality) or absolutely low-quality non-Netflix productions. Bad search does not help in conscious discovery either. I cannot understand why the best regional movies/series/classics are not shared between regions (excluding UK and US maybe). Those that happen to be available had a very lackluster translation.
I doubt this is exclusively licensing issue, but I may be wrong.
Something funny about Netflix: after they implemented double thumbs up they made the three buttons (two thumps up, one, thumbs down) hidden behind one thumbs up icon and exposed on hover. Next to the My List button. The double thumbs up then is superimposed on the My List button. So if I move my cursor from right to left in order to remove some show from my List I might give it two thumbs up instead.
I wonder why they haven't fixed that already. Even just recording the button clicking sequence alone, they should have more than enough data in which people clicking thumbs up button before immediately unclick it and click 'list' to show that it is a bad design.
Which they openly admit to doing on purpose to “increase engagement” or whatever, even attaching a monetary value to shoving new stuff in your face before you can finish the old stuff.
This is why I believe forced interoperability is essential to the
future of online consumer tech. We've discussed it here in the context
of social media monopoly regulation, but it has far greater
implications.
Salient examples are the alternative Twitter interfaces that
proliferated, and indeed those for Hacker News. One huge benefit is
that users won't be stuck with a single, often hostile UI, but be free
to either interpret data client-side, or make use of a possible open
market in presentation layer websites which may add their own value.
That would be cool, but then some of those interfaces (probably the ones with the most ad funding) would be part-owned by one of the streaming services and would push their content the most. Feels like it'd be just one more hull on the Titanic.
But Apple TV (the streaming service that I can access on the web, not the hardware smart TV thing) is much worse than Disney. Literally can't find the name or number of the episode that I'm currently watching in order to tell my wife.
The apple TV app on the mac is utterly horrendous. On my M1 macbook, it lags every time you queue something for download or delete an episode or try to view the details of an episode or series. It's so dumb that a first party app lags on their own line of hardware. Not to mention just how horrible the UX is. None of the clickable elements turn the cursor into a pointer and it takes just a little too long for the hover to trigger which makes it really irritating to use. The player is just as terrible. It automatically opens in full screen and is missing a lot of small quality of life features that other players have had for decades. Even as the cheapest subscription service I just cannot put up with how horrible it is
Only reason I use Spotify (Premium = no ads) is that I don't have to manage my music anymore and I can find all the music I need / want. But holy moly it is going towards a bad direction, in fact so bad that I am considering moving to Apple Music...
Their desktop app used to have a "search bar" in their Home -view which is now moved to a separate "Search" -view, which is.. one of the most annoying things ever.
I used to boot up Spotify, hit ctrl+f, type the playlist or artist I was looking for and click.
In the desktop app, press '?' to get a list of shortcuts. Ctrl-l opens search and focuses the input field, from any page. Ctrl-f searches in the current playlist or page.
There are some alternative frontends for Spotify available. None of the ones I found works on M1 mac, but Windows and Linux users have some options available.
Spotify UI in general feels like way too many product managers aggressively justifying their existence instead of making what the end user actually needs.
Spotify is full of those UI frustrations. There have been many times where I've thought "Just give me 'select * from songs where artist = % order by listen_count'".
I started slowly moving myself away from online streaming services for my daily listening. I ripped all my CDs (to FLAC so I can re-encode to whatever I want in the future) and started buying albums from new artists off of Bandcamp, 7digital and HDTracks. I've even bought a few new CDs from local record stores and ripped them. I still use streaming services for discovery but I'm moving back to blogs (Pitchfork, Stereogum, etc), aggregators (Anydecentmusic) and forums for more of that discovery.
I really don't enjoy that they've started hiding the listen count now so you can no longer tell which songs are the most popular if you're checking out an album.
The listen count is huge for checking out new artists. Find a new band, try the first four or five tracks to see if they're a band you're interested in. At least YouTube still has view counts... for now.
Foobar2k and Lidarr is where it's at. I went full circle back to sailing the seven seas because streaming services got so bloated and user-friendly in my opinion.
I like how the OP mentioned "Spotify's buddy, Apple Music". I work in IT for 15 years and I legit have problems navigating the app, I thought I must be stupid or something. Same with Tidal, just absolutely abhorrent UI where nothing makes any sense. Wanna go back to the Playlist you were literally just listening to a couple hours ago? That would be four clicks, three scrolls, a swipe and two jumping jacks. Want to listen to your favorite song from that playlist? Well then I hope it's not a long playlist because we removed the album arts for no reason. Guess you gotta squint your eyes pretty hard while scrolling and you'll find it eventually. Good luck.
> I work in IT for 15 years and I legit have problems navigating the app
I have the same issue, just with YouTube Music (regardless of platform). Other applications I cannot figure out how to navigate includes Slack and Snapchat. Snapchat is on the phone, of cause, but sometimes I just need to exit the app, because I can't figure out how to get back. Slack... I just don't know, it looks like one of those crazy Chinese chat application that does EVERYTHING, or a Japanese newspaper.
Installing and using a Linux desktop 25 years ago was easier than using some of these applications.
Are you on iOS? IIRC it doesn't have a back button/gesture, unlike Android, and that's the only way that makes sense to me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
Regarding Slack, maybe it's different on iOS, but it looks relatively straightforward - on login you get the list of channels and DMs, you can click on one, and then go back with a button next to the channel name, which does a left to right animation which implies you can just swipe left-right for that thing. What else is there? Long press for message details/options is the same across many messaging apps.
Yes, it's iOS. There might be a gesture, but those have zero discoverability. Especially when you're left handed, then many of them feels wrong.
I never used Slack on iOS, it might be better than on the desktop. The desktop application doesn't use as many resources as the internet had led me to believe, so that's nice, but the interface as WAAAY too busy to be effective as a communications platform. I still miss HipChat, and while it has its own set of problem, I honestly think I prefer the train wreck that is Google Chat.
Today everything is focused on making money. The focus on money makes the experience good for the ones that make the money, but for the end user it means everything turns into one giant ad.
That's why Spotify uses tiles instead of tables. The tiles are important for the content producer, not for the Spotify user. A tile can scream at you 'Listen to me!', a row in a table cannot do this.
It shows that Spotify is making more money from content creators than content consumers.
Yep. I wonder, if the balance has gone too far without any checks or balances? A/B testing our way into oblivion. May be, we should do a massive A/B test between 15 year old UI and today's UI. They'd probably have to modify old UIs to add some more images because visuals dominate.
I realize these things probably have commercial implications, but goddamn it feels good to rant.
The problem is: a frustrated user is not a leaving user. So as long the users stay at the platform and more money can be made the user experience will be crap.
Spotify has 2 types of users, the creator and consumer. As long as there is more money to be made from the creator user they will also A/B test for that user.
I agree, spotifys ux is terrible. Nowadays though I dont notice it as much, probably because i use it every day. But I have complaints.
Ive mentioned it before but their mobile design sucks. I use it a lot in my car, so usually ill keep the playback screen open amd just swipe when I need to change songs, simple and probably safe. But if I swipe ever so slightly upward, it opens the lyrics function, so I have to look down, see what happened, swipe, then get back to driving. I get im not using it the way it is "supposed" to be used, but its an akward design choice anyways. When are the lyrics that on the fly important, and even when im looking at the screen I still mess it up.
That and the issues ive been having with the desktop app. Maybe its just my hardware but it never seems to just open om the first try, I usually have to close, then reopen it.
Amazon's Kindle app is an even bigger offender in this category. It shows your library as a 4 x 4 grid of tiny cover thumbnail on your phone, so there is no hope whatsoever of reading a title.
So you click one, and what does it do? It downloads the whole book then drops you in at whatever page you last read, then hides the book title and author.
Unless you can recognize the cover photo (which changes to match the latest edition), there is really no way to know what you're going to get except to guess.
I quite like YouTube Music's UI. The suggestions to relisten to songs I've listened to, the autosuggest continue on the same type of music works really well and has helped me discover many new bands i now like.
The search manages to show the album art, title, artist and type ( song or album, and it's grouped by song, album, artist).
And of course there's the added bonus that it comes with a YouTube Premium subscription, so i get good music UI + no YouTube ads + YouTube mobile app downloads.
While its UI and its discovery algorithms could use some improvement, at least the mobile app UI doesn’t change all the time, and search results are lists, not tiles.
The goal with this design (same for Netflix etc) is not to show you the results you want to see in the most efficient format, it's to push what they want you to see.
It's even more apparent on Netflix where the UI has got progressively worse over the years to the point it's basically unusable to discover stuff you actually want to see - I mean, large rows of "you watched this already, here it is again".
Spotify used to be absolutely amazing, it really was!! It was my go to platform...
Now it's just embarrassingly BAD and essentially unusable unless you're paying for it
And it’s not exactly a UX paradise if one is a premium customer either. I really find the UI hard work on desktop and mobile.
If and when Apple Music introduces a Duo equivalent tariff I will jump ship, for many reasons but a significant one is that I use Spotify exclusively for music yet it’s UI takes up a significant amount of premium space for podcasts. Apple had seen the light and spun off podcasts to a separate app from music.
Not even paying is enough. I pay for it with gift cards, and the UI for renewing my balance is really, really bad. And the last time my subscription lapsed it brought down the entire app with it. I had to uninstall everything and clear the cache.
The only reason I still use it is because I need a music discovery service that takes gift cards and has an offline mode. But guess what? On my last flight there was some error on Spotify's servers and even my local songs in offline mode stopped working.
I do my best to support Spotify seeing as it is one of the few tech platforms not controlled by the usual suspects. But they are making it really hard for me.
Yeah, and that whole Spotify HiFi fiasco? Announce and not deliver? I put off buying good headphones waiting for those assholes. Year end came, cancelled my subscription out of spite, went for Tidal and bought the headphones. As soon as Qubuz becomes available I'll try that.
I mostly quit listening to Joe Rogan's podcast after it left YouTube. I'd watch when he had an interesting guest that showed up in my recommendations. A while back a co-worker told me about a recent episode I should check out. Reluctantly, I went to Spotify to check it out. It took me a good 20 minute, and a lot of just scrolling through page after page of podcasts, until I actually found it. You'd think after spending $50M on the guy they wouldn't make it so hard to find. The search and navigation was horrendous. I listened to maybe 20 minutes of the podcast, quit to go do something else, and never went back.
I don't particularly like what Apple Music has become, when compared to the iTunes from the music-only era, but it's still dramatically better than Spotify.
When talking about the downside of Spotify, everyone focuses on the lack of control over the catalog. This is a real issue, with tracks sometimes just disappearing, but another loss of control is in the interface.
There is a great website someone put up called “sort my music” and also “organize your music”. If you google those terms they are the first and second result.
It will allow you to sort Spotify playlists by a number of hidden variables like BPM and year of release. You can also export/copy paste the tables that it generates in the process.
Not perfect and might not fit your exact use case, but wanted to let HN know.
I still don't understand why sometimes I click play on an album of a specific artists and in half an hour or so songs from a completely different artists start playing too. I specifically did not click mix or radio or genre - just play on the album itself. I have no idea why big companies like that always have to have such shitty UI.
You can turn that behavior off in the settings. On desktop, it's in Settings > Autoplay, on mobile (android, anyway), it's in Settings > Playback. You'll want to uncheck both "Autoplay on this device" and "Autoplay on other devices" in either case. Then once your album ends, playback stops.
My biggest problem with Spotify (and possibly the easiest to fix?) is that you can add songs only to a single end of the play queue. In Google Play Music (RIP) you had a deque. And that single reason is why I chose Tidal. I don't use playlists, I always eiter create my queue ad-hoc or listen to whole albums.
I've got tired of this stuff so I just went back to downloading music. It has friction but in the end it's much better to have my music in my regular music player.
It really hampers discoverability, though. I've used Youtube Music for quite a while now, and I discovered a lot of songs that I really like. (And way more that I didn't.) Without a service pushing those other songs on me (and not listening to the radio with all its commercials!) I'm not sure how I'd find new songs, especially ones that came out years ago and I just never heard them.
This might even include genres that I wouldn't think to look in. I'm very picky about music, but it's across most genres so far. I can't really rule anything out... Even foreign music. `Alors En Danse` comes to mind quickly.
You have a lot of ways to discover new songs, friends, radio, YouTube. Then when you find the song that you like you can download them, possibly not from YouTube but in FLAC quality (that is better than the shitty mp3 that Spotify gives you)
I still miss rdio. Even though I have pretty diverse tastes in bands and musical styles, I loved how rdio would match me up with other people who shared similar musical interests. I could look at their music collection for inspiration. I would find many new artists I loved this way.
> Hmm. What the fuck is this!? Why are you trying to be edgy?
This killed me lol. Very true. Thanks for the write-up.
I left Spotify after a few years of using it and currently am trying Tidal because they pay the artists more apparently? Sadly, however, they're guilty of the same UX problems.
I agree with the post. I should be able to set how I view my search results. Not everyone has the bandwidth to download all of the album art.
My most recent, frustrating bug is setting an album or podcast to be available offline and then having to wait 30 seconds to 1 minute for the iOS app to give up on finding the network while in airplane mode.
Like another top comment mentions, there seems to be no cohesive vision.
If a true competitor ever emerges, I’m happy to jump ship. I enjoy the subscription experience a lot.
p.s. - I never want ads or popups for new album drops. I’d take a “feed” with search available over whatever “Home” is.
Spotify won’t even let you view an artist’s songs in order, which frustrates me because I like to listen to entire discographies in order while working. I spent one weekend building a free tool to generate chronological playlists for an artist - https://www.timelineify.com.
A decent number of people use this, which I think indicates some clear gaps in Spotify’s basic display features. Luckily the Spotify API is very generous with the data they expose about artists.
Sometimes their algorithmic playlist is exactly what I want. For me, it has been good for discovery.
Other times I just want to play on album, from start to finish, in order, and then stop. For some reason, Spotify has trouble with the last part - stopping. There are two autoplay options and I keep turning them off and Spotify keeps turning them back on.
Also discovered this by accident recently. I have 200+ playlists and this type of search is the most reliable way of finding a saved or self-created playlist by name (looking at you "normal" Spotify search that always shows others' public playlists of the same name first).
Fire their UX team and hire this guy and consult with NNG, their visual design language is so unusable, small tiny cryptic icons and hidden gestures be damned. Why do we consumers put up with this bullshit design? The cover art search pattern for podcasts literally makes it impossible to search when I’m on the go, it bothers me so much.
I miss the days of Apple Human Interface Design Guidelines that were actually based off scientific principles of human visual perception.
I cancelled my spotify subscription after they banned libspotify from working in May. I was using it in Mopidy using the Iris plugin to get this nice table of songs. Now I'm spending my subscription fee on MP3s to grow my local MP3 collection and curating local playlists in Iris just like the olden days. So far so good.
The article says "If there is a piece of information about a podcast that is the least useful, that would be the cover art."
I think that's not true. Cover art / album art allows you to visually scan through a pile of different podcasts to find the one podcast you're looking for. E.g. "I know it's mostly purple with a little white, so now I'm scanning for purple… there it is." You can find the one you want even if the art is tiny and you can see 100 at a time.
Let's not allow the lesson to be "text is better, don't display cover art". Instead, let's allow the lesson to be "let me make the software work the way my brain does." It's not that Spotify has made a terrible decision, necessarily. It's just that their UI isn't optimized for a non-visual person, or a person who prefers text to images.
What if software had far more customizable UI, such that I can make the software display the information to me in the way that makes the most sense to me? Harder to test, for sure, but if they made it a paid feature (meaning only for paying users) it might pay for itself.
For those wanting an alternative, do give Tidal a trial (there are services that can port over your playlists).
Pros: You can view almost everything as a list, although their UI is optimized for touch screens - so the rows are rather large. Their radio rivals Pandora in terms of properly understanding your tastes.
Cons: After a very quick look, I don't think they do podcasts. Their API support is utter shit, 3rd party clients aren't a possibility, and there is no Linux client. You have to use the their client for "master" quality (which isn't bit-perfect and is definitely snake oil).
Having tried Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Play, Pandora, and Qobuz, I have found that Tidal is comfortably the best.
Amazon Music is a very close second, but suffers from what I call the "Armin Effect". Armin van Buuren plays many genres of electronic music, and so inferior recommendation engines tend to connect this huge umbrella of genres through Armin. Your taste in music may not be affected by this problem. Tidal and Pandora are the only two services I have used that don't suffer from this.
Hear hear! Spotify's UI/ux choices have frustrated me more and more over the years. Do any of their employees use their clients? Why is artist not a column that I can sort. Why such terrible uses of space? What happened to the social features? I'm not on any social platforms but it'd be fun to easily see, share, comment on friends' playlists.
IMO the Spotify Android UI is OK for the most part.
That said, Spotify could improve the UX.
For one thing, recommendations are fine but how about reduce the amount of lists. Let the user click something if they want recommendations based on feeling or genre or "more like x", etc.
To illustrate the previous point, when I open the app, there are these lists:
Your top mixes
Made for
Recently played
More like x
Your shows
Genre/feeling recommendation
Musiken att ha koll på
Genre recommendation
For today's drive (but WHY?)
More like y
More of what you like
Genre recommendation
Genre recommendation
Genre recommendation
Discover something new
New releases for you
Discover i
Discover j,
Genre again,
Genre.
Why is my New releases near the bottom? Why do I even have a "Musiken att ha koll på" with some pop songs I couldn't care less about -- and besides, why is the title in Swedish though the app is in English? Why are there like 7 genre suggestions?
It's easy to find bad UX in the industry, and I think that the reason is that it doesn't have to be good. It's hardly ever the differentiator that makes a difference when you choose to subscribe or not. The same could be said about the UX of Google services, etc. Capital flows to acquiring new subscribers and, grudgingly, to retaining old ones.
This kind of "discovery" UI sucks. You see it everywhere now. A/B testing, out of touch design teams and algorithms have overtaken basic common sense.
Spotify has many teams working on the UI of their app, could be 100+ people, perhaps even hundreds. Isn't that absurd when the UI of any classic music/media player is superior?
No because Spotify needs to turn its music catalog listeners into (proprietary) podcast listeners. Possibly proprietary playlists/recommendation radio streams as well. Same reason why Netflix pushes originals over licensed content.
It's incredibly annoying but haven't yet heard a compelling reason to switch to apple music.
At the same time I met a five year old who'd show me how they is finding their favorite songs on Spotify, even though they can't read yet. I feel like "I need my plain text interface back, yesterday"-folks maybe don't consider how many different people are actually using these apps.
Spotify has a dedicated kids app for those with a family plan, it's one thing I miss from my subscription. However the interface is basically the same as the full version so maybe the developers think adults use apps in the same way as children...
I think one reason companies have been doing this lately is because a surprisingly large population of computer users are only semi-literate (low education or just children). So if you’re doing UX Research you’ll actually notice this more visual, non-textual UI does “better” in a lot of metrics
I’ve been extremely frustrated by Apple Music/iTunes Match over the years. The whole reason I use that combo is that I got a big library of MP3 of my own, and this allows me to upload them as well as download my whole library. It doesn’t always work though, I’ve noticed that songs have disappeared over the years which is worriesome. I constantly get errors when I try to add new songs. Chinese or nicher songs are not always on Apple music, but always on youtube, so I sometimes have to download the song from youtube in MP3. It’s hard to figure out what songs I’ve listened to when I listen to their radios (so that I can add them to my library). And in general searching for a song in my library (basic feature) is an awful experience. Should I move to spotify?
There are good reasons Spotify does what Spotify does, some of which have already been mentioned in this thread. Instead of begging and groveling for them to change, why not change your habits to ones more beneficial to you? Spotify has never promised users freedom; they are simply a front-end to their collection of licensed music. Spotify has all the power in the relationship with their users and will perpetrate abuse on their users without hesitation or warning.
If you're on a freedom-respecting OS, I recommend either soulseekqt or any plain old BitTorrent client for music acquisition. I recommend mpd with ncmpcpp as a client for playing, and sending cash by mail to whoever you want. Remember, sharing is a virtue, not a vice.
We live in an age of poor design. Advertisement and dark patterns run rampant and reduce the functionality and usability of our software all the time.
That being said Spotify still somehow stands out as a case study in how not to design an interface. What's worse is that the mobile apps are specifically designed with electron under the assumption that it will make cross platform development easy...but it breaks on every device in different ways.
It's sad because I hate having to maintain a large music catalog manually but no music service really provides an adaquite solution to this and the system with the most extensive library is sadly...the worst platform for it. I hope they get better but I've been hoping that for years at this point.
It's not just Spotify that has this problem. All major, successful web applications have huge usability issues.
Software becomes successful not because of how it looks, but because of how it helps humans in their daily lives. The current fad is form over function to the nth degree.
What I hate most about Spotify is: after meticulously adding songs to a queue, accidentally tapping a song near the end of the queue just to see the entire queue being cleared up to that song.
It’s just mind-boggling and creates some sort of anxiety during using the app.
I have similar issues with their desktop app and the UI seems to get worse over time.
Their API is pretty good and I've used it to build a PoC desktop client using JavaFX that works using simple table controls and local Sqlite caching so I can search/filter my playlist "library". The API even has playback controls and nowplaying support. Pretty much everything needed to build an alternative usable client.
The reason I did not continue with it and I'm still stuck with their desktop-(but-actually-web)-client is that the playback control API seems to be blocked by Sonos so I cannot use it to control my main listening devices.
I love Spotify as a service but their clients are horrible.
Just want to give a shoutout to Amazon Music, who (in a good way?) don't care much about the customer or a great experience, or even about being seen as a company who cares a lot about music or the artists.
They just shove a bunch of music into a giant search engine and do some easily ignorable curation.
But their search works great, easy to play an album, good back catalog on Unlimited (I've been doing a lot of crate digging into the early 2000s using Wikipedia's album catgeory listings and my hit rate between the list and it being in Amazon is about 85%)
The API sucks, playlists have weird limits, their UI is atrocious ... but you can hear what you like, when you like, so I'm happy.
I refused to use Spotify from early on because it is so anti-album. The interface just sucks for playing albums, and its ridiculous that they haven't fixed it. Playlists are fine for parties or when you want to discover new music, but if you are doing more focused listening albums are the way to go.
I use Apple Music for streaming / high quality downloads while on the go or airplaying around the house, and Roon (https://roonlabs.com) for dedicated in-home album listening. Its definitely a more expensive combo than Spotify, but worth it.
Do they do any development still? I haven’t seen a single useful feature come out from the team during past 3 years. Their single tap feature is absurdly bad. For some reason, shuffle is never truly random and keeps playing same old songs. I know people have been complaining about this for years. There is no easy way to merge duplicate playlists. There is tons of things to do but I don’t think they have any development team anymore. They rode on popularity, founders cashed out, bought private islands and now they probably only have small maintenance team to keep the lights on.
I'm so irritated with Spotify. Deezer is a bit better, but not a hell of a lot. I was a CD buyer and music pirate for a very long time, and while music streaming has helped me find a lot of new music, it has come with many frustrations as well. The biggest problem is the slow slide from convenience into a pre-packaged, curated experience, leveraging the audience for extra revenue. I know it's inevitable when companies need to maintain constant growth, but I can't help but get a little angry when I'm paying for a service, and I'm STILL the product to be sold for advertising dollars. The old adage of "if you aren't paying for it, you are the product" doesn't apply anymore. It's now basically "If it is a service, you are the product".
You can't customize any of these home screens. You can't tell them to STOP SHOWING ME PODCASTS I DON'T LISTEN TO PODCASTS. You can't reset your listening profile to get back to a vanilla experience (especially applicable if you use your account for multiple different things. I don't listen to the same music while working as I do while working out, or actual "just sit-and-listen to music" sessions, and I also use music for D&D sessions, so all my suggested music ends up being a terrible mishmash. Spotify's suggestion here is to pay for multiple accounts.
Even the AI and suggested music is wearing thin. Both Spotify and Deezer just give me the same exact tracks constantly, 99% of it is very mainstream, well-known stuff, and I haven't discovered any new music in over a month, despite listening for at least 4 hours a day. I kind of want to go back to just pirating everything again. It's actually pathetic that these top-of-the-line services offer less flexibility, power, and control than just pirating music and sticking it on your PMP did 15 years ago. It's sad.
At least Bandcamp is still a thing, but then I've got an annoying library split. I can't mix my bought Bandcamp tracks in with Deezer or Spotify.
Why are these the options? Pay out the nose for music (if you're a serious listener, $150 gets you 10 albums, which I can get through in three days). Be a criminal. Pay for a subscription that gives you no control and sells you to advertisers.
A couple of months ago I asked my wife to put on an a specific album in the car. I was surprised to find out she had just turned on the spotify artist shuffle. She then explained that this is how she listens to all music on spotify: search artist, press the big green button.
This is very anecdotal, but since then i have been amazed to find out that a huge chunk of < 30y olds i have asked listen to music exactly this way.
I'm still not sure if those users use spotify this way because the ui is so bad or if the ui is molded towards those users...
I bet you're right on you last point. It's a sign of how irrelevant albums are today. I bet if the UX team's average age was 45+, the UX would center more around the album construct.
The post complained about album art for podcasts, i bet that's more of a symptom of Spotify slapping Podcast support over what has already been created for music.
Plex (and plexamp) have really brought back the old iTunes interface I didn't know I was missing.
I can search and get a list, I can sort within that list by whatever I want, I can create a "smart playlist" for "100 tracks, with more than 5 plays that were last played more than 3 months ago". There's also a "shuffle albums" feature that I didn't realize I missed from iTunes. You can also add a tidal subscription within plex, but it's a little clunky so I just stick to my library.
Also - can we get a queue that clears itself when I click Play on an album, and that I can add songs to the front of?
I added a +1 to the "Play Next" community feature request [0]. Not sure if one exists for the queue clearing behavior, but I would definitely +1 that too if I found it.
Also this UI / UX issue isn't just a problem with Spotify but iTunes (Apple Music) to! So I guess it's just a general trend that started for no good reason.
In iTunes, the table view is now only for the main page, and has been gone from the search and the playlist pages. It's so inconsistent. You get the nice old-school table view when you're on default but then when on the search page they display it on grid view. On the playlist page, you're like on this weird half-table half-grid view.
I so fucking agree. That 5 songs only for each damn artist, that makes you browse through albums... What an outrage! I just gave up and don't use the app anymore. So frustrating.
I am glad I am not alone hating these kind of user hostile designs which is a trend nowadays.
I departed Spotify long ago but its pair, the Tidal is at least as bad, some may say (me! me!) that is much worse.
It took about ca. 2-3 years for them to get to a state where you click on a song and it plays it. With no long delay, no stutter, ability to skip into a specific spot, almost no crash. With still no decent playlist support (2-3 years more work to develop this cutting edge revolutionary concept to an entry level), but it was enough to switch for HiFi quality. Since then there was a tiny addition to playlists, fairly usefule if you now where the traps are, but they did a bunch of making it flashy and big, with very limited advancement on functionality. In fact, basic functionality got f..d up here and there! Drag and drop makes random things, search bar jumps all over the place, album/playlist info only visible topmost or much scrolled down position, in between just a big emty space. Which ironically can react to click! They introduced the invisible item gets clicked concept. Funny. : / Lists go to the very edge, visually cluttered navigation and item text, invisible title bar to drag (but click slightly elsewehere and it will start some song). And the most bloated search results, yes! They make it exceptionally hard to find what you need, in pair with Spotify. And the same kind of suggestions and trends and lists and whatnot, but your own favourites are pushed back somewhere. Their choices have the prime location not your own! How hostile is that?! (very!)
Looks like they hired the slowest working most incompetent UX/UI designers, turning the usability into an ever descending spiral.
But on the positive side.... well, nothig. It is huge, slow like f..k, bloated, a nighmare to use.
As soon as I pick up building an offline file cathalog again I will go back to the good old days of owning my songs and copying the file I want to have in the centre. This streaming kind of hostile nighmare is not for me. I am thinking about collecting my complaints into a post but it is a long work. And futile anyway. I tried to communicate problems with them but they do not listen. They try to change my behaviour first, also asking about things I already told them, seems like not even reading my mail in full. So likely will just go away while emitting little puffs of smoke through my ears.
To be honest the album art view in media catalogs is actually quite easy to "scan" if you know what you are looking for already. I guess our brains are probably hard wired for this sort of visual quickly-spotting-something-familair/-important/-dangerous-in-a-jumble-of-other-stuff type thing.
I would prefer a toggle to flip between a list (ideally with sortable headers etc) and album art cover view though - not exactly super complex to resolve.
This is true, visual search has a optima when the contrast of the object in the search field is above certain threshold. Below that magic threshold, it is useless (for e.g searching for a Jigsaw puzzle piece). But, when visual search works, it is probably ridiculously fast for the evolutionary reasons you rightfully mentioned.
There are a couple of things when we search for something in a text box: We're pattern matching what we think their database contains. If the hysteresis between the search and the match is small, Album grid view might work. You have to know the cover art a-priori though. But if you are vaguely looking for something, list is far better.
I just assume this and all UI weirdness in programs these days are dark patterns and they work very well for whatever nefarious reason the company uses them for.
I recently switched to Deezer, and the app web and webapp are so much more usable. And you can still upload missing tracks and sync them to your phone!
Personally I've not found that, I used Tune My Music to sync across 140 playlists of probably 10k songs from Spotify and not many came up as "not available". I have found their library for children's profiles more limited though.
It seems like we moved back in time somehow. To a time before Windows 95. We use to have multiple applications running, each in their own little Window, on a low resolution monitor. Windows where no bigger than you could reasonably justify, because you didn't know other programs the user might be running at the same time, on their tiny monitor. Our monitor are bigger than ever, higher resolution, yet many applications are designed as if they would have the entire screen to themself.
Dear Spotify, please do not go back to 2001. Thanks.
On a serious note. If all you do is high intent searches (I know exactly the one song/podcast I want), Spotify is not for you. Spotify is about discovery. Stick to iTunes or Winamp or Kazaa or Youtube or anything else that just gives you a list of things. Don't make the product worse because you're using it for something it's not designed around.
A bad search UI is a bad search UI. Saying that Spotify is about discovery makes it even worse. Why wouldn't they have a functional UI for searches then?
Also quit the Spotify exceptionalism please. YouTube has a discovery algorithm that is as good, plus there's tons of niche music on YouTube that you will never find on Spotify, because it wouldn't be easy to get a deal to have it on the platform (royalties blabla)
Spotify is not “about discovery”. It’s supposed to be the service you use to play music (and now general audio). Whether that’s new music, old music, playlists, your library, it doesn’t matter. They want you to use Spotify for all your music needs.
I don't like when podcast creators publish on Spotify only as it is not even possible to change playback speed in their web ui. And yt-dlp doesn't work either. They want me to download their app & create an account to just be able to listen so I mostly seek through it quickly or skip the podcast completely. They should follow the Netflix path, it is barely usable service.
I tried switching from YouTube music to spotify recently and was shocked that they don't have a _music library_ feature: a table of songs that you can slice by artist, album, etc, in the manner of every music player since the dawn of time.
How does anyone serious about music use it? Did I somehow miss that spotify is only intended for casual, "I'll listen to whatever"-type users?
No, you can't. This is a for-profit service, and a table of songs interferes with their ability to choose what you listen to, and prefer certain artists or songs over others. I would not expect a high-quality music library interface from any cloud provider, because the intent is to stream you the things they prefer, and not empower you.
I don't think people understand the purpose of Spotify and every user interaction they engage you with. Spotify is not for you - you're not the customer. Big labels are. Podcasters are. You're a product and you're being shown what's been paid for.
Why do people couch their interactions with big tech as if they matter? What are you going to do, NOT use Spotify? Fat chance.
I remember posting this to hn some time ago and it was well enough received that I'll mention it here, a self-hosted streaming solutions with absolutely no bells or whistles. Just a table of music, though, the table is generated by a search query, fast.
I think it says a lot when people hate Spotify this much and then feel like they have to use it. There are comments here about buildling your an entire new interface to Spotify. At that point, shouldn't you just...not use Spotify? What would Spotify have to do to you to get you to not use it, sneak into your house at night and do something to the family pet?
Yeah this infuriates me. I have a very large playlist and it will definitely keep playing the same stuff each time I shuffle it. It’s not like is even hard to set a pseudo random seed.
> If there is a piece of information about a podcast that is the least useful, that would be the cover art.
Slightly disagree with this. When you're searching for something whose cover art you know well, the visual match is definitely the fastest way for you to get to it.
Truncating the title/track info on the other hand, I agree is pretty unforgivable.
UI and UX got optimized to hell like other streaming services chasing metrics at all cost.
Sometimes I think there are companies and apps that would benefit from firing their entire UX/UI teams wholesale and then slowly rehiring a portion of them as actual problems crop up from their absence. A reset to this A/B madness of sorts.
Does anyone know a "good" source of torrent fo music? I'm tired of Spotify and Deezer, the former not giving me the free choice of settings to, say, disable podcasts and the latter not having a "native" linux client at all. I'm going for Gnome's Music app + stored music somewhere.
Just a side note:
Iirc Spotify does not use Electron - it uses the Chromium embedded Framework. It is kinda the same as electron (it gives you an Browser) but instead of JavaScript you have to use C++ (or a wrapper around the library in you favourite language) to implement the Backend side of the app
I think the inconsistent mess of Spotify is what most people actually want, because back in the day I remember constantly hearing from people how much they hated iTunes. This Neil fellow and myself are the ones with the weird taste in software, not the UX experts behind Spotify.
And please show the release YEAR of albums in the Appears On section.
AND please stop recommending stupid house remixes of my favourite songs. I don't like house music one bit, I don't know the remix artist at all, so don't recommend their TRASH to me!
Because even though you pay for the subscription, they are still getting paid to promote artists, albums, and tracks while also trying to keep you on the platform for more time by offering playlists made by themselves (more opportunity to promote) or other users.
Been using spotify since they launched a beta in the US (11 years ago?), but them constantly pushing services that are not music on their platform, and populating their recommended playlists cheaper-per-play songs, I am actively looking to move.
If a Spotify PM is collecting feedback: If I go to a song's Radio to try and discover similar songs, do not play me songs I already "liked" (ones with the heart icon highlighted), it defeats the purpose of going to the radio.
True. I left Spotify years ago for the single reason of their UI/UX getting worse every update. First tried to offer feedback on their tracker, but it just never changed for the better...
First time I tried out Spotify I as horrified to find that so many common functions are behind a pay wall. I forgot which one but probably just too many to recall. I will never use Spotify.
I've heard that Spotify recommendations are top notch, but its terrible UX keeps me from switching from Apple Music (which sucks in different ways, but search is much better).
Spotify's UI is a nightmare to use. If someone from the UX team hangs out on HN, please pass the message to the right people - fix the menu and split podcasts from music.
I’ve moved on to another service once I realised that there was no way to remove JRE Podcast from my homepage, despite the fact I hadn’t listened it in months.
I feel like I have such a disconnect from most others with these services.
I tried out Pandora one night when it first came out while I was in college in 2004/2005. Then it was “someone made an algorithm that can pick music for you!” After about 15 minutes I lost interest “Hm that’s neat, I’m good though I know what I like”
Fast forward 17 years and you have these multibillion dollar companies everyone loves and hates, controversies. I never saw the appeal in the first place.
On desktop you might get something like this when navigating to an Artist page, find the Discography section and click the "show all" button. On the resulting page top right there is a dropdown where you need to select "All" instead of "albums" and make sure the list icon is active instead of the grid icon. Then it shows a list of songs segmented by release.
Spotify's UI is the absolute worst. The craziest thing to me is that it's never improved either, it's always been down bad.
- Managing music offline is _terrible_. The first iPod did it well in 2001, but Spotify still can't let you navigate your downloaded music while offline on mobile at in any reasonable manor
- The "Now Playing" mechanism is awkward and confusing. Sometimes your playlist disappears as you play it, eliminating the "previous track" function
- If you come across the song while listening to a playlist, and you want to switch to listening to song in the context of the album instead of the playlist, there's no way to do it without restarting the song from the start (Apps like Foobar 2000 do this extremely well)
- Their recommendation engine is (generally) terrible. There's one particular song I get every single time I play one of three of my generated "mixes" even though I choose "Don't Recommend" every single time it comes on.
- My generated "mixes" are almost identical every day. Gimme something I haven't heard before!
- On the topic of not wanting to hear a particular artist, they added "Block Artist" functionality, as a compromise in response to anger that controversial artists like Chris Brown were allowed to stay on the platform. Annoyingly though, you can only access this feature from mobile. Like if I wanted to listen to The Smiths on my laptop for some reason, I'd have to first use my phone to unblock them (I blocked them due to the aforementioned "Don't Recommend" feature not working)
- They are a shitty podcast player, so I use the excellent Pocket Casts instead. Unfortunately, there's no way to not to be exposed to be inundated with ads for their original podcasts whenever you're navigating the app
- I resent the idea of podcasts being locked to a specific platform in the first place. It's bad enough that we have a dozen different streaming services, but now we have vendor lockin with podcasts? Give me a break.
- No lossless audio in 2021
- Artist pages are a fragmented mess. Look at the page for Barenaked Ladies for an example. Their catalog is hard to navigate because they have such a large amount of live albums. Why put live albums in with studio albums?
- Similarly, multiple editions of the same album are listed separately (but not always). Look at the page for The Beatles for an example. They have 3 versions of Sgt Peppers (various special editions which came out over the years), and they are all tagged as 1967. Then they have a "Super Deluxe" of Let It Be which apparently came out in 2021. Why do contemporary reissues and remasters sometimes have the date of the remaster, and other times have dates of the original albums?
Are you new to internet drama? People use it to feel high and mighty for a couple weeks and get some sweet, sweet dopamine hits, and then they go back to doing exactly what they were doing before.
A concise explanation: functionalism is secondary to the attention economy for modern media platforms.
Hard to advertise in a functional list grid, but yeah like fuck, I’m right there with you. It’s to the point where I’d rather just steal the album off of YouTube. At least there’s an ad-blocker.
The problem I see is that the "attention economy"'s end goal is still to be a marketing platform for real, paid products. It won't work in a world where there are no products and everything is an advertising platform - people won't be paying for the "privilege" of seeing ads.
The market has been distorted by VCs and investors who are willing to throw shit tons of money towards anything that "grows" and generates engagement. This pulled the ground out of the model of making products that people pay for - you would make money money (off investors) if you just give away your product than if you make people pay for it. That's how we ended up in the current situation, and there are tons of vested interests (people's entire careers are built on this) in perpetuating the problem even if the system can't ever be sustainable.
The music has to stop at some point though when everything is saturated by advertising. That appears to be now given the current, massive downturn. Investor money is no longer free or easy to come by, so the pendulum will have to swing back to making products funded by its end-customers.
I will give Spotify UX one thing: the mobile version has a great feature where if I just double click the tab menu button that opens up search, it shoots me straight into my keyboard. That needs to be standard.
Advertising ruins everything. No exceptions. In Spotify's case it's an even bigger insult since people are paying for the privilege of being advertised to.
> There are so many terrible UX/UI patterns everywhere in these tech companies. Apple, Google, Spotify, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, etc;
I 100% agree with this, and I find myself increasingly hating software the worse the UX is.
I was in visual studio the other day, and wanted to view the properties of the project on the settings page, so I open it up trying to view it, which immediately and automatically without any input from me fired some sort of event off that modified the settings and completely broke the project.
Now that they are the market leader, Spotify does not have any business incentive to make their app nice to use. In fact, their incentives are to keep you paying but not listening, since that maximizes their ROI.
The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface, which is actually what I recently started doing: https://i.imgur.com/ar7VrYy.png.
It's still work in progress but actually works perfectly well already. It's not ready for public use yet and also isn't open source yet though. If you want to follow development I guess the best place to do that is my twitter: https://twitter.com/tom_j_watson.