Still can't organise songs in any meaningful way, can't rate songs, playlists suck, shuffle is broken, and they keep pushing podcast content when I never listen to podcasts.
1Password also used to sync to Dropbox for free and even had an HTML version that could serve from Dropbox.
I think lyrics was a bit of legal hurdle so Spotify had to get rid of it. I imagine they brought it back recently as they worked out a legal way to provide them again.
In either case, I do think some of the points the other comment made are prescient. Spotify Connect is definitely a killer feature and I think Spotify Wrapped is one of those cultural phenomenon that you can't reliably predict the impact of. Network effects definitely seem to be quite powerful.
I keep looking at Deezer for its cheap hi-def support (the premium plan now has FLAC, for the same price as Spotify). But integrations with non-officially sanctioned devices seem janky, at best.
Maybe things have improved, but at one point I had a Yamaha receiver, officially supported, which basically replicated the Deezer interface inside the receiver's app. I couldn't control it from my computer. IIRC Tidal was the same. With Spotify, this just works. Bonus points for supporting the use case of "having friends over who can play their music on my stereo".
I also use multiple "devices" to play music: phone, personal laptop, work laptop, personal desktops, media PC. I don't know how Deezer's "three registered device limit" is implemented, but I'd hate to have to log in again every time I change the computer.
Spotify Wrapped is also kind of a cultural phenomenon. People enjoy sharing and talking about it and I guess it's the default assumption that you're using Spotify so you can easily share playlists and stuff to other users. Spotify has the network that smaller services don't.
Unfortunately, something as basic as lyrics is rife with legal challenges, and you can't just slap it onto an app.
Also, arguably, shuffle is not broken, it is working as intended, as there is an intended method to shuffle the songs according to popularity, right? Unless they changed that.
FTFY
This is why I kept all of my old CDs, Mp3s, and DVDs... One day we're going to have to boycott everything and it will be painful for those who only had subscriptions on entertainment & productivity apps.
I'll load up windows 98 if I have to! I'll do it again!
Squeezebox Server was awesome, and these days it’s way easier and more accessible to host a media server and playback in ways you want.
I think what makes it worse is that they've got a section of their community site where you can 'vote' for features and bugs to be fixed - why on earth you need a voting system for bugs is beyond me. But overall its pointless, theres feature requests going back nearly a decade with thousands of votes and all they keep saying is "keep voting". How about no, how about you actually update your damn platform.