Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

Things I want from Spotify:

- Fix the damn album artwork in the browser. A big part of enjoying an album is viewing the cover and liner art. Let me do that full-screen with zoom.

- Let me create genre-limited radio stations from my likes. Don't just play songs from my likes. If I'm in the mood for , say, 80s hip-hop, I want a radio station based off my liked 80s hip-hop songs which includes related artists.

- Hide the damn podcasts. There will never be a situation now or in the future where I want to use spotify to listen to a podcast. Users should be able to hide them.

- Improve your audio quality. I've shamefully returned to bit torrenting flac files because some of what I've heard on spotify is so bad. Part of that is because I want access to a vinyl mix.

- Your interface sucks. One thing I liked about Google Play Music was easier access to an artist's discography. Please give me an option to hide "Popular releases" or put a quick access button to reach either Albums or a full discography at the top of the artist's page so I don't have to scroll down and hunt for an easily missed label to reach the discography when I use the Android App. When I start the app, there should be a search box ready to go. I shouldn't have to click the magnifying glass and then a search box. Either put a search box/icon on the home screen which goes direct to an input dialog, or make the magnifying glass respond accordingly.

I miss Google Play Music. It wasn't perfect but it was, in my experience, a far superior product. It's regrettable that YouTube Music is such a dumpster fire.

Also, how about giving me the ability to not hear songs with certain words in them. I'm not a tea totaller or holier than thou Nancy, but I really don't want to hear any more songs from the hood rapping about their gangsta money hoes and all the other things that are basically domestic violence, gun violence, racism, gang mentality and "I'm so tough" stories all in one.

Spotify keeps recommending them even though I skip nearly every one of them nearly every time. I'm on premium and this annoys me to no end.

You can disable songs with explicit lyrics in your settings, if that isn't too wide a net.

Hmm. I'd imagine you'd end up blocking a lot of good songs that simply have the word "fuck" in them, in a non-aggressive, non-sexual way, and may still have to endure lyrics that sound like a 13 year old bragging about how cool he is (yeah, that's mostly rap but not exclusively)

This is a bit of a wide net I'm afraid. That said, someone else pointed out that I might be able to hide artists. That could be a partial surrogate for blocking a theme / specific content.

Surely, that has more to do with common themes in the music you frequent than spotify pushing these themes on you. If you don't like the themes that frequent the genre you are listening to most often, the solution seems to be to find alternative genres. I don't tend to get these themes often when listening to electro-swing, for example.

And like the other reply said, you can disable explicit lyrics and I'm pretty sure you can hide artists.

I suspect its possibly to do with my families preferred listening - two teenagers. We are on a shared family plan - so theoretically each have our own accounts. There seems to be some bleed across.

I'll need to check in to whether I can block specific artists.

You would love Cigarettes from the Fort Minor album The Rising Tied then.

It talks about exactly what you are saying - why do all raps have to be about guns, violence, drugs and domestic violence etc.

I'll check it out. Thanks!

For the people who argue that you cannot hear the difference lossless and compressed: I agree, however the issue is that the lossless versions of the music also received more editing from audio engineers. That is what makes Tidal more enjoyable.

I think Tidal gets better recommendations for me than Spotify used to as well (lots of smaller acts I'd never have come across on my own), although it's rather irritating how the labels keep yanking things from Tidal. I really like Tidal but I'm genuinely tempted to move away because of this problem.

What never seems to penetrate the skulls of the labels is that it's their shitehawk behaviour that drives piracy, not their customer's desire to freeload. This was as true in the '60s when the only good radio content in Britain came from ships in international waters (hence the name "piracy") as it was for things like Napster and remains true today.

I preferred GPM in every way except that it would silently remove songs from my playlists, probably as a result of the publisher updating or removing them. This lead to me losing songs I had painstakingly worked to discover over many years. I discovered this only after several years of using GPM. Spotify seems to leave removed songs in playlists but disabled, which at least means I don't forget them.

The Spotify UI is atrocious. It must be designed for income/royalty maximisation because it certainly isn't designed to help me find and play the music I like.

- Allow listening from more than one device at the same time on a family plan.

Use case: I listen to something at home and then get in my car. People at home should still be able to listen to what they want, and I should also be able to listen to something else. At the same time.

They already have this family plan though?

Family plan allows you to have multiple accounts, but if a single account is logged in multiple devices (e.g. some home device that's playing stuff at home, and your phone in your car) then they would do what OP says... unless they constantly re-log in the home music device (whatever setup you're using) to switch accounts based on who is home.

Oh, right. We do that anyway as we have very different tastes and sharing the same account messes with the suggestions too much.

Haven't tried it yet, but looks like it can address some points: https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli

Last.FM would have worked for you 17 years ago because it did most of that, until they mismanaged it into obscurity.

I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, it's a more modern version of Last FM, like Tinder for Music https://piki.page.link/Rng5

Hmm. Tinder for Music doesn't sound anything like Last FM. At all. I'll check it out anyway. FWIW the great thing about Last FM was the fact that it tracked your listens on almost any device, linked you with people who listen to similar music, and let you stream "radio stations" based on their collective music libraries.

While YouTube Music is still a clear regression from GPM, it's slowly catching up. Any year now it'll be good... But it seems it might already annoy you less than Spotify? Which is interesting, most people seem to believe Spotify is superior.

Did it stop mixing YouTube likes with music likes? Destroying my 'liked' music playlist was an unforgivable sin in my book. Fortunately I was able to get my old GPM info with Google Takeout before it went away, so I just scripted up a solution to recreate those likes on Spotify.

I think this has been fixed before they finally turned down GPM. I migrated when they forced me and never saw the dreaded cross-contamination.

Flipside opinion: I always thought album art was a feature every player tried to add for the pleasure of a non-existent user who fetishizes album art. Literally the last thing I'd want out of a music player.

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