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Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

neil.computer

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Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#171

Post by alerighi »

wccrawford wrote: post #87
spaniard89277 wrote: post #84

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 th…

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)

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#172

Post by criddell »

sorokod wrote: post #163

One can reverse engineer the ideal customer according to Spotify. It is a person who to a large extent gave up on strong personal preferences and is comfortable with algorithmic/business driven replacement.

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.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#173

Post by barnabee »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #17
KyeRussell wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Couldn’t agree more.

Infrastructure/service providers cannot be allowed to continue to control the interfaces that are used to access their services.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#174

Post by asdojasdosadsa »

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.

Now it's just a mess.

1/5

edit: remove curse words

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#175

Post by weazl »

matwood wrote: post #161
lapser wrote: post #43

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.

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?

Way back many years ago Spotify used to be GREAT, the client was super efficient and easy to use did everything necessary, really.

But then they started butchering it more and more and now it's almost completely unusable.

I've been a paying customer since 2009 and I'm thinking of cancelling, I don't use it any more because it's just a mess.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#178

Post by capableweb »

rednum wrote: post #131

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 stu…

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.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#179

Post by jnurmine »

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?

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#180

Post by Reason077 »

weazl wrote: post #175
matwood wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Way back many years ago Spotify used to be GREAT, the client was super efficient and easy to use did everything necessary, really. But then they started butchering it more and more and now it's almost completely unusable. I've been a paying customer since 2009 and I'm thinking of cancelling, I don't use it any more because it's just a mess.

Generally speaking, those old versions of Spotify still work fine. Just make sure to write-protect your Spotify app so it can't update itself.
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