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

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.

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

[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/102309/spotify-will-launch-in-the-...

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.

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).