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Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

I can't be the only one that has almost zero faith the music industry won't ruin Spotify? I'm sure it won't be deliberate, just a combination of stubbornness, greed and living in the past.

Spotify and music is like a library and books. It's fantastic and accessible for listening and discovery. I'm hard pushed to find a friend that didn't use napster or limewire that's moved to Spotify - it's just easy, there and the price is right. And with the exception of a few hold out artists (lost back catalogues, or smaller artists who are unaware of 100% revenue services like distrokid.com) it's pretty complete. It'll be such a shame if it slowly goes the way of the buffalo.

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The music industry doesn't need to ruin Spotify. It's ruining itself.

Its support is abysmal, its apps are bug-riddled and get worse with every update, and it's consistently doing boneheaded "pivot" moves (like mandatory Facebook login a couple years back, "version 1.0" of the desktop app more recently), and so on. It's squandering the good faith and great library it has.

I agree. Never cared much for the UI, and always found it too buggy to keep using. At my old job, we used it for office tunes, and it was often showing the wrong song that was playing, (so you never knew what you were listening to unless you used something like SoundHound), and going to previous or next tracks was inconsistent, so you might not get back to the last song ever again.

Pardon my ignorance but why is Google Play Music not worth mention here?

I actually used to have Google Play Music All Access, but the bugs would just drive me insane. I think the worst one was where it would play the censored version of a song, no matter if you chose the edited or explicit version. The only way to fix it was to delete your locally downloaded music, which I keep 60gb of my favorite tracks on my phone. I finally jumped to Spotify premium and I've haven't experienced any bugs. Plus, Spotify premium is half the price because I get a student discount. I think the only thing I miss is no ads on YouTube videos.

I recently switched from Google Music to Spotify because the Google music app was so bad. Buggy, slow, and just kinda hard to use. Spotify has its quirks, but it's a million times better.

The sad thing is, it didn't used to be this way. The first versions of Spotify (beta) were really performant. In fact, the same developer that wrote Open Transport Tycoon had a large part to play in the first Spotify desktop app. It was slick, simple and easy to use.

Now though... There's bloat every where, bugs everywhere, zero user feedback has been incorporated into the product. There are bugs that have been open for _years_ that still haven't been addressed.

From what I hear of the company culture, it's not surprising. International parties, organizational bloat, defunct acquisitions. What started as a really nice piece of tech quickly devolved into a hedonistic wannabe mainstream media company, and it shows.

I have absolutely no issues with the mobile or desktop versions of the app.

The mobile app is pretty decent, but it's not well designed. It's easy to get lost in the confusion mishmash of navigation elements. For example, if I'm playing a song, I tend to hit the hamburger menu in the upper-right corner to find the "add to playlist" function, when it's in the tiny "..." icon next to the pause button.

I'm reasonably happy with the desktop app, although it's still as terrible at organizing your collection of music as it's always been. For example, if you save a single song from an album, that album shows up in your "Albums" view, which makes no sense. And if you go to that album, it's actually a weird, special virtual album and not the real album (there's a "View full album" link to get to that one).

I was using the "Save" function for quite a while until I met the 10,000 song limit. Which is a ridiculously low limit for any lover of music, especially when album counts toward that limit — "saving" an album is actually just saving the individual tracks. You can't raise this limit; you're done, or you have to go back and unsave music.

The "Local files" function is also pretty obviously an afterthought. You can only play them to a device if your device is on the same network as your desktop machine; this also goes for syncing. To play your "local files" on a device, you have to mark them for offline play on the device while the desktop Spotify is running. How ridiculous is that?

A final gripe: After 10 years, Spotify still doesn't categorize classical music by composer and performer separately. Apple Music does this correctly.

For me the desktop app regularly seems to consume way too much RAM (memory leak?), and it regularly doesn't shut down properly or even crashes, and this is on two separate macs.

Could be that it's a MacOS Sierra issue, but considering the number of 'random weird shit' that happens when I have the app open (playback working fine but visually stuck on an ad, to name a recent issue), I'm inclined to think it's just a piece a shit.

On the one hand I am baffled by the terrible quality, but then I remember that even companies like Google aren't always much better. My Google Inbox app (on iPhone), for example, regularly gets 'stuck' on showing a badge icon of '1' even though I can't for the life of me produce the email that causes this. It's been this way for quite a while and I just don't get how it's possible that a big company like Google lets this happen. And again, I understand it's possible there's some weird edge case that causes this to happen for just me or very few other users, but considering that I run into a whole bunch of other weird issues using Google Inbox, I'm inclined to conclude, once again, that it's just a piece of shit.

Here's an example of something utterly ridiculous that they still haven't fixed several years after first reported to them: despite music having flags to classify it as "mature", you can't tell the client to filter out that music. They have the music flagged already, so it's not like they're being requested to tag all of the music in their archives.

Pandora, and pretty much every competitor in the field can.

Still it's arguably better than the alternatives out there. When I cast music to my TV Spotify has a nice interface. When I cast Google Music there is this icon dancing around all over the TV. I think their web interface is superior as well.

I like Apple Music more - more songs and it uploads your mp3s that are not matched and make them available everywhere.

Does it still replace your local music files with inferior copies from the cloud?

It is, and I pay for a subscription still. I wish there were a good alternative.

I'm still shocked that the spotify desktop app won't let you output to anything other than the default audio device. There's an open request with thousands of votes on their tracker that has been in "not right now" state for half a decade. I know people with multiple outputs aren't a majority, but c'mon, it's gotta be less work to add than pretty much every other "feature" they've added in that time...

I loved the music discovery aspect of Spotify but bad software pushed me away.

Even to me it sounds counterintuitive. Finding new music I love should have been worth more to me than a player with a lot of features. But my instinct was to let foobar2000 pull me back. Something about sophisticated control of playback and playlists turns out to be really important too. But power users are the minority, I'm sure.

I loved both LastFM and MusicIP (or MusicMatch as it was previously known) for their unique matching and recommendation ability. Both were neutered and gradually withered.

I still hope something out there will use my LastFM profile to offer something better than the laughably inaccurate recommendations that I get from every other service.

And adding playlists to your account without telling you. This was on a free account, but still, it felt like they had no integrity at all.

What I often find is that artists will have have everything on Spotify except their latest album, at least for a few months. Fair enough, they want people to buy their albums; it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete.

> it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete.

At first (especially some years ago when the catalogue was much smaller) this used to annoy me. But Spotify has made a lot of progress in side-stepping the issue.

The Discover Weekly playlist of recommended music in particular was a great invention. It doesn't matter that much if artist X's latest album is not on Spotify, as long as they can find some other music that satisfies what people are looking for. Some techno with no vocals to code to, something chill in the evenings, like a personally curated radio, not a perfect on-demand player.

Focusing more on recommending music instead of having people search for music means that they get away with missing some artists - and they can take the cost of licensing deals into account when picking the recommended songs.

Personally, I fell in love in their Discover Weekly algorithm. If you in previous week listened music from artists which tracks haven't been listed in any user-made playlist nor played magical 10,000 times and there is a problem with getting a vinyl / CD you wouldn't expect any songs from such artists but in Discover Weekly you may found similar tracks - they match same genre, they are also from the same decade, they are not covers and they are unique - not only per week, but I haven't heard them in my whole life. If Spotify is going to close, please share access to it, because it is amazing.

Protip: You can generate a new random "Discover Weekly"-style playlist manually by putting a bunch of songs into a playlist, right-clicking the playlist (in the desktop app) and selecting "Create similar playlist".

This is actually exactly how I do music discovery. I create seed playlists with maybe 5-10 songs and start the radio from that. Any songs that I like from the those stations get added to a separate playlist, unless I explicitly decide that I want that song to influence the future selection of songs.

Thumbs-up or thumbs-downing songs in a radio playlist will change the songs that show up, but I find just having a seed playlist is more reliable and repeatable and easier to fine-tune.

Indeed, I would call myself as user who uses "Create similar playlist" on daily basis. Sadly, it isn't so awesome as Discover Weekly, because for certain tracks it won't generate any new tracks, i.e. When you put single track (Price - Controversy) and click to create similar playlist you may notice exactly the same track (Prince - Controversy). Also, it usually generate the same output for the specified list of tracks.

Oh, thank you so much for that! I find Spotify to be an even bigger turd than iTunes (at least in the ways that matter to me), but I use it for the discovery. This tip is a good addition!

Exactly. Netflix streaming has proven how well this strategy can work with a limited library.

There are other big areas where it's seriously lacking content:

1) Modern contemporary electronic music, which is usually available vinyl only.

2) Classic albums in their original form. When there's a remaster, Spotify typically only has the remaster, original was either never there or will be removed when remaster is out.

Now, when you start to invest to your sound system even a bit (not talking about 100k wires here), you notice the lack of dynamics in many remasters. The originals just sound better with good soundsystem, not so much with below-average systems.

When I listen to music, I like to have the best possible master from it. And preferably lossless, or that I have the control of the compression parameters and format. I guess Spotify will take the masses, but I'm not the only serious listener who prefers my own files and physical copies.

Streaming is handy, but you can do a lot of things already with big hard disks with your computers, some syncing NAS system (as in Synology), beets[0] and a big enough microSD in your phone.

[0] http://beets.io/

Honestly, if this is how you evaluate music, the current generation of streaming is not for you. Do yourself a favour, buy a good quality turntable and start collecting vinyl!!

PS - I've been collecting vinyl for over twenty years and consider it my one serious vice. This comment is the equivalent of a drug addict suggesting that you "just try it once." You've been warned...:)

I own plenty of vinyl, two Technics SL1200's and a mixer and I think it's a huge waste of resources. What I need is to just get lossless music effortlessly and with the right mastering. For new stuff it's pretty easy because you only have one option (or then some mega rare double vinyl versions, I'm looking at you Björk!). But for these old rock albums... In the 2000's their record labels wanted people to buy them again and so we got these super bad remastered versions, which are the ones you find from Spotify.

Yes, now I need to get CD's to have the best mastering, rip them to flac and opus and put the CD's to a box collecting dust. Or in some cases I need to buy the vinyl, record it to flac and opus and maybe play the vinyl a couple of times more when I do a house party.

Waste of resources...

With all due respect, I think you're just looking for something to complain about. Generations of music fans would love to have the options that you clearly have...

> Modern contemporary electronic music, which is usually available vinyl only.

Oh, the irony.

I am not sure what is ironic about this, unless you mistook electronic music for edm?

Almost all underground electronic labels offer their releases digitally, they just don't publish to steaming services.

And some don't. I'm looking at you SUED or Perlon. And that's totally fine! They sell enough and the dj's and producers are highly praised anyways.

Have you honestly done a blinded listening test, comparing 320 kbps Ogg Vorbis (Spotify Premium) to lossless, and concluded that there's a severe reduction in quality?

Audio compression is an old technology by now. Lossless CD audio is ~1200 kbps, and we're only compressing to something like 1/4th the original size. There really shouldn't be much room for error. Even completely lossless CD audio compression can still get to ~50%-ish of the original data rate.

Imagine if you had H.264 video at 50% the data rate of a completely lossless signal. That would be completely perfect.

And if you're listening on a speaker setup, your room will distort the sound orders of magnitude more than compressing an audio signal 4x will.

When I get my music, I want to use that for the next 20 years at least. It's stored in my NAS lossless and I can convert it to any format I want? For example, I use 192kbps opus files on my phone, which work nice while using A2DP to pack the sound even more.

But if I own music, FLAC is the proper format. I can go into any other format from it and re-pack my whole collection in the matter of minutes. Buying and storing content in lossy format doesn't give me this freedom.

And even if Spotify Vorbis sounds ok, it doesn't change the fact that many records in there have a very bad mastering and no other versions at all. Which was my original point here.

I think Spotify's saving grace is that it's not owned by a big tech company. I think the music industry would prefer to negotiate with Spotify than with YouTube.

Isn't it a big tech company itself?

Well at least they want to be one. It's not like they want to be the good guys there. This is what disappoints me a little bit

At least it's focused on Music industry. At least I'm comfortable as a patron that some egoist exec won't just shut it down out of nowhere.

>"I can't be the only one that has almost zero faith the music industry won't ruin Spotify?"

But will it be the music industry ruining Spotify if that happens or will it simply be a failure of the business model? You could certainly argue the latter.

Is dealing with the music industry, which cranks licensing costs up every year, a failed business model? Maybe. Spotify is allowed to live but not to thrive.

>"Is dealing with the music industry, which cranks licensing costs up every year, a failed business model?"

I think it could possibly be. Nobody has been successful yet at least that I can think of. I think the problem is the better you do the more those licenses will cost. I am trying to think of another industry that works that way. I guess cable is similar with content in that the more subscribers a cable operator has the more expensive licensing the content is. So maybe licensing entertainment content is just a very constrained business model?

I can't imagine if I ran a restaurant and my costs from my food purveyors increased with the success of the restaurant. I think it would be very difficult to make a go of that.

>with the exception of a few hold out artists

fuck you Tool. :(

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