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Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

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Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#81

Spotify, get your shit together. You’ve wasted a fortune in podcasting and now you’ve destroyed your app UX. Nobody wants this crap. Everybody just wants better music discovery and instant access to their favorites.

Their UX is infuriating compared to a few years ago. Why does it take multiple clicks to get to search? Why are my playlists etc not front and centre? Pop-ups about new albums from artists that they know I’ve never listened to and never would? Every time I use it now, my inner voice is saying “get the fuck out of my way” to the UX itself. What are they optimizing for?

In the desktop app Search is always available for me in the sidebar. Not for you?

I agree in general about their UX, though; it's part of the general enshittification, these companies always trying to squeeze us for more attention. The constant change has its own friction. And tt feels especially egregious on something as personal as our music.

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#82

Spotify, get your shit together. You’ve wasted a fortune in podcasting and now you’ve destroyed your app UX. Nobody wants this crap. Everybody just wants better music discovery and instant access to their favorites.

Their UX is infuriating compared to a few years ago. Why does it take multiple clicks to get to search? Why are my playlists etc not front and centre? Pop-ups about new albums from artists that they know I’ve never listened to and never would? Every time I use it now, my inner voice is saying “get the fuck out of my way” to the UX itself. What are they optimizing for?

> What are they optimizing for?

Probably engagement. The more clicks, the better.

I've switched to Tidal. It pushes some ads too, but not nearly as badly. The discovery algorithm is slightly worse but pretty close. Most importantly it doesn't keep playing the same 3 songs (at least it's more like 30).

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#83
post #51
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference should be that users pay Spotify for a subscription. Raise the prices if they need to, but don't try and have a subscription + "whatever ad bucks we can make" model.

Vote with your wallet.

Guess for a lot of us spotify users that'd mean stop paying for their service? am pretty close to doing so after almost a decade of paying for spotify.

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#84
post #73

Spotify, get your shit together. You’ve wasted a fortune in podcasting and now you’ve destroyed your app UX. Nobody wants this crap. Everybody just wants better music discovery and instant access to their favorites.

I recently subscribed to YouTube Premium, which includes YouTube Music, and for the first time in my life a system is recommending music that I actually like on a regular basis. I've discovered entirely new artists and even genres. Can't recommend it enough.

Same; I switched to YT Music b/c of better offline playback than Spotify Premium (and ofc YT Premium simply includes music!)

however i've found that the mixes introduce me to recommendations that I like at roughly the same rate as Discover Weekly.

What are you listening to for such good recommendations? Is the the automatic "Mix" playlists it creates?

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#85
post #73

Spotify, get your shit together. You’ve wasted a fortune in podcasting and now you’ve destroyed your app UX. Nobody wants this crap. Everybody just wants better music discovery and instant access to their favorites.

I recently subscribed to YouTube Premium, which includes YouTube Music, and for the first time in my life a system is recommending music that I actually like on a regular basis. I've discovered entirely new artists and even genres. Can't recommend it enough.

Also you can trust Google to never shut down a service that you like. /s

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they’ve realized that as long as they don’t the licenses to the music itself, another company can always come along and eat it’s lunch (a la Disney+, Peacock, Hulu with Netflix. So they’re trying to raise the barriers to listening to “songs” rather than “whatever Spotify serves me”

Yet now they've removed playlist radios in favor of the "enhance" feature. Someone is asleep at the wheel.

"Radios" in Spotify are a shadow of their former self anyway. They used to be a theoretically infinite list of songs that you could up and down vote, which would then influence the next songs to be added. Now it's just a playlist of stuff Spotify deems similar and you essentially just have to deal with it.

Discovery via their radio used to be great. Whenever I tried it more recently it was kind of awful. I've switched off of Spotify many times over the past few years, only to regrettably come back and be disappointed again.

I wish Apple would just make a proper cross platform Apple Music client, then I could switch in peace. All the other alternatives lack some of the more obscure artists I listen to regularly. And while I try to purchase as much as I can, not everything is available digitally and I don't really want to import CDs from the other side of the world.

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#87

Heardle was one of the games that we really enjoyed quite a bit, but definitely needed some sort of variation to the game itself other than 'first x seconds' Usually we would get the answer in a single try, because it happened to be a song we knew by heart, or we wouldn't get it at all because we didn't know the artist/it was just not in a genre to which we regularly listen/the song was an obscure hit or one hit wond…

Why don't they just ask songs some of you once heard before using ur song history?

Because then it loses the shareability - you can't compete with your friends when you're all getting different songs to guess

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#88

Spotify has a document oriented culture. All they do all day is writing docs. No wonder they cannot execute on anything meaningful. It's unfortunate because it's a great employer.

Do the documents also have like four words on each page and you've to spend your entire time scrolling to navigate?

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#90
Does this mean the Heardle developers will be tasked elsewhere, like writing that AirPlay 2 integration they've had the ability to do for well over a year now, instead of a stupid widget for our iPhone lockscreens that doesn't even do what people want it to?
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