There's no concrete criticisms in the blog post other than vaugarities around "big Spotify". As a very happy Spotify customer (after ditching both Google and Apple music), all of the bemoaning of self-promotion is very easily ignore by scrolling past the first two rows of promoted content in the app. It's essentially not even recognizable to me anymore.
The author touts Spotify's recommendation engine and rightly so, nothing comes close. Author then goes on to say they've gone to some niche streaming service that provides FLAC (nobody actually cares except audiophiles) and has no meaningful recommendation service. So author is just cutting off their nose to spite their face.
I agree that Spotify has problems, specifically around financials but that story is as old as music itself. Artists rarely make money of the actual music but off merch and concert sales.
You wanna support your artists? Stop being lazy and go so see them live or buy their merch. Boring article otherwise.
edit: You wanna keep your data too? Hook up to last.fm scrobbling and it's all yours. Last.fm has a very good integration with Spotify.
> There's no concrete criticisms in the blog post other than vaugarities around "big Spotify".
Simply not true. He describes and discusses several concrete problems, all of which are related: Spotify is trying to control his experience in favor of their goals and counter to his. You may not agree with his goals, but they’re plainly stated.
> “… the consumer has a perception of control, but almost everything is controlled by the app-masters and faceless algorithms.”
> “I got tired of the dealing with an app (and a platform) that shoved podcasts and audio books in my face, despite having no interest in them.”
> “… dowdy app that exists not to delight its customers but instead meet the growth objectives of its stock market masters.“
Although I also don't like the podcasts available in Spotify, I agree podcasts do make strategic sense for Spotify from a business perspective compared to recorded music. Spotify competes with internet content creators that make hundreds of hours of content per month. Music production is very labor intensive and musicians usually make 1-2 hours of recorded content per year. To match the output one streamer/YouTuber, you might have to have a team of 100-200 musicians, but I'm not sure most people can name even 50 artists they regularly listen to.
Podcasts, on the other hand, are also capable of cheaply producing hundreds of hours of content per month, and therefore for Spotify, are a logical solution to this problem, and theoretically allow them to compete more effectively with YouTube and streaming.
Whether they can actually produce enough good-quality podcasts is another story though. In some sense The Joe Rogan Experience was supposed to be their Halo, but I'm not sure how much traction it has given to Spotify's platform.
That's not my argument. My argument is this: a reason Spotify might have decided to move into podcasts is that podcasts are more efficient at generating content (measured in hours) than musicians are. It doesn't go the other way though; there's little incentive to generate content less efficiently. (Ignoring the fact that Amazon/Audible do in fact distribute music through Prime Music.)
> The author touts Spotify's recommendation engine and rightly so, nothing comes close.
Actually the author does the opposite, saying that YouTube’s algo is superior.
For me, Spotify used to be THE recommendation engine, but the last few years I found it to regurgitate a lot of the same songs, and recommended the same songs to people around me.
To be fair, I’m far less in “discovery mode” than I used to be, but Spotify is contributing to this by no longer inspiring me. It’s easy to get Spotify like everyone else and just be over with it, but a healthy discussion about active choice is always welcome.
> is very easily ignore by scrolling past the first two rows
Right? I personally don’t use the home page at all. So, it is just a click.
> Spotify's recommendation engine and rightly so, nothing comes close
For the people who dislike AI recommendation, try to be more creative with your playlist search keywords. You will be surprised (it's heading past the 500 million users, many of them are also “curators”)
> You wanna keep your data too? Hook up to last.fm
Not only that. Spotify tracks are just "text" (copy/paste...). I personally keep all my library data (playlists, favourites...) in simple txt files. Then you can do whatever you want with it (data maintenance, API enrichment...)
>Given, the most of my music discovery is analog — through friends, magazines and music blogs, I don’t rely on recommendation engines as much.
>I know what I like. In 2022, I tuned more to jazz classics, ambient electronica and ambient classical music for nearly 30,000 minutes.
I think the reason the author is able to live without Spotify's recommendation algorithm is that many of the artists producing music in their genres are either dead ("jazz classics" i.e. 1930-1960) or few in number and studied intensely by human academics ("ambient classical", whatever that means). In other words, their music either has been or is currently being catalogued and classified by humans.
For other genres this is not possible. I listen to a lot of jazz in general. Jazz is very much the Wild West; there hasn't been a lot of money in it for the past 50 years and I certainly don't have an army of humans or "piano friends" curating it for me for free. And to put it bluntly, there's a lot of bad or uninteresting music.
Spotify does a pretty good job of recommending me good music, at high scale, based on content rather than popularity, and often from musicians that no one's ever heard of. I don't have a lot of time to triage, classify, and curate music myself, but even if I did, there's no way I could possibly get even close to what Spotify does via my manual human labor. So that's why I pay for and continue to pay for Spotify.
>You wanna support your artists? Stop being lazy and go so see them live or buy their merch.
My gut says a Patreon-style system for music is less viable. Internet content creators put out hundreds of hours of quality content every month. Musicians put out maybe 1-2 hours/year of recorded music that can be accessed over the internet (i.e., excluding private live performances.) Unfortunately for me and my wallet, there's less incentive to donate to musicians than other content creators given the difference in output and value to me. I'm not sure the content creator model can be the same for musicians; I can't name off the top of my head a single musician I like that regularly produced content worth $5/month or more for me. The mass distribution model sounds more effective for music: if a musician can produce content worth $0.05 individually to millions of people, it's profitable. Given the labor-intensive model of creating music compared to other content, the mass distribution style of business model makes more sense.
I don't think OP was suggesting a monthly donation, unless buying merch has taken on a new meaning?
A tiny amount of artists get anywhere near that number of listeners - I'm not arguing that you should feel obliged to do so but for anyone that wishes to support the average artist it makes much more sense to put money in their pocket than hope they manage to get huge amounts of streaming plays.
Every time I use Spotify and - as the author laments - get podcasts and audiobooks thrown at me, I want to ditch streaming audio entirely.
What will I lose? A frictionless way to get individual songs into a playlist and some recommendations.
What will I gain? The ability to keep playing those songs after they're dropped by $streaming_platform. Fewer ads in a product I'm already paying for. Supporting artists in a way that gives them more money.
Edit: Thought of another positive - songs will stop getting replaced with new mixes of them (this doesn't count the cover art changes). It's happened a dozen times on various Evanescence songs, and a Peter Hollins accapella song was replaced with a violin duet version.
I barely use Spotify at this point and I've been meaning to go through it and export lists of my playlists but alas, laziness...
My two biggest gripes with Spotify is how poorly it runs on every platform I use it on (web, Android, desktop), and the pushing of podcasts. It constantly has weird glitching and missing UI elements that show up a few seconds later. As much as I listen to podcasts every single day, that's not what I want to use Spotify for, as the podcast player is also atrocious. It has lost my position in my podcasts so many times. The only reason I no longer listen to the JRE podcast is because it's now only on the Spotify platform and Spotify is a terrible experience.
I've also run into the issue where songs in my playlists are removed for whatever reason. Why would I ever indefinitely pay money to some service when basic elements of it can be removed at any moment? Same thing happens for YouTube playlists, but at least Spotify has the grace to leave the song info there so you actually know what got removed...
I started buying CDs again, which I think I stopped doing for over a decade at least. I run Roon and ripping the CDs just involves sticking the CD into the drive. It's not terribly burdensome to do when a new disk arrives. Qobuz has music for sale (downloads without DRM), and it also integrates with Roon for when I just want to stream.
I also used to buy FLACs on bandcamp, but Epic bought them, so we'll see how long it takes for that to get ruined.
Honest question, are you on a free plan? I use Spotify daily and did not even know they offered audiobooks until I read it in this threads linked article. I knew about podcasts, but have never had it thrown in my face, or even mentioned. Where are these ads the OP is complaining about?
No, I'm the manager of a family plan. They're thrown up as "look at what's new on Spotify" interstitials, and all over the front page. They're also the first two tiles on Browse, and like to show up in categories other than Podcasts and Audiobooks.
Oh, and in their marketing emails too.
If you're not seeing them, well, that's just odd since I can't get away from them.
"but that is not enough for me to put up with a decidedly dowdy app that exists not to delight its customers but instead meet the growth objectives of its stock market masters."
I have the same problem with every modern day app. They are earning 100s of millions, but instead of making the apps better/faster for the main feature which sells them, everyone is just in the hot pursuit of cramming more and more features in so that they can get more users somehow (which is what the board/stock market cares about). No one gives a second thought about the existing user who uses 1-2 features of the app, and wants them to be simple, better, faster and easier.
I also think a lot of it also has to be blamed for iterative "Agile" development model where every 2 weeks, every team has to showcase something "new", this takes a toll right from product management to development. Cargo culting product development / growth hacking etc.
Spotify is the most valuable subscription I have. $10 for all the music I could ever want. I journey through the discographies of artists I listened to as a kid, I discover new artists, I love it.
My biggest gripe... I don't want to listen to Drake. Ever. Yet he's in every one of my Daily Mix playlists.
At least in the Android app, you can go to an Artist's page and choose to not ever play that artist. I've done this with a handful of artists (Taylor Swift and Smashmouth come to mind) and it makes it so much better.
What we need is the ability to control our own “timelines” and curation policies. Spotify is most definitely incentivized to highlight certain artists over others (using a completely opaque process). Again it all comes back to maximizing shareholder value over maximizing user control and experience.
I'd gladly leave Spotify for a better alternative, and there is so much that could be done to make it better[1], but the article did little to point out Spotify's real flaws or make a compelling case for something better.
I think it was a post-hoc rationalization by someone who has invested into super high-end audio gear and needs a service with the right features to match that.
I'm leaving Spotify because their Android client is hot dogshit (sorry, not sorry).
They put the unfavorite button right next to the cast button AND in the drop-down shade. Why would I ever be trying to unfavorite a song from there? There's no confirmation to unlike a song. If you are so unfortunate to hit it, you will instantly lose that song, have no idea what it was or how to get it back. And even if you do, you will never be able to reorder your Liked songs.
This is beyond the INSANE REFRESHING behavior it has where it regularly shows you stuff for 5+ seconds only to yank everything and refresh the page with basically all new data as soon as you go to click something.
Truly, what the hell is wrong with these app developers and designers? I would love to watch one of them actually have to use the app. How is this the standard?
Spotify's biggest issue for me has been their insistence on a terrible Desktop UI. It used to be that Spotify allowed you to resize column widths but they removed it ages ago. Like around 2013-2015. And it's a feature that's still missing, even with the popularity of widescreen monitors. Now, this is what I believe to be a fairly uncommon issue with music because the vast majority of music fits in the default columns. BUT this is a very annoying issue when it comes to classical music because the track name will sometimes get cut off.
I basically had to memorize how long each track was because I otherwise couldn't tell if I was about to click on "Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-Flat Major, Op. 106 "Hammerklavier": III. Adagio sostenuto" or "Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-Flat Major, Op. 106 "Hammerklavier": II. Scherzo"
I've used Spotify on both Android and iOS and agree, the Android client is terrible.
I cant tell you the number of times Spotify removed all of my songs and made me sit there and re-download them? This has never taken place on iOS so i dont get what gives?
The Like/Dislike feature on Android is exactly as you outlined, weird...
Oh YEAH! If you're on a plane, with a bunch of music downloaded. All the sudden you realize the Treble sounds dreadful. Oh right, Spotify changed the quality for downloads again. I'll just go ahead and update that for next time it's online.
Nope, purged all my downloaded music. That was a fun 10 hour flight. Completely thoughtless.
The iOS client has some weird offline behaviour, where you will often need to force it using airplane mode to trip whatever flag turns the whole client into offline-mode rather than it just... playing the song that it clearly has the data downloaded for without phoning home first or whatever it's doing on a weak connection.
Spotify iOS automatically plays as soon as the app is started. At least, it does when connected to bluetooth. No way to disable. That was reason enough for me to delete Spotify.
I use Apple Music which is marginally better but not great for anyone who like to rewind and hear passages of music again. It’s also difficult to stay on album view.
Both apps are total pants for classical music as well. Apple acquired a player in that field but I’ve yet to see any improvement to Apple Music on that front.
what issues do you have with rewinding? long press and drag will seek forward and back.
the classical issue is one i’ve heard a few times, i’ve heard from a few different places that apple has been doing a ton of work in integrating whatever tech they got from the primephonic buyout — i don’t know enough about classical, but classical lovers are rabid about how great primephonic was.
between the upcoming windows apple music player and the work they’ve been doing to integrate the primephonic stuff, i suspect apple has been playing the long game.
On Apple Music, I believe I need to be in Album View in order to drag the currently playing music’s timeline. Depending on the path I took to get the music playing, Album View may not be visible or simple to get to. If there’s another place other than Album View where I can rewind or fast forward, I’m not aware of it. I’ll need to explore that. In general, I take an album-oriented approach when listening.
If Apple is playing the long game and becomes classical music friendly, I’ll be happy.
This is my major complaint about Spotify. All of their clients have problems, not just android. And then they're constantly tweaking them, usually not for the better. It's a music player, it doesn't need to be complicated, just make it work and leave it alone.
I have two big complaints about Spotify and they are both about the client. Like Om, I too have no interest in books or podcasts and wish I could permanently remove them from the UI or at least push them to the very bottom of the screen.
My other UI complaint is that you can't completely silence their in-app notifications. I've turned off all (20+) notification categories and I still get notifications including some notifications about the notifications.
My non-UI complaint is that they still don't work with Siri. I know it's because of some stupid spat they have with Apple but I don't think their strategy is very smart. If I leave Spotify it will be because of this. If I didn't have the family plan I would have already (my kids like Spotify).
I don't have much of a problem with Spotify with its navigation features but however they've been cramming way too much crap on the home page and frequently injecting random artists into my feed.
I keep getting confused as to where my "Recently Played" items went. Sometimes they're in "Home" and sometimes they are in "Search".
On top of this, they have committed a nastiness on Android 12 which keeps nagging you to turn on bluetooth to discover devices and it keeps coming back even after you said NO. Here's a support thread that's been open for months and they never cared about it.
Spotify does work with Siri on iOS but does not work with Siri on Homepod/Homepod Mini. They complain in their Time to Play Fair website about Apple not giving them access to Homepod, but Apple provided them access over two years ago. Also since Homepod uses standard Siri support that Spotify already has in iOS, it's not like it would be significant engineering effort to get it to work, so this is purely Spotify trying to spite Apple. They don't even have AirPlay 2 support yet! Every other major music service supports AirPlay 2 and Homepod already for some time now.
I think there is some magic lost in how music discovery used to work online over the last 20 years or so. I spent a lot of time on IRC, and then later Waffles.fm working to build my musical library, and discover music. A few things that are sorely missed..
* A community built by common interest in music. Community written articles, recommendations, and friendships built from across the world through music.
* Consumption was not the only form of participation. Ratio maintenance was required - this IMO helped everyone be a "good citizen"
* There was still a formal boundary between "the communities music" and "your music" since you had to download it to listen to it. This helped encourage a more pro-active form of discovery.
* Less emphasis on playlists - more emphasis on artist and album discovery.
* While there was some concept of tiers ( power users, etc ) - there wasn't a tier low enough to subject to pushing advertising through your home speakers.
I tried Qobuz for many years in search of a community that cared about music - and just a couple of months ago finally switched to Apple Music. It was hard to stick with the poor streaming infrastructure (streams cut out all the time) & terrible recommendation engine. A lot of the Apple collection is lossless at this point - and there's no reason not to pick them unless you want to wax philosophical about AAC vs FLAC.
I'd like to use Spotify because I've never found Apple Music's recommendation algorithm to be particularly impressive. But until they have a music locker system like Apple Music and YouTube Music, it's a non-starter.
It's wild to me that people just accept albums being removed and think "oh well, guess I just can't listen to that any more." Not to mention I have a decent chunk of music I listen to that just isn't available on any streaming services.
> It's wild to me that people just accept albums being removed and think "oh well, guess I just can't listen to that any more." Not to mention I have a decent chunk of music I listen to that just isn't available on any streaming services.
I think the average Spotify customer might have a different listening behavior than you. From my personal experience, I have never had an album I listen to regularly be removed. I'm not saying it doesn't happen I'm just saying I bet it doesn't impact many people. And I don't know anyone who has a lot of music they listen to that's not on Spotify, if any. Again, not saying what you're saying isn't true, just that I think you're not the average Spotify customer.
As a datapoint, my “bookmarked songs” playlist that I’ve been adding to for about 10 years is ~600 tracks, roughly 10 of which are greyed out, having been removed from Spotify.
Neil Young took all his music off Spotify because he was mad about Joe Rogan. I wouldn't be surprised if services started pulling Kanye's stuff in light of his new bit.
I just don't want my music library to be beholden to musicians or labels or tech companies trying to disassociate with the bad guy of the month. Obviously it's not a perfectly independent solution to upload to Apple's servers, but the system is working as it is.
That's just a "works on my machine" type of comment. Or anecdata etc. pp.
A hipster might tell you, that the songs that got removed and you didn't notice or knew where by bands that you never even have heard of. But wait, maybe you have heard of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell ..nah
Regarding your last point, there's a way to add your PC's local files to your Spotify account so you can listen to them anywhere. Though it's a bit of a pain, I've found it handy.
Not that I expect this to convince you to use Spotify, just that this info may help others.
That seems to be only for streaming your own files and doesn't have an existing library. That's the benefit of Apple Music to me, I don't really have a full local library of all my music. I stream what they have, and then if I find something missing I'll source it from somewhere, upload it, and then forget about it.
I don't really want to give up the built-in music library cause there's a lot of benefit to that too.
It's a little bit more nuanced. It allows you to merge both cloud services like Qobuz/Tidal with your "local" music which could be on a NAS or even Dropbox. Not exactly what you're asking for, however, it's close.
Over the course of the past ~6 months, I've been slowly importing my CD collection over to [0]PlexAmp. The player itself is amazing (it has CarPlay functionality) and since its part of the Plex eco system, I can share my music library with friends and family. I also use [1]Last.FM which offers a much more thorough yearly re-cap of my listening history. Both Spotify and PlexAmp offer Last.FM 'scrobbling', so I'm really not missing out on anything.
It galls me that music went from radio's payola to the celestial jukebox of Napster to an algorithm pushing corporate recommendations. Worse, people (well, consumers, at any rate) seem to believe not being allowed to cultivate their own taste represents an improvement or added value.
As Hunter S. Thompson said: "with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." My vision places the high tide line in 2003 with the advent of the iTunes Store.
> It galls me that music went from radio's payola to the celestial jukebox of Napster to an algorithm pushing corporate recommendations.
The music business did, not music. Music is more accessible and shareable than it has ever been in the history of mankind.
> Worse, people (well, consumers, at any rate) seem to believe not being allowed to cultivate their own taste represents an improvement or added value.
No one is not allowing people to cultivate their own taste. People prefer others to narrow down the selection for them. For example, I like music, but I have no interest in seeking out new music I may or may not like. I am content with having others do that for me and just going with the flow of whatever ends up being popular.
I paid for Spotify since forever. Have no plan to quit. The quality is poor across all platforms. The company more or less brags about how incompetent they are with change management and tech choices.
Still, the service is cheap and works good enough. Features like liked songs and offline listening have been broken like a billion times. Still, nothing in comparison to old bugs when you could get stuck and had to listen through all queued tracks.
I left Spotify but I still pay for the family plan for benefit of the rest of the family.
I moved to YouTube Music because I was ultra tired of the "Sorry your music has stopped because it looks like it is playing on another device" - I keep the music playing on my desktop nearly all day long and just adjust the volume - when I go into the kitchen or car I would also play music there but sometimes... when I play it in the kitchen and other people are in there I would just leave it running - when I go back to my desk it would have stopped, I start it again to the frustration of the other people in the house that actually liked what was playing.
With YouTube Music... this issue is no longer an issue.
I have found that the music that YTM presents is way better and frequently stuff I would never have heard from Spotify. With Spotify I seemed to always be getting the same tired stuff - some of which I swear was made by bot artists if that is a thing.
yeah not seeing a lot of meat in this piece. spends a most of the start talking about how great Sptofy Wrapped is, then spends 1-2 paragraphs on why they're really leaving (getting notifications for stuff they don't use), which like ok but unless you're gonna have more details about that fees like I wasted my time
I don't listen podcasts and audio books at all on Spotify. So I ignore them completely. I would complain about degradation of "discovery" feature that is more and more hidden with every update.
What I really like it's that I can install Raspotify (librespot) on RPi, connect it to sound card and plug studio monitors in it. Then all connected devices at home network are able to control music with superb quality. I don't need flac. This is not possible with other streaming services what I know.
Nit-picking time - I'm struggling with this sentence construction:
"in an effort to placate two ladies, placed each of them on two sides of his piano"
Surely a better way to say this is "placed one of them on each side of his piano"?
Saying "each of them on two sides of the piano" sounds to me more like he managed to put both of them on two sides through some kind of duplication scheme.
Edit: this is in no way intended to criticize the author, who may be ESL for all I know. Just got sent into one of those "what does this really mean" loops.
I really wish Spotify hadn't deprecated libspotify[1]. I know there are reverse-engineered alternatives, but having more control over my UX and resource utilization isn't worth the possibility of getting banned.
LastFM circa ~2010 is one of the most wonderful apps I've ever used. Spotify feels like a cheap knockoff while ironically being much more expensive. However LastFM was so good that even a cheap knockoff is enough to get me to pay my monthly fee.
So uh, when did Neil Young actually leave Spotify?
At least within Canada, Neil Young's music has always been available on Spotify even during the period when he was feuding with the service about Joe Rogan.
Or was just within the US? Or did he ever leave Spotify?
I tested out a bunch of other apps (Tidal, Quoboz.. maybe more) and Spotify had by far the best Carplay/Android Auto app. The others were incredibly limited that they basically felt like "well at least it exists."
I switched to Deezer because of the Neil Young controversy.
I certainly paid a price. The Deezer recommendation engine and availability of songs just can't match Spotify but It's a trade off I'm comfortable with.
If only iTunes, Youtube, Spotify, Deezer and Tidal would let me block artists and genres I don't like and don't evert want to hear or listen to, I'd be happy.
Never needed a streaming service to listen to music. There is so much to listen to online or offline without having to jack up a playlist from a curated app.
I think there's room for premium internet services (like apparently Qobuz), which aren't ML optimized / advertising wastelands. They will have smaller user bases and paywalls but actual user/communities engaged within them.
The author touts Spotify's recommendation engine and rightly so, nothing comes close. Author then goes on to say they've gone to some niche streaming service that provides FLAC (nobody actually cares except audiophiles) and has no meaningful recommendation service. So author is just cutting off their nose to spite their face.
I agree that Spotify has problems, specifically around financials but that story is as old as music itself. Artists rarely make money of the actual music but off merch and concert sales.
You wanna support your artists? Stop being lazy and go so see them live or buy their merch. Boring article otherwise.
edit: You wanna keep your data too? Hook up to last.fm scrobbling and it's all yours. Last.fm has a very good integration with Spotify.