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Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

newsroom.spotify.com

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Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#12
post #9

I hope they fired their UX guy, at least the interface would stop its descent into hell (Cianide 1994)

I've never had an issue with Spotifys ux

Yea it’s the kind of thing you deliberately don’t want to see changed. Never had an issue. Now, if my DW would stop playing songs I’ve heard hundreds of times, that would be appreciated!

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#14
I got asked to do a survey when I opened the Spotify app last week. All the questions were of a "What would you do if this price rise happened?" and most of the varieties had the family plan going to £20.99.

I don't know what they are smoking to think that they're worth more than a Netflix subscription. Video > audio. If they put the family plan price up I'll cancel it and use Prime Music or something.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#15
The Spotify app constantly frustrates me and I miss the old Google Play Music app.

- I listened to 5 minutes of one episode of a podcast once, decided it wasn't for me and stopped, but ever since then I have an entire pane on my homepage dedicated to my apparent love for that podcast.

- The first 4 sections of the homepage recommend me exactly the same things - I have the last 6 albums I listened to at the top, then "Jump back in", then "Recently played" and then "Recommended for today". There's no "here's some stuff you haven't listened to lately". I regularly enjoy an album, burn myself out on it (because it's always presented to me), don't listen to it for a week and then completely forget about it because Spotify never mentions it again.

- The queuing functionality is horrible. There's way to add a new album to the end of the current queue. That means I have to consciously realise that I'm listening to the last song of an album and then queue up what I want to listen to next. It regularly gets confused especially if I connect it to a Bluetooth device mid-album, and will sometime decide to truncate my queue, chopping off the last few songs of an album or repeating a middle few songs that I've already listened to.

How can such a simple concept (listen to music) get so many basics so wrong and have such glaring bugs?

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#16
post #11

No mention of who is taking full responsibility for the situation! Edit: The CEO takes full "accountability" instead, further down the original announcement[0] [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230123124201/https://newsroom....

The actual statement by Ek contains: "I take full accountability for the moves that got us here today."

Interestingly, responsibility is usually used as a get-out-of-jail-free phrase, while accountability literally means that you will take consequences. Maybe I'm just reading too much into the literal meaning of otherwise similar words.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#17

The Spotify app constantly frustrates me and I miss the old Google Play Music app. - I listened to 5 minutes of one episode of a podcast once, decided it wasn't for me and stopped, but ever since then I have an entire pane on my homepage dedicated to my apparent love for that podcast. - The first 4 sections of the homepage recommend me exactly the same things - I have the last 6 albums I listened to at the top, then…

For your second point, there's a Time Capsule playlist with content you haven't recently listened to.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#18
post #9

I hope they fired their UX guy, at least the interface would stop its descent into hell (Cianide 1994)

I've never had an issue with Spotifys ux

The app is terrible. No consistent route for the "back" button - constantly doesn't do what I expect. No clear way to find a history of songs you'd played before. App notifications for new podcast episodes never take you to that episode. In patchy wifi/4g it takes forever to start or search, rather than finding local results first.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#19
post #6
post #3

More doom and gloom. Last few years have been terrible.

Yeah we seem to have had hit our industry peak in November 2021.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Palo Alto. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle twenties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#20

The Spotify app constantly frustrates me and I miss the old Google Play Music app. - I listened to 5 minutes of one episode of a podcast once, decided it wasn't for me and stopped, but ever since then I have an entire pane on my homepage dedicated to my apparent love for that podcast. - The first 4 sections of the homepage recommend me exactly the same things - I have the last 6 albums I listened to at the top, then…

For your second point, there's a Time Capsule playlist with content you haven't recently listened to.

I listen to albums, not songs, and looking at that playlist then there's a lot of stuff there that I've never listened to and have no desire to listen to. Spotify seems exceptionally bad at metal music and says "oh you listen to prog metal? Then you're definitely going to love us constantly recommending you the exact same Korn, Slipknot and blink-182 albums".
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