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Longhanks

Good. They have been so out of touch with what their users want, it's time they wake up.

Examples:

- Redesigning the client multiple times

- moving from native clients to essentially a bundled browser

- removal of lyrics feature

- can only store 3333 songs offline on a device - 10000 songs is the limit for the library

- Still no Hi-Fi option

- Can't add third party songs to the cloud library

And the competition is definitly rising: For example, Apple Music offers lyrics, a song limit of 100000, can store all of those songs offline, play back on 10 different devices at the same time and store all those songs offline. Also, you can drag and drop the songs that are unavailable into your library, which makes them available on all of your devices.

Once Apple Music releases a web player (or a client for Linux), I'm done with Spotify. For the moment, I need it for my desktop, which runs Linux.

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I realize that these features are what you want, and sorry that they're not making you happy. But I would bet that a very small minority of users cares about things native clients / bundled browser and Hi-Fi option.

On the other hand, they added things like making discovering new music much easier, like "Daily Mixes" and "Discover Weekly", which - again, I don't have any hard data to back this up - made a ton of users very happy.

The first time I used daily mixes I was blown away by how perfect it was.

I use Spotify as much as conceivably possible (~20 hours per week) and haven't heard a peep of discontent from anybody. Totally agree - Spotify is incredible.

Yeah, I agree. The criticism above is definitely from an engineers perspective. The vast majority of users really won't even notice most of the items on that list. Reminds me of the episode of Silicon Valley where engineers absolutely love their product, but everyone else hates it because of the terrible UX.

Three things stick out on that list as things non-engineers care about.

Lyrics; people listen to music and then enjoy singing along. This little thing called karaoke supports a whole industry, for engineers and non-engineers alike, so people can get together and sing songs.

Redesigning the client. New interfaces are scary and different for non-engineers.

Can't add third party songs to cloud library. Non-engineers understand that some licensing nonsense means they can't get Taylor Swift on their Spotify, and then... just don't use Spotify, because all their music is on the Apple.

I'm not including "native client to bundled browser" as something non-engineers care about, but people do ask "why does the new version of $program make my laptop fans get all loud?"

Really? What genre of music do you listen to mostly? I enjoy hip hop / rap style music and the discover mixes are generally pretty awful. They seem to just throw in a bunch of popular radio hits and some b grade tracks from smaller artists. I've been really disappointed because people always talk about how great the discover feature is.

I have much better results playing a full album on youtube and letting youtubes auto play feature pick the next album for me. I've discovered a half dozen artists that way on the last year.

YMMV

My daily mixes never flow correctly. I'll have a softer, technical indie track followed by a technical heavy metal song. It's bad enough that I can't use them at all.

My friends and I average over 20 hours a week as well and we're all pissed about their recent decisions. The removal of messaging/direct sharing was the final straw for me.

Wait. They removed this feature? I unsubscribed over a year ago but this was one of the biggest things I missed after no longer having Spotify. What is the idea behind removing features? I do remember lyrics being removed and that was awful too.

I'm not sure if I use daily mixes but after years of being a Spotify user I recently Started using some of their curated playlists for me. And am also blown away by how many new bands I'm being exposed to that seem good. Once I started telling friends about my curated playlist experiences they were mostly like yeah we know. So seems to be a feature that's widely liked.

I want Spotify to fix Discover Weekly. At some point Spotify learned I like Chinese and Korean songs, they started to add Thai songs. I don't listen to Thai and I don't understand Thai. I don't know how to make Spotify unlearn and remove Thai from Discover Weekly now. Ever since, I stopped using the Discover Weekly feature because I get 3-4 songs in languages I don't understand and there isn't an easy way to make Spotify realize I dislike a particular kind of song.

If there isn't a "I do not like this" feature for a machine learning feature, that UX isn't good. Other users have raise this concerns too (google it).

This is from a friend with a similar problem who talked to a guy working with the feature, so YMMV:

Supposedly, the feature works at least in part by analyzing your playlists and giving recommendations based on what the people with similar songs in their playlists have there as well. He claimed to be receiving less Finnish rap m after removing his playlists with northern Swedish rap, so you could try that approach if you still have any Chinese/Korean playlists.

I just remove the few offending songs from my discover weekly, which I don't find too much of a hassle, but it doesn't seem to learn from that.

I've had no problem giving songs a thumbs down in the discover weekly playlists.

They also ripped out messaging and the ability to share music directly after allowing it to die a slow death that involved it being completely hidden form the web client.

As a big fan of data analysis I've also noticed that they no longer accurately report or record user preferences and instead heavily weight popular artists. They also only sent out the "Year in Review" to people that were subscribed to their spam emails.

Those two things are what brought me to them over Google Play Music. I'm currently in the process of switching back.

This is so frustrating hear. I'm going through the same thing right now as google music just wasn't doing the job for me and enjoyed my experience with Spotify much more.

I am a moderator for head-fi.org and I both don't need hi-fi playback and am certain its unnecessary.

Also, complaining about stuff like "only" being able to store 3333 songs is pretty silly.

As a non audiophile but someone who always chooses 320 Kbps perhaps more so for placebo than anything else, why do you not need hi-fi playback if you are an audiophile? Similarly, do you listen to Spotify or other music at 320 and notice a difference between that and 256 or 192? (Which I think are the other bitrates Spotify provides)

A core principle of lossy audio codecs is leaving out information that would be masked by other information. But the masking will only happen if that other information is actually reproduced as expected. If, e.g. through a lousy frequency response curve, the masking information is not as loud relative to the masked information as it should be, the difference between would-be-masked present (lossless source) and would-be-masked absent (lossy encoding) will be much more noticeable. Same for the masked information: if played back through a system that distorts the masked part into something that would not be masked, the distorted version will be missing from what you hear in the lossy version but present in the lossless on. Again a noticeable difference (and just because the audible difference lies in a distorted part does not mean that not hearing it would be better, the lossless version would be more consistenct with itself).

Better headphones make the illusions of the psychoacoustic models work better, much like a stage magician will be more convincing with more precise execution of his tricks.

Or in other words: if you are good at identifying the differences between lossy and lossless that might be because you have golden ears. But it could just as well be because you are using tinny cans. (Or any combination thereof)

I and many people I know care tremendously about the lyrics feature.

What do their users want though? I am a user and have some counterpoints.

I have been a premium user of spotify for over a year now and I actually really love it. Maybe I don't use as much features as other people do.

I have a bunch of playlists (18) and love their discovery feature as well. I listen to it every time when I am at work - or doing chores at home - and sometimes during the commute on my phone. Same goes for 2 family members.

I don't miss the lyrics feature - I used it occasionally but it was shortly after I started using spotify so it's hard to miss something you have not really had the opportunity to use for a long time.

I have used their client on Windows and Mac (work), Linux (home) and mobile (android) and actually did not have issues with either of them. For what I use it (listening to music..) it does everything I want and does so perfectly.

Storing songs offline? No thank you, if I wanted to do that, I would just torrent the albums I like.

About the Hi-Fi option, they do have a HQ option but I am not sure which "quality" that actually is. I'm not an audiophile though, but I bet the average user isn't. So they might not care.

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But, like I said, to me it is essentially just a cloud music player and should not be anything else. I don't use any of the social features, I'm surely not an audiophile, and I can actually not compare it to Apple Music.

(Sidenote: The pricing is really good as well, at least the premium model where you can add family members).

EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm not affiliated with Spotify, and as always, this is just my opinion and yours might be different which is completely OK. :-)

I'm in the same boat as you are (subscribed to spotify less than a year ago). I was really disappointed when they removed the lyrics feature, it was pretty nice and now I have to resort to 3rd party services for that.

Like the parent I really would like to be able to complete my library with my own music files when I can't find something on Spotify. That would be massively convenient for me and it doesn't seem like it would be a massive hassle for them to implement (as long as they limit the maximum amount of storage to something reasonable). I'm sure many users would love to be able to add their own audio files and podcasts to their library to access them from their spotify client everywhere.

I would also really love if they added a truly random mode. I get that they try to have a "clever" shuffle mode that's supposed to avoid playing the same artist back to back and things like that, but for most of my playlists I don't actually need that and spotify ends up replaying the same tracks before it's exhausted the rest of the playlist. As a side effect it also seems to favor certain titles over others in my experience. Just give me an option to turn on "dumb" random mode and I'll be happy.

"Hi-Fi" mode is probably snake oil but I guess it'd make for a nice marketing gimmick. I'm personally perfectly content with the premium audio quality as it is currently.

I still don't plan on canceling my subscription but I'm mildly annoyed that in this past year I've seen features disappearing while nothing of great value was being added.

> That would be massively convenient for me and it doesn't seem like it would be a massive hassle for them to implement (as long as they limit the maximum amount of storage to something reasonable).

The problem isn't the storage, but figuring out who the rights holders are and ensuring they get paid for those streams too. And it gets even more complicated for things you might have that Spotify doesn't have in their catalogue vs. is not allowed to let you play due to geographical restrictions. There's no easy way to guarantee correctness and completeness of the metadata uploaded by others whereas they can reasonably trust what is given to them by music labels.

Wouldn't it be similar to streaming music from a dropbox account for instance? As long as they don't allow redistribution to third parties (like grooveshark used to do) there ought to be a way to work around this issue?

Doing that is only legal (under US copyright) if you bought the CD and ripped it yourself. But that's pretty much impossible to validate from the receiving side.

Dropbox "allows" for it but they're in a grey area, just like other services have been able to skirt the issue. It's likely to not be a big enough concern for anyone right now to go after that particular use case.

I am a premium user of ~5 years, and I still share much the same sentiment. The lyrics being gone sucks though.

>Still no Hi-Fi option

Spotify supports 320kbps. Lossless streaming is borderline a pointless luxury, and I'm happy not to subsidize it for people who want to stroke their gold ears or egos. There's luxury services for that.

My problem with Spotify is their lack of TFA. My account had a unique password that was somehow stolen a year and a half ago, at which point I realized users' full names, address, DOB, etc are all exposed on the profile screen once logged in. There's absolutely no email or text verification for new signins either. That, and the android app runs like shit, pushed me over to Play Music.

Been a Spotify Premium user for very, very long. I used to create accounts with a swedish VPN back when Spotify wasn't available in my country. Overall, i am pretty happy with the service. Native clients would indeed be nice, but it is understandable why they don't want to maintain three different clients.

If they had native Windows and Mac clients but no Linux client because of time and resources, then all the complaints on HN would be directed there. Sometimes the over complaining on HN can be a bit much.

Five really, at least.

I don't think most of true things listed matter to the vast majority of people.

People don't care how an app is made usually. I really dislike the 10000 song limit too but none of my friends seem to know or care. A hi-fi option def can't matter much to people or Tidal would've been more popular for that reason, no?

I have my own ax to grind with offline music not scrobbling to last.fm even close to properly but I'm not going to even pretend that more than a fraction of their users care or know about the feature. Similarly I don't think people would have an issue with 3k+ offline track limit. That's a lot to me.

Apple Music does seem to have a lot of good features though. Give you that.

I moved to Apple Music about 6-8 months ago, but had essentially stopped using Spotify before then for many of the reasons listed above. The many changes to the iOS app, songs disappearing from playlists when moving between countries, and with offline synced songs disappearing at random times, I just lost interest.

The move to Apple Music wasn't entirely without friction. There was no very good migration story, only third party apps and the results of these were so-so at best. But this was a one time cost, since then it's been a smooth ride. I pretty much only use apple hardware and the fact that Apple Music works great on all platforms is a huge win for me – Spotify doesn't even have an Apple TV app which was also a pretty big reason for my switch.

I also feel that Apple Music has improved a lot in these past 6-8 months, perhaps not so much in terms of app features and the likes, but I've definitely noticed changes in music availability. Most tracks and albums that I searched for half a year ago but weren't available are there now, and when I started I felt it was hit-and-miss whether the particular songs I was looking for would be there or not. Today I can't remember last time I tried to find a song but it wasn't available.

The only annoying thing now are my friends sending me Spotify links, since it means I have to look up the link, see what song/album they are linking me to, and search for it in Apple Music. This feels like something we should've solved with URNs instead of URLs...

I'd also suggest trying Google Music. I moved to it originally simply because I could upload my existing music collection to it, and listen to it wherever. Then Google gave me 3 free months of the subscription service - and I'm seriously considering paying for it once that's up.

It runs in a web browser on Linux just fine - and I find a lot of their suggested artists/tracks are closer to my tastes than I got from Spotify.

It runs in Chrome, or in Firefox but only with Flash installed. For me it also uses a lot of CPU in either browser.

The thing that most bothers me about Spotify is that it boots to a "top music right now worldwide / in your country".

When it also has a "Discover" system that works semi-well. Why not open to the Discover screen? If I was that plugged in into the zeitgeist pop music-wise, why wouldn't I just listen to the radio?

The shuffle feature in Spotify is probably among the worst, or perhaps is the worst, I've ever used.

It's more of a "shuffle-songs-from-the-same-artist-or-even-the-same-album-until-you're-annoyed-enough-to-manually-switch-songs" feature. It doesn't seem to be a proper shuffle, or even close to a randomization, no matter how many songs, artists, or albums are in your playlist.

That's the killer feature I've been waiting for...

> - Can't add third party songs to the cloud library

You can, actually. Although I'll admit it's not the easiest process. You simply need to manually add your songs into your library on the desktop, create a playlist with those songs, and all your other devices will now be able to download these third party songs via the playlist as well.

They also removed the internal chat feature where you can share music with your friends.... why would they do that??

> moving from native clients to essentially a bundled browser

I'd argue that this is a better choice than having to develop and port features to all their different platforms. By having their clients be a web view they're able to offer features / innovate quicker.

If only Apple would decouple Music from iTunes as well, that would be a huge +1.

They removed fucking 'Most Played', dicks.

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