Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs? • Hacker News Board

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#291

Post by rosseloh » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #162

javajosh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. Does anyone else get a dystopian vibe from this statement? I feel like the old guy in the SF movie pulling his hair and exclaiming, "But what have we lost?!" We used to have vinyl, tapes, finally CDs, and even the ability to rip our library to a computer, which we could carry with us. It was…

Turntables are not cheap because of the vinyl revival, so they are trendy, hence expensive. Nobody wants CD players :(

I like CDs. I just don't listen to music on physical media enough to really justify having a dedicated setup anymore.

My boss, on the other hand, collects the damn things. He's got an entire large bookshelf filled with vintage CD players...

To me, vinyl is a collectible, or at least, a way to show "yes I appreciate this music and want to show off that I enjoy it". If I like an artist/album enough, I'll buy the vinyl if I can. But it usually just sits on the shelf looking pretty. I got lucky and my player (nothing special but it works so long as you have a good cartridge) was from my dad. When I actually listen to said album, it's usually on my phone over bluetooth (earbuds or in the car), or even if I'm listening on the "hi fi" it's streaming.

Not to say that I never play albums on the turntable, it's just not that often.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#292

Post by midislack » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 2:04 PM UTC

I don't think people understand the purpose of Spotify and every user interaction they engage you with. Spotify is not for you - you're not the customer. Big labels are. Podcasters are. You're a product and you're being shown what's been paid for.

Why do people couch their interactions with big tech as if they matter? What are you going to do, NOT use Spotify? Fat chance.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#293

Post by behnamoh » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

californical wrote: post #47

dm270 wrote: post #14

I don't know if others saw the same behavior. I'm on Android. And I feel like I'm in some sort of a big A/B test regarding their app. One day, the interface changes one way, couple days later it changes back. Constantly some menu or behavior changes. It's super frustrating. Lately it seems to have stabilized, but it really made me feel like a guinea pig. And maybe that's my inner old person speaking, but most of the…

Yeah I switched to Tidal when I learned about Spotify’s data sharing and privacy concerns a little over a year ago, but I was also so frustrated with Spotify’s UI always changing in frustrating ways and making it worse. They’d break features that I used often (playlist sorting broke, for example). I’d contact customer support and they’d go through this whole “uninstall and reinstall the app, does it still happen?” …Y…

Tidal doesn’t even let me play with it for a while to see if I like it to subscribe…

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#294

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #203

frogstomp19 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. In the streaming era, it's easier than ever before to discover new artists and listen to an unprecedented variety of music with minimal investment. If it's slightly cumbersome to listen to albums on Spotify, it's still much less cumbersome that going to a store to buy a CD or purchasing online and waiting for it to arrive + keeping your collection physically organized and i…

>I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. We've lost: cover art, liner notes, the ability to share or sell your music without 3rd party permission, music stores, and in many cases local music scenes that formed around music stores. Bret Victor has been harping on this for years, but we've also lost a great deal of tactility - putting a CD in a player and pressing buttons to play it uses your hands in pleasant ways…

> I didn't discover a single new artist through it.

That's surprising. I've never used Spotify for this, but 10+ years ago used Pandora for that purpose. I was overjoyed with the new artists I learned about.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#295

Post by solarkraft » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

pigeonhole123 wrote: post #86

lemursage wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I feel that in the case of Netflix et al., it's just orders of magnitude more ridiculous -- may I just get the list of the films instead of being force spoon-fed crap content, please? I don't even know how to begin to tell the recommender engine that it's completely missing my preferences. That would be somewhat digestible if their search experience wasn't terrible as well -- no facet search, no dynamic categ…

It feels like these design choices are there to hide the fact that their catalog is tiny (maybe especially in Europe). The majority of what I search for just displays things that are similar to what I actually wanted to watch. For example if I search for Family Guy I get some off-brand Netflix cartoon in the "irreverent" category.

Yeah, they can't even tell you they don't have it. I wanted to watch лучше чем люди (Better Than Us), which was recommended to me by a co-worker as available on Netflix.

It looks like I was too late and it had left their catalogue again, but anything I found on the internet was either "look at this nice show available on Netflix" (posted 2 years ago) or, very very rarely, a Netflix page with a grayed out play button. Again, no explanation.

It was the first time in a long while I had opened it and also the last.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#296

Post by reaperducer » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

frogstomp19 wrote: post #165

javajosh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. Does anyone else get a dystopian vibe from this statement? I feel like the old guy in the SF movie pulling his hair and exclaiming, "But what have we lost?!" We used to have vinyl, tapes, finally CDs, and even the ability to rip our library to a computer, which we could carry with us. It was…

I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. In the streaming era, it's easier than ever before to discover new artists and listen to an unprecedented variety of music with minimal investment. If it's slightly cumbersome to listen to albums on Spotify, it's still much less cumbersome that going to a store to buy a CD or purchasing online and waiting for it to arrive + keeping your collection physically organized and i…

it's easier than ever before to discover new artists

Not really.

It's easier than ever to be exposed to a select group of pre-selected songs by a small subset of artists churned out by a computer program for the purpose of getting you to continue your subscription. That's not discovery.

Go into any real music store, like Louisiana Music Factory in New Orleans, Amoeba Music in Los Angeles, or Electric Fetus in Minneapolis, and you'll find thousands of albums and artists that are not on streaming, never have been on streaming, and never will be on streaming.

The tech companies have made people believe that they're seeing everything, but they're not. They're just looking through a keyhole into the world of music.

For example, Apple boasts something like 90 million songs on Apple Music. The reality check is that's probably less than 1% of the world's recorded music.

People on HN rail against "walled gardens" in app stores, and then wall themselves into one streaming service or the other because they bought the infinite music hype, and don't even know it.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#297

Post by chrisdalke » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

Spotify won’t even let you view an artist’s songs in order, which frustrates me because I like to listen to entire discographies in order while working. I spent one weekend building a free tool to generate chronological playlists for an artist - https://www.timelineify.com.

A decent number of people use this, which I think indicates some clear gaps in Spotify’s basic display features. Luckily the Spotify API is very generous with the data they expose about artists.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#298

Post by svnpenn » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

lucsky wrote: post #136

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #16

This is a big frustration of mine, too. The other is that Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface, which is actually what I recently started doing: https://i.imgur.com/ar7VrYy.png . It's still work in progr…

How do you deal with playback? The Spotify web playback SDK requires browsers DRM support, and baseline Electron does not include Chrome's Widevine CDM libraries. I know there are alternative Electron "distribution" which try to workaround the problem but it only makes the whole thing even more complicated :/

You can download or dump your own CDM. I think Spotify uses L3, it's pretty straightforward, once you know how to do it.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#299

Post by moolcool » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

Spotify's UI is the absolute worst. The craziest thing to me is that it's never improved either, it's always been down bad. - Managing music offline is _terrible_. The first iPod did it well in 2001, but Spotify still can't let you navigate your downloaded music while offline on mobile at in any reasonable manor - The "Now Playing" mechanism is awkward and confusing. Sometimes your playlist disappears as you play it, eliminating the "previous track" function - If you come across the song while listening to a playlist, and you want to switch to listening to song in the context of the album instead of the playlist, there's no way to do it without restarting the song from the start (Apps like Foobar 2000 do this extremely well) - Their recommendation engine is (generally) terrible. There's one particular song I get every single time I play one of three of my generated "mixes" even though I choose "Don't Recommend" every single time it comes on. - My generated "mixes" are almost identical every day. Gimme something I haven't heard before! - On the topic of not wanting to hear a particular artist, they added "Block Artist" functionality, as a compromise in response to anger that controversial artists like Chris Brown were allowed to stay on the platform. Annoyingly though, you can only access this feature from mobile. Like if I wanted to listen to The Smiths on my laptop for some reason, I'd have to first use my phone to unblock them (I blocked them due to the aforementioned "Don't Recommend" feature not working) - They are a shitty podcast player, so I use the excellent Pocket Casts instead. Unfortunately, there's no way to not to be exposed to be inundated with ads for their original podcasts whenever you're navigating the app - I resent the idea of podcasts being locked to a specific platform in the first place. It's bad enough that we have a dozen different streaming services, but now we have vendor lockin with podcasts? Give me a break. - No lossless audio in 2021 - Artist pages are a fragmented mess. Look at the page for Barenaked Ladies for an example. Their catalog is hard to navigate because they have such a large amount of live albums. Why put live albums in with studio albums? - Similarly, multiple editions of the same album are listed separately (but not always). Look at the page for The Beatles for an example. They have 3 versions of Sgt Peppers (various special editions which came out over the years), and they are all tagged as 1967. Then they have a "Super Deluxe" of Let It Be which apparently came out in 2021. Why do contemporary reissues and remasters sometimes have the date of the remaster, and other times have dates of the original albums?

I could go on...

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#300

Post by markus_zhang » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

First time I tried out Spotify I as horrified to find that so many common functions are behind a pay wall. I forgot which one but probably just too many to recall. I will never use Spotify.