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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#181

Post by xnorswap »

wasyl wrote: post #131
mgoetzke wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?

It does remove songs, or at the very least disables some (you can toggle a setting to see disabled songs) presumably due to copyright/licensing issues. But worse, it sometimes _replaces_ a song with a different version, with no warning and no recourse

It's impossible to listen to some albums because of song replacement. You can try to do so, but when you click play on some albums it replaces several tracks with their single versions.

I noticed this last year with Dark Side of the Moon, although that's since been fixed.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#182

Post by lloydatkinson »

NoLinkToMe wrote: post #49

Long article for a single comment: I quit Spotify because I can’t customise the home page which pushes podcasts and music I’m not interested in. For me I navigate my music via My Liked songs + my own playlists for particular moods. If I open the app and press play it defaults to where I left off. The fact there is a home page which shows options similar to what I like is fine, sometimes useful. Yes I’d prefer to cust…

It's a critique/criticism of a service that has degraded, and why the author understandably is unhappy.

What is with the growing trend on HN of just being overly negative about posts that are shared here?

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#184

Post by Kiro »

itsoktocry wrote: post #157
Kiro wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find Spotify that much different from Winamp. Everyone says they hate the interface but apart from the suggestions or the front page (which I don't use), what are the problems exactly? I have playlists with songs that I can double click to play. What more is there to it?

> I don't find Spotify that much different from Winamp Say what? Have you ever used Winamp?

Yes, but it was at least 20 years ago so please remind me.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#185

Post by master-lincoln »

jchw wrote: post #162
mittermayr wrote: post #32

> Instead, my subscription is probably pooled according to some black box formula and ends up paid to some of their top performers like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, or The Weeknd. While the indie artist I have been obsessed with gets literally nothing because they don’t meet a certain arbitrary threshold. Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as…

I think you've over-complicated this, or at least missed the point by quite a lot. The question is extremely simple: Why should I pay money to listen to music I like, and then that money goes to music and artists I've never and never will listen to? I don't care how much money top performers want. If I am going to spend money on music, it should go to artists that I actually listen to. And it does, because I buy musi…

> if I go into a record store and buy a CD or record or something, that's what I paid for, that's what it goes to. Hell, even if I watch a monetized video on YouTube Premium, a portion of my subscription money goes to that creator.

In your examples, money goes to right holders, not necessarily content creators. That was true in CD-age and is true on Youtube. A big distinction to make I think

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#186

Post by CrypticShift »

> It was a pain > all worth the hassle for the teenage me

My perspective is this: If I accepted (like the OP) how "difficult" it was to set up a system for discovering music before, why wouldn't I accept a little "hassle" with Spotify? because I'm paying? No, personally, I'm paying for the music DB, not the app. dashboard? Ignore. Official playlists? Ignore. How difficult is that? It takes way less effort to get around Spotify "pain points" than any prior system, and none of these offer what Spotify does best: enriched API access to "unlimited" music.

But of course, we do need to complain to make things better (especially for the artists).

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#187

Post by boraoztunc »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #110

Goodness, feels as if I could have written this post :) I have Spotify premium because I got a year long offer for less than 1/10th the price. Since I anyway used ad-supported Spotify I went for it. I really didn’t see any improvement: - The UX sucks, more so - there’s nothing much to say here really - They still push podcasts and different languages down my throat, more vehemently - The recommendations still drive m…

UX def sucks. I don't understand how a design-focused company that invests so much into its design teams (www.spotify.design) can create a user interface so cluttered and hard to navigate to find music. After years of using it, I've recently discovered (on mobile) that they've hidden the search and sorting on top of the playlists.

My home page is full of things I'm not interested in; there is no way to customize which are displayed. And enough of pushing podcasts.

I've created a (free) web app using Spotify API, Echoes, with a simple interface to see your top artists and songs, it also has a New Discovery section to generate playlists based on your listening algorithm.

https://echoesapp.io

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#188

Post by jbgt »

vintermann wrote: post #130
wolframhempel wrote: post #85

I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember thos…

> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...) But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article c…

Weren't we all complaining 20 y ago that music labels were giving bands pennies on the dollar and the only way they could actually live off of the music was by touring and selling merch?

I think Radiohead then did the groundbreaking selling of mp3s for a pay what you want fee.

Now the baddie is Spotify.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#189

Post by srvaroa »

mgoetzke wrote: post #108
wolframhempel wrote: post #85

I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember thos…

Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?

I'm working on an app to help solve this. It's still waiting for Spotify's approval but I can whitelist some users while in development mode and some beta testing / user feedback would be appreciated. The profile shows my email.
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