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Comment by kaftoy | Hacker News Reader

I really don't want to change this discussion into a "which is the best music streaming service" debate, but I am really curious, why haven't your considered Google Play Music? Interface? Songs count? Price?

I am subbed to GPM for a few years now. I did it first because Spotify was and still isn't available in my country, but I don't think I would switch if they become available tomorrow.

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I used to use GPM and am now a Spotify customer. For starters, I was annoyed that Google removed some of its playlist interface around the activity-based radios. You'd click an activity and there would be several stations/playlists for different styles of music that were great for that general activity. Loved it. Now I can't find it anywhere.

Second is the interface in general. Spotify realizes that especially on mobile, you have limited screen real estate. I really dislike Google's choice to overly emphasize giant thumbnails of album art I'll never care about or recognize, at the expense of not providing a list view for all levels of the hierarchy. This also leads to situations where artist names are truncated beyond recognition because there's only a few characters space for them.

The GPM app on my Pixel XL also takes seemingly forever to load and play, podcasts often lose their place, etc. Spotify just works.

The album art bit I'll generally agree with, but for the activity bit... not to sound too harsh, but did you even try to find it after they did a minor redesign a while back?

Menu ("..." on left in web) > Browse stations > Activities

It's right there!

The change occurred ages ago so I might be forgetting details, but what I think was removed was a more curated way of matching stations with the activity, with descriptions for each. Now it is just a ton of radio stations that often seem unrelated, and no upfront description of what it is unless you click through. Just more giant thumbnails I don't need.

I was using Spotify 3 years ago but it was killing the battery life on my Nexus 4 so I switched to Google Play Music (chose it because of the upload feature).

I like the service but there is many things in the UI that I don't like:

- No desktop app

- Album listing is a mess: . It doesn't differentiate between singles and albums so the album list is sometimes very long for no reasons . You can't mentally filter them yourselves as the number of tracks and the album's length are not displayed for each "album" . It is somehow sorted by release year, but not entirely (you can't chose anyway). . On mobile the year is not even displayed so if you want to quickly see if an artist has a new album or simply listen to the more recent one, you can't really be sure of what is displayed.

- On mobile the search button is not always accessible, you have to navigate / "go back"

- Features disappearing: . You used to be able to filter new releases by genre. Now it's a general category of just popular artists. . Same for popular tracks and albums. For my tastes this entire feature is basically useless.

- Radios: the UI used to suggest auto-generated radios based on artists you listen to, it was my favorite feature that helped me discover many great artists and songs. Somehow it got moved and it took me a long time to find it again (it's now only a link on the artist page I guess ? I never think to do that)

- Bonus nitpick : the upload feature is great, sadly your music is not available to other people on the family plan

I've really enjoyed using https://www.googleplaymusicdesktopplayer.com/ for desktop. Its just an Electron App but it seems to add a few extra features that make it much nicer to use.

Thanks I'll check it out. I used Nuvola player on Ubuntu at work which is a bit the same concept. Mostly I want access to quick play/stop buttons ...

https://tiliado.eu/nuvolaplayer/

(sorry about the formatting, couldn't edit it due to the noprocrast setting)

hmmm honestly it is just a case of "I used spotify first". If spotify hadn't been my first choice I probably would have gravitated to GPM instead. At this point I don't want to sacrifice any more of my life to Google, so if I had to switch it would probably be to nothing.

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