- Reliability: Spotify’s IOS and Mac apps regularly refuse to play and require killing and restarting. If you’re in the car, several times. Similar issues with bluetooth speakers. When browser or Youtube app happily play, Spotify struggles.
- Improved UX: Still can’t filter for unheard episodes of a podcast. Not sure why the repeat button has no tooltip and has to be so cryptic. One tap repeats the (imaginary?) playlist and 2 taps repeats the song? Who knows? Why can’t I see a stream of the songs I played so I can easily find what I recently played and play it again? No, recently played albums/radios don’t help. How do I search for business podcasts that aren’t from my country? Why does the shuffle of an album start playing random other artists? Well, actually I know, those artists are cheaper to play.
- Proper Listings: Bo Burnham’s Make Happy isn’t a podcast and those are not 3 minute long podcast episodes. Hitting next must go to the next track and start from the beginning, NOT from minute 4.
It’s unbelievable that in the last 10 years the only positive change was the podcast UI and addition of podcasts with videos etc. At the expense of app reliability. And how hard is it to allow me to find business podcasts from US? (Yes, I am hung up on it after Google decided to kill the Podcasts app) Or at least sort by globally most listened?
Actually, happy with the car thing dying. Maybe they will pull the super obstructive car UI from the app. It comes back from time to time even though it’s turned off and it’s a major safety risk, despite trying the opposite.
It's so ridiculous we can't see a history of songs played. I've been complaining about Spotify's lack of UX improvement for years.
Managing or finding playlists on mobile is a nightmare. There's no organization or folders on mobile (despite being on desktop). Searches are always sluggish, even when searching downloaded songs or playlists.
While the UI is not my favorite, I can see a history of my songs played. On android, click on home, click your avatar (top left). A menu should slide out with "Listening history" in it.
I switched to Apple Music because of Apple Music Classical (browsing and curation of classical music is very different from popular music.) I'd love a similar feature set for Jazz.
I can think of ten thousand things I'd like the Spotify player to do.
- First of all, stop changing the layout every goddamn day
- Stop pushing podcasts
- Better 'ignore' functionality so I can listen to something without it influencing my recommendations. I know Private Mode exists but it's clumsy and all-or-nothing. I want it to be more granular and available on an as-needed basis.
- Support for player cursors, which is like 'queue', but with the ability to tell Spotify to 'resume playing from this point in the playlist'. Maybe even expand this, and add multiple simultaneous cursor support, allowing for on-demand blackout zones or something.
- Bring back the 30 second press-to-hold song preview. Removing this feature was a crime. "low usage" my ass, so what? Keep it in, you scoundrels, even the SDK still supports it.
- Support for song start/end offsets. This is the #1 most requested feature on their feedback forums, has been open for 10 years, and they only ever occasionally chime in to say "we hear you, but not right now". If the issue is legal, just say so and stop leading us all on.
- Allow me to re-order my Liked Songs.
- Do what Apple Music did and require artists upload lyrics. Partnering with Genius was a dumb move. Genius is inconsistently available, and more often than not, just straight up incorrect.
There are so many more. Their UI is just barely on the right side of acceptable and not one inch further than that. I stay on Spotify because their music discovery is really excellent, I look forward to the new recommendations from Discover Weekly and Release Radar, and I think the Spotify Wrapped is a lot of fun every year. But as a music player, it is deficient to the highest degree.
Apple Music does not require artists to upload lyrics, it’s optional. They just make it easier than Spotify where you need to submit through Musixmatch.
> What new features do you want for a music player?
I want playlist folders (which do exist) to be playable in their entirety, or just the sub-list. I want to be able to turn an existing playlist into the top-level one, i.e. categorise within it. I want to find songs I've liked that are not in any playlist. In short: playlist management.
You asked for 'new features', but mainly I want the bugs fixed, and they're not doing that either. (I'm sure they must be, but obviously I mean the visible bugs that prominently affect me.)
I find Spotify's library system deeply lacking. The only update I have seen is they changed like/dislike songs to 'hearting' songs - and they removed the default view from 'Custom Order' playlists to 'Recently Listened.'
I want control over how my library is organized and made accessible to me. Any basic library system would allow me to tag music and create ways of organizing music in a way that works for me.
For example, I can't view a catalogue of my downloaded songs - only albums and playlists.
What if I could explore music by entering a mode to listen to music as if I were at the time I was in college, considering what I was listening to then?
What if I want to listen to the music I've listened to the most- view the stats of what I listen to, like last.fm's scrobbling?
Why hasn't there been a music video made available in Spotify?
Why isn't there a way for Artists to interact with fans in a meaningful way beyond promotions? Why is there still a barrier to entry for Artists to make their music accessible to an audience- they still have to go through an costly, label-esque intermediary. Why haven't they attracted the DIY scene of bandcamp and built better goodwill?
Further, Spotify's playlist/song centric model promotes only listening to a small number of songs from a large number of artists. I wish they invested in allowing for listeners to discover music in different modalities- like enabling someone who wants to seek out and listen to a whole new album.
A common take, but their recommendations are tired and often just songs I already listen to. Why must their recommendation also be kept behind small sample sizes like the 'Discover Weekly?' Why can't I query/paginate through recommendations- such as viewing artists I might like if I like these sets of artists?
My really only options for discovery are finding music on a lucky chance on a radio- or actively clicking through "Related Artists." - or more likely, not on Spotify.
Further, I cannot get Spotify to understand that I have multiple listening profiles. I sometimes want to listen to jazz or post-rock for background music. In terms of music discovery- I want to find more in my preferred genres, and not have lofi-hip-hop interrupt my listening session. This has never been possible.
They used to support native app integrations- the only way you could use a music visualizer- not anymore.
New features I can think of- there's been the recent DJ- which is a worse version than an app that predated it, Radiant- which is more creative and does a better job at blending AI by taking the form of a robotic person who can provide weather updates.
To then hear that they are investing on building B2B software with commercializing Backstage is concerning. It further hurts their ethos to learn that they are pushing 'Ghost' artists to avoid paying royalties to deserving artists.
What new features do you want for a music player? Better audio quality? More discovery features? Lower memory usage? More responsive UI?