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Comment by mithr | Hacker News Reader

Spotify has some really strange "won't fix" issues...

I'm on a Spotify family plan. I recently bought a Spotify gift card on sale, because you can usually apply those for a credit on subscription services.

Well, it turns out unlike the rest of their plans, Spotify Family doesn't support gift cards. I didn't even consider that it might not apply to all plans, and didn't check the fine print. Disappointed, I contacted support, who were happy to inform me there's a solution! I should cancel my plan (kicking all my dependents out), sign up for a _regular_ plan, apply my gift card to it, and _then_ sign up to the family plan again. This would, of course, mean that I'd have to reinvite my entire family to the plan.

They didn't really seem to understand why I was less than enthusiastic about this "solution".

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Spotify still has a limit of 10.000 saved items. An album with 10 songs counts for 11 (10 song entries and 1 album entry). Meanwhile you can create 10.000 playlists with 10.000 songs no problem. So the saved items is obviously a very crappy (database?) design and they still refuse to fix it.

Very glad I have Apple Music now...

How does a saved item differ from a non-saved item? Is it equivalent to "downloaded"?

No. Saved means it appears when you browse to "My Library".

That is very odd. Why limit that at all?

With 10+ years experiencing designing software, my motto is to limit everything and then test at those limits. If you're not limiting things because "why limit this?", then you're going to run into some unhappy conditions in production (and once a user has added 1m songs, it would suck to just delete them out from under them).

Also, you can always raise the limit later if it really matters..

but the problem with Spotify is that they have not touched this arbitrary limit, there's no option to increase limits, and this has been this way since 2012, so it is by design.

And quite frankly, from a Software perspective, 10k entries in a database as a limit in 2018 feels small... especially when you consider how many people even listen to 10k entries in the first place. most have no clue about this arbitrary limit because they never hit it.

All I'm saying is that changing 10k to 100k is a significant difference in terms of music, and doesn't feel like it should be a significant difference in terms of data storage.

That is a strange issue. I have all of my music (sans the few tracks not on Spotify anymore) saved in a Starred playlist which I started 7 years ago when Spotify saved music via "stars." Even there though, I only have 7K tracks - how do you have 10k?!

I also have a lot of saved music as I tend to save whole albums instead of tracks. If I find an artist I like and want to listen to later, I'll often save their most popular album to come back to. It all adds up pretty quickly.

I hit that limit when I tried to import my Rdio collection and, similarly, switched to Apple Music. The Spotify UI is pretty awful for browsing a big list of albums, too.

I also hit this limit on Spotify. The super frustrating part to me was that it appeared to save your songs, but didn't. They would be starred until you left the page and came back.

I swapped to Google play music, though. They like to re-upload / move albums around and automatically remove them from my lists without telling me. Not particularly thrilled about that, either.

Have you ever come across a Spotify issue on their support site which they have fixed? I personally have never seen this. Everything on there is pages and pages of people with the same issue and nothing from Spotify to address it. They really have zero interest in giving their customers (paying and otherwise) what they actually want. The only alternative is Google music which is probably worse!

I've been using it since beta, and I've seen it once.

After three years and 48 pages of community feedback, technology finally advanced far enough to implement the incredibly complex feature of preventing duplicate songs in a playlist: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Way-to-pr...

Yeah, there is also the thing where they don't allow you to change your address when you are on family [0].

[0] https://support.spotify.com/us/account_payment_help/account_...

You still can't tell the Android Spotify app that you want to stream one quality on wifi, and one on cell data. This really seems like a no-brainer, and easy to implement, yet there has been no movement on this for years.

> seems like a no brainer

It is. Also, the iOS app has this so they’ve thought about it at least.

They also won't allow you to blacklist content (artists, songs, albums, etc) from your radio... truly frustrating given they force you to use their client.

Another bizarre Spotify #wontfix is how you have (or at least had, this was two years ago) no recourse against someone with access to your account. e.g. Changing your password doesn't invalidate other sessions.

My friend had her password guessed (you can buy hundreds of hacked premium Spotify accounts online for <$1/each) and was powerless against the person who had been using her account. She had to basically listen to what they were listening to, it was a bit comical.

We emailed Spotify about this as it was happening and there was no way to lock this person out. Sorry! They advised her to create a new account and they would gift it with some duration of premium access.

To make things worse, she was the one who started our family-plan, and their customer support was unable to simply migrate the plan to her new account. She registered a new account and added it to the plan. This intruder was basically able to free-ride on our plan and force her our of her own account.

When I later saw the price of hacked Spotify accounts, I thought it was a great value!

There's a big "signout everywhere" button in settings now.

Crazily, I've heard the same issue on _Cloudflare_, of all services. And they're supposed to be in the security business!

A disgruntled ex-employee changed some of the settings on my website, and there was no way to kick them out after changing the password and adding 2-factor auth.

This is a very serious allegation and I need to know details. Please email me (jgc AT cloudflare DOT com) with details of the site and who you are alleging made such a change.

I sent you an e-mail describing the incident in detail, with a link to the support request I opened at the time of the incident.

I actually really do like Cloudflare a lot, for the record, so I'd be glad if it turned out to be something more innocuous. But at the time, Support said they'd look into it, and I got nothing but radio silence since then.

Thanks. I'll follow up internally.

In general, I always try to put my PM shoes on and try to evaluate what benefit they could possibly be receiving to ignore such a prominent issue that you can pretty much guarantee they are well aware of the issue.

That being said, I completely agree that this is pretty strange since I have not a single example that comes to mind in this case...

They could just be shitty devs? There's a reasonable amount of evidence for that: their android client is extremely buggy, and one day they deleted all my partner's playlists. On mac, I regularly have to close the client to force it to sync playlist changes, and sometimes playlist changes just disappear when I quit the mac client. I recently found 3.5g of old spotify updates sitting in ~/Library/Cache on an older, ssd space constrained mac. I have multiple performances of the same songs from several of my favorite artists; their client occasionally confuses different performances with the same name. You have to delete and re-add to get them to match correctly. I can continue...

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