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