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Comment by lapser | Hacker News Reader

Spotify is horrendous. Their UI is subpar. Their mix of podcasts with songs is odd at best (seriously, I never listen to podcasts, why can't I switch it off completely?). Their shuffle is just not. Imagine listening to the same 20ish songs from a playlist of nearly 2k songs. How can you mess up shuffle that bad?

It's also not easy to move away from it. It requires time and effort. Time that many don't have.

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> Their shuffle is just not. Imagine listening to the same 20ish songs from a playlist of nearly 2k songs. How can you mess up shuffle that bad?

I thought it was just me! I did notice that sometimes when this happens the numbers being skipped are “this song is currently not available for playback” or some such message.

I seem to listen to the same music a lot actually so just buying the CD would be more cost efficient.

Spotify shuffle is indeed not (uniformly) random, as confirmed by this blog post[1]. The post is eight years old, so it is highly possible the algorithm has changed.

[1]: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...

I recently switched to Tidal. Same price, better audio quality, better user interface. I try it out for a couple of months to see how it goes.

By the way, I'm always tempted to go back to pirating, and use these services just to discover new music. Given the cost of storage today disks I can easily get 1Tb of FLAC music on my NAS, and discard any streaming service. So I can also get music in a quality that you can't get on a streaming service, all you find is remastered albums that doesn't always sound as good as the original.

Some good private trackers that have better recommendations than Spotify. Look around.

Spotify was promoting a podcast to me for a while called “c*m town” (add a u). It was so gross, the album cover was written in white liquid. I could not make it go away! One of the worst UI experiences ever, actually made my stomach turn.

It’s worth noting that said podcast is (or was, at least) #1 on Patreon in terms of number of people paying money to the creator(s). I bet that makes it really popular on Spotify, and if you have explicit content turned on, that’s probably why it was recommended.

There should still be a master “turn off podcasts” button, although since it’s the only way Premium subscribers are still exposed to ads, fat chance of that happening.

Not the only way. There are also promotional pop-ups every now and then and I've heard of them introducing an option for artists to pay for better rankings.

Cum Town can be a fun podcast, but it just doesn't belong in between music. "I want to focus on somebody talking about something" is a very different mood than "I want to tune out with some music".

I get the business incentives, but I have to imagine some manager somewhere going "Perfect, it's both audio content!".

> podcasts with songs

I really hate that. They are completely different pieces of content but NOOOO, they want to be the "all audio" platform.

What really floors me is their lyric integration.

Initially I though “oh cool neat”, and although I never noticed inaccuracies, I was willing to let it to, lyric listings aren’t always 100% accurate anyway, especially for older underground stuff of people who have indecipherable vocals at times (Mike IX Williams for example)

However as time passed I noticed in a ton of the songs I was listening to, the lyrics would be missing entire verses, hooks, choruses or in occasion show the lyrics to a 100% unrelated song. There were also blatant typos, that looked like someone was quickly typing the lyrics on their phone and didn’t check to read and bad autocorrects or anything.

Lyrics are provided by Musixmatch, and are user contributed. If lyrics are missing or bad, it's because Musixmatch has it like that. You can contribute!

My guess is they pay per play. So to minimize plays, they try to play songs you won't skip, which, naturally are songs you didn't skip the last time they popped up on shuffle.

I'm sure their stats tell them that this gets people to skip less, but it's infuriating when you actually want to shuffle a big list.

I always wondered about this. I had sooooo many songs saved yet I have been only listening to probably 20% of them. Why is that?

Revenues from licensing. Full stop.

Can you elaborate please? I thought their revenue was from users periodic subscriptions. Do you mean there are certain songs with lower licensing costs that the algorithm will prefer?

Despite whatever revenue model(s) are employed, every song that is played generates a fee for the host. Generally, popular media come with higher fees that cost them more to stream, while less popular media are cheaper to license and net them more. The algorithm tries to increase the margin that comes closest to their perception of your preference(s). In theory.

I find it pigeon holes me into a category that may or may not appeal to me, and I get to listen/view what they want me to experience, rather than let me choose & explore without manipulation. No, thanks, is my response.

Thats terrible. What is the alternative here?

I've never understood the Spotify love. I tried it long ago and didn't like it at all. Ended up on GPM until Google pushed me to YTM. Now on AM, and it works fine with how I listen to music.

I wonder if it's just different ways that people listen to music that lead them to prefer one service over another?

Way back many years ago Spotify used to be GREAT, the client was super efficient and easy to use did everything necessary, really.

But then they started butchering it more and more and now it's almost completely unusable.

I've been a paying customer since 2009 and I'm thinking of cancelling, I don't use it any more because it's just a mess.

Generally speaking, those old versions of Spotify still work fine. Just make sure to write-protect your Spotify app so it can't update itself.

> I've never understood the Spotify love.

I started using it when it was launched or shortly after, before most of the alternatives (including Youtube Music) even existed. It was great ~10 years ago.

I still use it because I'm invested into it: we have our premium family account, with all smart speakers configured to play songs using it, we have playlists, out of the music I like I know what's available and what's missing and I have acquired what's missing by other means (but switching to another service would mean different songs/artists would be missing, etc.)

Compound that with lack of time (work, parenting, etc.) and while the Spotify UX has really gone downhill, it would have to get really, really bad for me to switch...

Walled gardens are evil. But so convenient...

I know what you mean here. I used to download and meticulously tag my music and listen on an iPod classic. Sure maybe Spotify might not be ideal, but I do not have the time to fiddle around with all that anymore, and especially don’t want to spend tons more time on the computer than I already do. I am the same as you too with the smart speakers and family account too. The alternative is so much more effort, for not a huge amount of benefit.

That being said I have started collecting vinyl, which I do enjoy, but don’t often have the extra money laying around each month to buy more. One day I hope to have a nice dedicated setup for it :)

The worst UI offense to me is the new playlist view that came with their new desktop UI last fall. They went from having seperate columns for Song Title and Artist Name and bundled them into two rows within a single column. Not only does this make scanning through a long list of songs/artists much more difficult, it means they've taken away the ability to sort a playlist by Artist which seems like a major downgrade in my opinion as someone who keeps most playlists sorted by Artist most if not all the time.

Press once: sort by title, twice: reverse title, thrice: sort by artist, four times: reverse artist.

Horrendous, but the capability is still there and, of course, completely impossible to find.

If you're ok with using google's product...

I've switched to Youtube music and never looked back, better (simpler ui), live music, (no ads in Youtube since I have to pay anyway cause otherwise it becomes unusable).

For some people Spotify is the next best thing since sliced bread, but I think I'm onto the pattern, Spotify is great if you like to vibe with what other people are listening to, all the suggestions seem to lead to the mainstream. I don't mean it in any kind of dissing way, I honestly think it's great that there's a sort of communal feeling where people are listening to the same things, but for my particular tastes it drives me crazy to start with my obscure weird hipstery song and 6 songs later it's suggesting Reggaeton. YT music seems to flow in the direction of similar songs way better.

I know I honestly sound like a Google shill, but I honestly pretty much dislike (I was going to use despise but it's too strong of a word) what they have become, but my pragmatism just makes me keep going back to them (unfortunately?).

YouTube music’s integration with YouTube is too weird for me. I used a service to try to import my Spotify into YouTube music, and it did two things that I can’t stand:

1. Subscribed me to every single artist in my artist library on YouTube. It took a long time to clean up my YouTube subscriptions.

2. All my playlists are also YouTube playlists, which isn’t what I want.

3. The tool was fully incapable of transferring my library over, because YouTube music’s API is limited. So no albums or artists can transfer to the library section.

If I can’t transfer my library over, keeping a semblance of organization (such as maintaining a chronological list of “date added” for my songs), I’m gonna struggle to use any alternatives when Spotify does good enough.

I guess they got inspired from the way youtube does it (or maybe the other way around)

Spotify’s been making a soft pivot into podcasts (as original/exclusive content, they can be more profitable plus you don’t have to deal with record labels). So they’re trying to promote those.

To combat the shuffle I split my playlists into bite sized ones around 50-100 songs. Works great for me

I honestly don't care about the UI design at all as much as it be absolutely infuriating because it's extremely slow on my still fairly new android phone.

I read a blog post about this at some point. When people say shuffle, they don't actually mean random. They mean, songs I haven't heard in a while.

Spotify's algorithm doesn't do "songs I haven't heard in a while", it does " here's 20 songs from your playlist, have fun with it for the next few weeks. So even if I "songs I haven't heard in a while", Spotify's garbage algorithm is not it. At this rate, I'd much prefer an actually random playlist.

I've been having to work around it by copying over the playlist I was shuffled, running it through shuf, and then putting it in to a separate playlist, and lastly, disable shuffle. It's garbage, but it's better than what Spotify produces.

Yes, and isn't generating a random order, then playing the songs in the album/playlist in that generated order the best way to do that? Ie, no repeats until every song has been played. That's how the MIX button on my car CD player works, that's how my MP3 player works, and that's how the Phonograph music player on my phone works. Why should Spotify be any different?

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