Comment by tim-- | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tim-- | Hacker News Reader

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One thing that has devastated me about recent Spotify updates is that now, when viewing an Artist, you do not get to see all of the albums (or at least the first 10 newest albums) for that artist straight away with all of the tracks listed. It's now much harder to find a song that you don't know the title of, but you know an artist has sung.

It's also small changes that are extremely annoying. Pressing "New Playlist" used to come up with a dialog box asking what the playlist should be named. Now it just gets called "New Playlist". Clicking the playlist name to rename it does not automatically select the textbox to give it a name, meaning that to create a new named playlist - an action that used to take one click, is at least three clicks and two keyboard presses... I mean, come on Spotify!

The search bar used to always be visible. Now I need to click search first, then click the search bar.

To me, Spotify was the epitome of software completion five years ago. The client worked. It was perfect. It seems like every single update since they released the "Daily Mixes" has both downgraded the performance of the app, and made discoverability harder. I want Spotify how it was 18 months ago.

Spotify on my machine sometimes chews up 2GB of RAM. Reached out to support, and the best that they can give is "try restarting the app". That helps, until 12 hours later you need to do it again. A music player should not have 10% CPU usage on a modern MacBook.

Finding Psst has been a life changer.

Discoverability...

I'd pay handsomely for an app that did discovery on tracks and not artists. Last.fm kind of but not really does it. It took me many years to get from Sirenia: Seven Sirens And A Silver Tear to the Midnight Sonata (I can't remember alas who did it -- was it reddit or a forum on a now defunct tracker? all the great trackers are dead) and from there I was able to branch out. But this shouldn't be so hard..? We already have several music matching apps, surely closeness is a solvable problem.

> a forum on a now defunct tracker

Years have passed. I still havent filled the gap left by whatcd...

Nothing can, it seems. What wanton destruction. Oink's Pink Palace first, then what.cd

Oink...talk about the glory days. If it existed, it was there.

Try YouTube Music. There's a tab in the player that shows related tracks for each song you're listening to.

Based on https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeMusic/search?q=related&restr... I will pass.

They really do make things worse and worse and worse. Related to your playlist example - saving an actual album I liked as a new playlist would give it a default title, "artist - album title" or something like that. Fine, 2 clicks: create the playlist, and accept the title.

Now? A blank text box. "Let's ignore the artist and album this user's basing a playlist on and make them type the whole thing from memory". I just don't bother any more, which seems petty but it's just so cumbersome, from mobile especially.

Oh wow. I thought that was only a mobile thing, going to have to check the "desktop" app now...

I have also noticed this. There isn't even a way to see songs, you always have to go to each album. I don't remember the album! Or the name of the song!

Under the artist's page, select their Discography. Songs not released under albums should show up under 'Singles'

Again with the multiple clicks though. You need to select 'Singles & EPs' after clicking the drop down with the label 'Albums'. To see all the tracks, you first need to change the view from grid view to list.

Also it's rare that an album folder even has all the songs from the actual album. I wish they'd just have an "all songs by artist" list.

I wonder if some of these decisions are driven by their business model. My understanding is Spotify's agreement with record labels means they have very low margin on a typical song stream. I've heard that some of their playlists are very valuable for artists and that there's some payola going on there. It could make sense that they're nudging people in those directions.

They also see much more upside in podcasts and thus are pushing people there.

I'm on the same boat: finding a song now requires too many clicks. Albums make sense in a physical world, but not in the virtual one.

An album is (ideally) carefully crafted to work as a coherent musical statement. Tracks in isolation don't have the same effect. It's even more so in classical music, where a work usually encompasses multiple tracks. One of my frustrations with Spotify is that it doesn't understand multi-movement works, so you get an single movement — sometimes even one that is connected to the preceding or following one — in isolation, and it's often really unsatisfying.

tl;dr I think albums have more significance than you do.

Let the user be the one choosing how to use the music.

I think Spotify (at least for me and I think for many others) is great because of lists: I'm the one choosing what and when to listen the songs, and I'm able to group them. I have lists made out of albums where I respect the order that you mention, with the same implications. But some other lists I have hours of songs that don't fit under the concept of album.

I agree and understand your point, but I think in the past Spotify's UI had both options: the songs were sorted by album, but also allowed me to access all of them and cherry-pick the ones I wanted easily from that same view.

But none of that matters because most artists only upload a small number of songs from each album anyways.

Not sure how it works now, but back with GPM, you could get access to all the songs by purchasing the album on Google play. Some tracks just can't be played unless you pay for them.

dunno how long it will last for, but you can add `ui.experience_override="classic"` to your prefs file to hold out a little longer.

Sadly, this does not work on the newest version of their client.

True but you can use a old version and set the update folder to read only.

oh? I'm on stable version from snap and it's still alive - time to find a way to keep an old version around just in case (apparently snaps don't make this easy.)

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