There is no way in hell that I am giving up on having instant access to 99.9% of all music, but I will say that Apple Music is infuriating in many ways. The desktop application is widely known to be crap, and, to the point of the article, my biggest frustration with the phone app is that 3 out of 5 icons along the bottom are dedicated to discovery. I don't want Apple to help me find music (that they likely get kick backs to promote).
Leaving Spotify for freer pastures
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures
#22I genuinly want to stop giving Spotify my money because of the increasingly horrible user experience. But the sheer investment I have there in the form of more than ten year's worth of curated lists and folders makes it damn near impossible to leave without abandoning pretty much my entire "music library" which it has become at this point.
Is it possible to export? Is it possible to make them export it for you - via a GDPR request?
You can export both as GDPR requests on the Account -> Privacy pane of Spotify's settings or through the public APIs here: developer.spotify.net
As I mentioned in a previous comment in this thread, I work for Spotify and specifically on these APIs, we don't block you from extracting your data if you wish.
Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures
#23I genuinly want to stop giving Spotify my money because of the increasingly horrible user experience. But the sheer investment I have there in the form of more than ten year's worth of curated lists and folders makes it damn near impossible to leave without abandoning pretty much my entire "music library" which it has become at this point.
There are export tools.
But what would I do with it? Yes, the playlist itself is important, but arguably the content is what I pay for. Even if importing to another provider was possible, the alternatives seem to suck equally. Buying all that music and future music I want is simply not feasible from an economical perspective.
Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures
#24I don't think I've ever been introduced to artists I wouldn't have listened to otherwise through Spotify. In general I find Spotify's recommendation to be slightly worse than just listening to the radio. I don't have a good alternative at the moment though. A long time ago I built a music recommendation system based on Discogs that made a vector space based on the genres and then found the most similar albums of one…
Is your music recommendation system open source? Would be down to check it out and learn a thing or two from it.
On the topic of vector search, I'm fairly certain that Spotify still uses Annoy (https://github.com/spotify/annoy). Like Faiss, it's a great library but not quite a database, which would ideally have features like replication (https://milvus.io/docs/replica.md), caching, and access control, to name a few.
Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures
#25There is no way in hell that I am giving up on having instant access to 99.9% of all music, but I will say that Apple Music is infuriating in many ways. The desktop application is widely known to be crap, and, to the point of the article, my biggest frustration with the phone app is that 3 out of 5 icons along the bottom are dedicated to discovery. I don't want Apple to help me find music (that they likely get kick b…
It is a sad, terrible irony that Apple whose resurgence began when they acquired the best desktop framework from NeXT and further developed it into a revolutionary mobile one, is now a company that’s famous for how bad their new desktop apps are (Music, new macOS Settings, everything made with Catalyst…)
Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures
#26I don't think I've ever been introduced to artists I wouldn't have listened to otherwise through Spotify. In general I find Spotify's recommendation to be slightly worse than just listening to the radio. I don't have a good alternative at the moment though. A long time ago I built a music recommendation system based on Discogs that made a vector space based on the genres and then found the most similar albums of one…
Everyone seems to hate YouTube recommendations but as someone who mostly use YouTube to listen to music their recommendations are amazing.
+1 for this, threw a lot of awesome Australian stuff my way I would never have heard otherwise
Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures
#27I genuinly want to stop giving Spotify my money because of the increasingly horrible user experience. But the sheer investment I have there in the form of more than ten year's worth of curated lists and folders makes it damn near impossible to leave without abandoning pretty much my entire "music library" which it has become at this point.
What do you find horrible about it? I'm genuinely curious as, apart from the lack of tab navigation, the UX suits my use cases pretty well.
Pretty much everything about the UX on all platforms I use it on, the constant breaking changes to the UX, which just keeps getting worse. How its still completely geared around lists and recommendations, while 90% of how I listen to music is album or discograpgy based. How its piss poor (I believe that's the technical term) at actually recommending me music I like or could like, or in any way challenging my tastes. Deliberately not fixing bugs and known issues, and never addressing or implementing popular feature requests from the community, even those that are ages old and still requested. Still no lossless alternative, and it keeps getting more and more expensive.
Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures
#28I tried Tidal and couldn't tell enough of a difference in audio quality with lossless in the car (very capable sound system) or in headphones (beyer dynamics). It's just one of those things that people will convince themselves is worth it sometimes when most of the time it's not, really.
Eventually there were enough things missing on Tidal that I gave up and cancelled the sub and went back to Spotify.
Spotify does everything well enough for me that it's still the best streaming service. The fact they listened to Adele and changed the functionality of how album playback works has a good side too!
For me what would be awesome would be if they paid artists more. But that's true of any and all platforms like this.
Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures
#29I don't think I've ever been introduced to artists I wouldn't have listened to otherwise through Spotify. In general I find Spotify's recommendation to be slightly worse than just listening to the radio. I don't have a good alternative at the moment though. A long time ago I built a music recommendation system based on Discogs that made a vector space based on the genres and then found the most similar albums of one…
For me is the opposite, almost half the value i get from Spotify is about discovery (the other half is convenience).
Specifically, I discovered amazing artists through the Discovery Weekly and the Artist's Radios. But also the "Fans also listen to" section in an artist profile. I found all sort of things, even obscure indies with a few thousands of listens and other "hidden gems". I'm really happy they now added the "Enhance" function to playlists.
What I noticed though, is that I have to be very careful with my interactions on the platform to "train" the algorithm in the right direction. I have to like only specific genres that I want recommendations about, use playlists for anything else and use a lot the "i don't like this" feature on the discovery weekly. There was a period where I listened to more casual genres than usual and it completely broke my profile. My Dicovery Weekly was terrible at that time, it was a bummer.
What I think would be great is if Spotify would be more open about this. I would love to be able to tweak the discovery by myself (like suggest specific genres or artists, blacklist others). Maybe even create different discovery profiles for different genres. Instead I have to play the game of interacting blindly with the platform and see the results next monday on the new discovery weekly.
Re: Leaving Spotify for freer pastures
#30> I think a lot of people would probably look at my distaste of Spotify and recommend another, more suitable, streaming platform like Apple music or Pandora
Just go to YTM?
I stopped using Spotify when their client became slow and bloated. Then I went to GPM which was easy (didn't care for my library much).
Then onto YTM (which in the beginning sucked), but is now close to parity with GPM. Took them a while but they are close to there now.
I also found the recommendation algorithm of GPM better than Spotify and also YTM has better recommendations.