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Audiobooks on Spotify

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Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#141

Post by fleddr »

nerdjon wrote: post #100
fleddr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine if you prefer that, but this is no reason for Apple to enforce it as the only allowed option.

If apple opens the floodgates allowing these purchases outside of this option, why would a company give apple's option to consumers? Apple enforcing it is the only reason as a consumer I don't have to deal with park patterns for many of the apps I use. Which is a good thing for consumers

Simple solution: enforce IAP as an option whilst allowing alternatives. The other option would be to not tax 30% on value Apple did not produce.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#142

Post by Aachen »

corobo wrote: post #85
agentwiggles wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as far as I concerned Spotify was basically perfect in like 2012, and most all of the features added (and _REMOVED_) since then have made the app experience worse. I want to listen to music. That's it. Anything that gets in the way of me doing this is a net bad afaic. I'm still particularly offended by their near deprecation of support for local files. When I first got into Spotify the seamless integration with…

Silly as it is I really miss song previews. Used to be if you long pressed a song (iOS anyway) it would jump in a little and play for as long as you held it, going back to the music you were listening to when you let go. Great for checking you've found the song you were thinking of and impromptu remixes to make friends laugh. Annoyingly it was removed for "low engagement rate"[0]. I mean yeah, I found it by accident…

I never knew they had it, but now that you mention it... I miss it also. When you just want to get an impression of the song without listening to the whole thing front to back, yeah very often I'd make use of this.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#144

Post by Aachen »

Maxburn wrote: post #106
soneil wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty much embrace, extend .. They're benefiting from the open ecosystem whilst simultaneously damaging it.

Agree with the first part, but how are they damaging it? Everything they are building is open far as I know.

Can I listen to paid shows in antennapod? Can I buy their podcasts from someone else the way I can get music or books from different stores?

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#145

Post by threeseed »

JimA wrote: post #59

Regardless of the passionate feelings against Spotify, it's hard to dispute their basic premise that Apple is deliberately creating a bad user experience just to preserve their walled content garden. The same thing applies to not being able to buy a book using the Amazon app. It's ridiculous and there is no valid argument against it other than greed. Not a fan of overregulation, but in this area I can't wait for Appl…

Spotify could just implement IAP. It's simple and has a great user experience.

Seems like this is more about Spotify wanting to benefit from the channel without paying for it.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#146

Post by Gigachad »

amykhar wrote: post #19
firloop wrote: post #8

As a consumer, I’ve actually come to prefer in app purchases. I love when a subscription is available on IAP because for something like a newspaper, I know that I can cancel it with a couple of taps instead of having to fill out some long retention form or call someone.

Exactly. It's not that Spotify can't do in app purchases. They just don't want to pay for the privilege.

Because they exist in a highly competitive market where Apple Music can provide in app purchases without paying the extra tax.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#147

Post by Gigachad »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #23

No other company do I hate and love so much. I love their discovery algorithms and find new music through them so often. I look forward to my new Discover Weekly every Monday. But in every other way they drive me crazy. The UI is terrible and basic but I've learned to live with it. What I absolutely can't stand is inserting podcasts and audio books into the app with no option to opt-out. I get that they want to put t…

The Spotify UI is bad but it’s not even close to as bad as Apple and YouTube music.

I tried my best to like Yt music since it comes with YouTube premium but the service is simply unusable.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#148

Post by unsupp0rted »

fleddr wrote: post #101
mostlysimilar wrote: post #23

No other company do I hate and love so much. I love their discovery algorithms and find new music through them so often. I look forward to my new Discover Weekly every Monday. But in every other way they drive me crazy. The UI is terrible and basic but I've learned to live with it. What I absolutely can't stand is inserting podcasts and audio books into the app with no option to opt-out. I get that they want to put t…

The funny thing is that they have many teams each doing a tiny part of the app's UI, and proudly advertise this model as a best practice: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal... Baffling how you can have so many engineers working on a music player, and it ends up worse than Winamp or Mediaplayer from 25 years ago.

It's very hard to come up with a media player interface that is better than Winamp 25 years ago.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#149

Post by unsupp0rted »

Jorchime wrote: post #58
mostlysimilar wrote: post #23

No other company do I hate and love so much. I love their discovery algorithms and find new music through them so often. I look forward to my new Discover Weekly every Monday. But in every other way they drive me crazy. The UI is terrible and basic but I've learned to live with it. What I absolutely can't stand is inserting podcasts and audio books into the app with no option to opt-out. I get that they want to put t…

I used to love the Discovery Weekly list as well. But since a couple of years, my account recommendations went into some strange niche solution and they recommend the same rubbish over and over again. I even get annoyed at certain genres that I used to mildly enjoy before. If you try to look for a solution, apparently the only way is to cancel the subscription, delete the account, resubscribe and start over ... I wis…

Literally: they keep recommending variations of the same song over and over. And if I'm not mistaken, not even variations, but the same song over and over.

Each time I mark it as "remove".

I visit my Discover Weekly about once a month because there's almost never anything of value in there. I'd find more gems with a random list of 30 songs.

Re: Audiobooks on Spotify

#150

Post by eduction »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #111
fleddr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that they have many teams each doing a tiny part of the app's UI, and proudly advertise this model as a best practice: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal... Baffling how you can have so many engineers working on a music player, and it ends up worse than Winamp or Mediaplayer from 25 years ago.

Software interfaces in general have regressed severely since the mid-2000s. Media players are a perfect example. There was 10x more functionality in Winamp or Windows Media Player than we get in Spotify or Apple Music today. What is going on? Why are things getting dumber? Are we just optimizing too hard for the lowest common denominator and the average user wants things to be dead simple? I don't want to believe sof…

>There was 10x more functionality in Winamp or Windows Media Player than we get in Spotify or Apple Music today.

Except for the extremely useful functionality of putting a large percentage of the world's music at your fingertips ready for instant listening. Spotify also makes curated playlists ("This Is _[Artist Name]__" playlists), artist pages that show their most popular tracks and discographies, offers professionally mixed playlists, social sharing of playlists, sharing of songs, and works on mobile, desktop, web, and tablets.

It also lets you have a library made up of both local files and Spotify licensed files on the network. It has selective download of songs you want to listen to offline (even licensed songs). It has both regular playlists and ad hoc queues. You can make playlists public, share with certain friends, share with all friends, make them collaboratively editable or not.

It's actually kind of a staggering achievement.

I get that the player could be better, and maybe Winamp had some features it should steal, but let's appreciate that it has solved many, many problems that no one was addressing 20 years ago. (And I must say, I can't conceive how Winamp could have had 10x the functionality as Spotify or Apple Music - this seems quite an overstatement, as someone who used it c2000 and uses Spotify now. Maybe you meant it had more of the functionality that you care about (presuming you only care about listening to files you own and have downloaded).)

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