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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?

#231

Post by mongol »

frogstomp19 wrote: post #165
javajosh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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 i…

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.

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

#232

Post by boesboes »

WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: post #226
boesboes wrote: post #69

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…

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. (and I switched to Apple too)

Thank you :) I can get overly frustrated with tech, but have learned to move on. Most of the time atleast haha

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

#233

Post by cube00 »

kristaps wrote: post #42

Spotify UI in general feels like way too many product managers aggressively justifying their existence instead of making what the end user actually needs.

The hilarious thing is their "community" is full of up-voted suggestions in the thousands for things the end user actually needs.

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

#234

Post by criley2 »

caymanjim wrote: post #209
hyperbovine wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And what do people do with this power? Listen on shitty tinny phone speakers or comically bad earbuds. Give me back my glorious 80s stereo.

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.

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

#235

Post by watwut »

frogstomp19 wrote: post #165
javajosh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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 i…

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.

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

#236

Post by Trufa »

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.

If you're ok with using google's product...

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?).

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

#237

Post by anticristi »

srrr wrote: post #196
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #16

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 progr…

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 royalt…

Thanks for highlighting this!

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.

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

#238

Post by zouhair »

nicce wrote: post #128
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #16

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 progr…

I have used spotify-tui for years. It is all about tables and lists :-D https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui

I never liked Spotify UI, ever, coming from Foobar2000 it is very hard to go to such shitty software

https://i.imgur.com/O0aHYHO.jpeg

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

#240

Post by sqlacid »

objclxt wrote: post #199
daveoc64 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoyment of music linked to a specific physical item seems incredibly shallow to me. If the music is worth listening to, the medium shouldn't matter 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…

I'll never forget discovering the third track of Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief, thought I'd lost my mind.

As an Eno fan I'm not familiar with the mentioned album.

King Crimson would put hidden messages printed in the vinyl inner track, I remember seeing "The next step is Discipline", which was their next album.

I also miss the thriving bootleg community, picture discs.

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