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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been a Spotify premium customer for years. For music discovery, they’re incredible. But I really hate two things about Spotify:

1. Sometimes music I have in playlists disappears, for licensing reasons. I understand the reasoning but it makes me irrationally angry

2. There’s still no way to remove playlists from the home screen. No, spotify, I still don’t want to listen to your Dad Jokes podcast. I feel like some bozo product manager has had a bonus package attached to podcast listens and he’s doing what he can to get more podcast listens, instead of making me (the customer) happy.

I’m considering going back to a bespoke mp3 collection again. Something about it feels better. It feels like mine.

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> No, spotify, I still don’t want to listen to your Dad Jokes podcast. I feel like some bozo product manager has had a bonus package attached to podcast listens and he’s doing what he can to get more podcast listens, instead of making me (the customer) happy.

Two things I have an issue with when it comes to Spotify and podcasts:

1. Podcasts are _still_ open and distributed via RSS. They're probably the last medium to truly exist in this way in a mainstream fashion. With a company like Spotify "embrace, extend, extinguish", then putting podcasts behind a walled garden is a real risk. (Remember when Chrome was the cool and hip browser instead of an ad space?)

2. The annoying, pushy UX (you're making my music listening experience worse)

Given 2., it's hard for me to imagine that 1. isn't a wet dream of some myopic, OKR-obsessed product person at Spotify.

Nr 2 is just bizzare. I pay premium to not get ads and as a thank you I am constantly bombarded with other ads, ehum…sorry…suggestions, for bad podcasts. Wtf.

Otherwise Spotify is one of things I am happy to pay subscription for. Sure it sucks a bit when some good songs go away, but it’s rare and there are thousands of other songs that I like and never have time to listen to anyway, it all just works, has great suggestions and is super convenient otherwise, outweighing the few negatives.

Hoarding mp3s and syncing to devices just in case one out of thousand favorites go away simply isn’t worth the time anymore. For nostalgia reasons my old teenage mp3 collection is enough and can double as providing local music needs in case of a zombie apocalypse.

Absolutely agree RE podcasts. These are ads, which I pay not to see.

I’ve been making playlist for years, and I’ve noticed Spotify mangle songs on some of the older ones. Like one of my earliest playlist now contains a few tracks of super obscure jazz from the 40s that I’m pretty sure I never added. What they replaced I’ll never know.

That's never happened to me, but I'd hate if it did!

Could this be an error from the producer? Or, dumb question, did it start playing related songs after?

On 2, what really grinds my gears is that some of that content is tied to the country of your funding payment method, including podcasts in a language you don't speak about local politics on the other side of the world.

There's an option that allows to keep showing unavailable tracks. They appear greyed out and are not playable, but at least you know they're there.

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