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"How can such a simple concept (listen to music) get so many basics so wrong and have such glaring bugs?"

Spotify internally has a model where they have a large number of small teams where each is responsible for only a tiny part of the experience. Possibly this leads to a lack of a coherent experience. The other factor may be the constant experimentation.

Frankly, 20-30 year old media players were better. So what the point of it all is...I have no idea.

Quite similar experience with the Netflix app where it seems every single day I have to wonder where they put my currently watching series.

Ironically, we look up to these companies for their engineering culture. We really shouldn't. It's a hot mess. Toy tech. Deeply unserious about quality and customers.

The constant moving of the Netflix "currently watching" pane is a huge annoyance for me, especially because it looks the same as every other pane ("horror films", "British comedy" etc). My grandma can't figure it out, she needs to be able to press the same buttons every time she goes on the app and Netflix doesn't let her do that.

“She needs to be able to press the same buttons every time she goes on that app and [insert app name here] doesn’t let her do that” must sum up at least 90% of user problems.

Not even episode syncing works (for me). I clearly finished watching an episode yet regularly on another device the next episode would be the one I already watched. Just one of many basic things that doesn't work.

I forgot to add that not only will they change "currently playing" every 3 secs, also the cover art of each series changes, as an A/B test. So if you use that as a visual confirmation, well tough luck.

In the case of Netflix, there's a reason for all of this. They don't really want you to go and sniff around the catalog in easy ways. You might discover its not great. Best to throw a bunch of random stuff in your face to give you the illusion of a fabulously rich and "dynamic" experience.

The distraction UX of Netflix is intentional. In the case of Spotify it's mostly incompetence.

Agree about the syncing - its not just you. I click on "Continue Watching" for a TV series that I have been watching - only to realize about a minute or so into it that I had already seen the episode the previous day. This has happened to me so many times that I would have wasted close to an hour just moving back and forth between episodes.

Exact same experience here. I even let episodes roll past the credits to the absolute end. And it still doesn't work.

Not going to defend it because I agree.

But if you are interested in the why of "currently watching" moving all over the place, you'll notice its harder to find the longer its been since you opened netflix combined with the faster you start looking for it.

Different part of Netflixes backend respond at different speeds. The call for "Top in the US" is likely cached and up to date, the call for "What did dataengineer56 stop watching" is probably cold and slow.

This leaves netflix with a few options, and what they seem to have settled on is "Show everything that has loaded, and quietly insert the stuff that loads later into parts of the screen the customer isn't looking at, so our entire app seems to load instantly"

Anecdotally I disagree. I think I have a pretty eclectic taste, and spotify has helped me discover tons of new songs, but also still keeps my daily mixes coherent. I find myself listening to their autogenerated ones most of the time since they are very easy to craft and extend.

I also love spotify as a general product. But the UX grievances are fair and representative of tge standard product thrash where far too many people are involved in making design decisions that ultimately end up punishing users

> Frankly, 20-30 year old media players were better. So what the point of it all is...I have no idea.

I would say that Spotify does not compete with traditional media players, it competes with radio.

If i want to listen to my favorite songs, there is no reason to use Spotify for that. But if i want something different-but-similar and i do not really know what, because i am not very interested in music, then discoverability of new music by Spotify is game-changing.

Spotify should serve both audiences: consistency and discover new ones.

I think Apple Music got it right. I like how you can start a radio of any song. Or just play your own favorites.

Spotify has always had "Song Radio".

For me song radio simply plays songs that I've already listened to but are similar to the current song. Completely useless for discovering new music.

The most frustrating one for me is that saving an album doesn’t add the Artist to your artists list in your Library.

You have to ‘follow’ the artist by going to their profile and clicking ‘follow’. I much prefer this functionality because liking an album or a song does not mean I want to be exposed to all new music by the artist.

It makes the library a bit useless though. If I'm offline and want to look for a specific artist's music I have downloaded, if I can't remember the name of the album it's not easily findable.

> Spotify internally has a model where they have a large number of small teams where each is responsible for only a tiny part of the experience. Possibly this leads to a lack of a coherent experience.

Which is particularly surprising since they have multiple teams of highly compensated product people who are supposed to be guiding the overall product direction and preventing just that kind of incoherence.

Yes, I forgot to mention that. They have cross cutting orgs too. Which means they reinvented the matrix organization which is the worst of all organizations.

I think the most amazing mistake Spotify made was that recently all private playlists suddenly became public, because they changed the meaning of private and public to introduce some weird third level of privacy. I now have no idea what the privacy settings do.

Second most amazing was when they made the scrollbar literally two pixels wide and therefore unusable.

It’s not even that these are huge errors but it just makes you wonder who drove those change and why? What on Earth are their teams up to when they’re prioritising those kinds of changes?

WTF? I just checked all my private playlist are now public! WTF Spotify?!?

They say that “public” means what “private” used to mean, “added to profile” means what “public” used to mean, and “private” now means that people can’t see the playlist at all even if they have a link to it. But it’s completely unclear which setting controls whether someone can search for the playlist by name and find it. I found out about this public/private change because I somehow got a subscriber to a playlist I’d thought was completely private, so I’m sure the previously private playlists actually did become more public without my permission…

WTF!!! Same here, the playlists are now public

They probably made a good chunk selling your now public playlist music preferences to advertisers.

It's so they could sell your music preferences. You got got.

Damn, I just noticed all my playlists are public too.

Thanks for the heads up. And screw Spotify!

The most frustrating for me is the way the “offline” feature works. On my android, even though I had downloaded songs/podcasts/etc. I had to dig in settings and set it explicitly to offline mode to enable offline playback.

Another grievance: I love music and podcasts and use Spotify for both. It would be great to have a podcast tab and a music tab. Instead, if you switch from one to the other, you’ll have to dig out the previous episode you were listening to. Very user unfriendly

The whole offline / no data experience is absolutely terrible if you live anywhere like Canada where mobile data rates are small and expensive. The #1 complaint I've heard about Spotify for years is "I set it to not download music on data then didn't notice I was listening to a new playlist and now I'm out of data till next month". Also taking public transit like a subway without cell service was a pain. Hold on, let me open the settings in advance and flip the offline switch so I can keep listening to music on my commute. Ugh.

Offline is also weird on iOS, you often have to turn on airplane mode to get it into its offline state reliably.

Don't forget the part that you now have to "love" a song or an album in order to download it because there's no "Add to Library" anymore, completely ruining the concept of "likes". How would I know if I like something or not if I have to say I "love" it in order to download it so I can listen to it later? Do I really "love" every single song of an album or was I just forced to say so in order to download the whole album? There is no possible way you're getting the correct data points out of me like this.

There's three things I want out of Spotify:

* Browse the albums of a particular artist and play it – this is becoming harder and harder;

* Find and play one song in particular by title – this is the only thing Spotify still does right;

* Download an album / playlist and be able to listen to it later on regardless of my internet connection status – besides the requirement to "love" it stupidity, the UI just hangs until it timeouts if you have a spotty connection. If you have the content, just display and play it! It's actually slightly better now when you have no connection, a while ago, if you were on a plane in Airplane Mode, it would hang for a few seconds "loading" until it gave up and displayed the album art it had downloaded - why?!

I just want Winamp with a search engine and a downloader built in. Is that really so hard? Is Electron really adding any value here, or just making problems far harder to solve than they should be across every single platform?

"Browse the albums of a particular artist and play it – this is becoming harder and harder"

So much agreement here - of the most annoying things to me is that I can't just click on an artist and have an easy way to list every song by that artist.

I just went back to Spotify after trying a 6 month Apple Music trial for only 3 weeks. Apple Music is even worse. First of all they don’t support handoff between my mac and iPhone. A feature that Spotify supports a lot better. There is no way to go back to the previous song. The mac app constantly fails to resume playing a song after a short while paused. And sometimes I have to go to a song or playlist again to get it to start playing music again. Searching for song has horrible ux. I haven’t found a way to get to the playlist I’m currently on.

While spotify has its issues I’m now a lot more happy with it after trying an alternative.

I use Deezer instead of Spotify, I don't know if it's better or worse, but what I can tell you is that I miss Google Play Music everyday.

Deezer has a lot of interface problems too.

I think that Deezer is better because there is a button to 'don't recommend this track/artist'. I can filter the things that I dislike.

Another positive thing about Deezer is that it shows less popups and notifications than Spotify.

There are plenty of dedicated podcast apps that offer a better experience with no or very little algorithmic recommendation system.

I've used PocketCasts for years and it's been perfect and doing exactly what it needs to do and no more. The main page is just a grid of podcasts I'm subscribed to, and I can go into a list of all unplayed episodes of all my podcasts sorted chronologically. There is a "discover" tab that has featured/trending podcasts, but I never touch that other than to use the search (which doubles as an entry field where you can paste an RSS link to subscribe that way)

Google Play Music was designed in a pre-streaming world, when albums were much more popular.

Unfortunately, very few people use streaming services to listen to albums.

It is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but given the minuscule usage of albums by users, it’s not worth Spotify’s time to optimize the album playback experience. (Same goes for Classical music.)

Your problem with a static, duplicate list of suggested music sounds like a bug. Somehow Spotify’s recommendation algorithm has run out of ideas of what to show you, so it just shows you the same thing several times.

Songza(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza) really brought a lot of value to GPM. RIP

You still cant search for a song in your playlists only either.

I am just waiting for the personal I formation train to get to include my listening history and like/dislike behaviour.

There should be an XML/JSON standard to store, download and share that information. I've got a listening history in last.fm, another in spotify, another in Tidal an finally in youtube. I should be able to use them together in any platform. My listening habits is also my personal information.

It's algorithm is really dumb. That's why these companies need to stop with these so called "algorithms", we should only select the genres of music we like and our front page should be a reflection of it.

I still remember when my girlfriend searched for a fart noise podcast as a joke and then I kept getting suggestions based on it for weeks.

After using plexamp for the last year, it just reinforced my impression that the UX of Spotify is cosmically bad. Plexamp feels a lot like winamp, it is a nice pared down experience that just works and is fast.

But I guess I'm just one data point. Spotify has enough users that they have no incentive to make any kind of radical change.

Why does every thread about a consumer app company like this turn into off-topic feedback about the product?

For your second point, there's a Time Capsule playlist with content you haven't recently listened to.

I listen to albums, not songs, and looking at that playlist then there's a lot of stuff there that I've never listened to and have no desire to listen to. Spotify seems exceptionally bad at metal music and says "oh you listen to prog metal? Then you're definitely going to love us constantly recommending you the exact same Korn, Slipknot and blink-182 albums".

+1 on Google Music, I really miss that.

And yet, people still pay for crap experiences. For me, even a slight annoyance means I'm out, with a quick email to 'contact us' explaining exactly why. Never heard back from several and they dont receive my $$ anymore.

Podcasts are interesting for Spotify because they keep the listener attached to the service while their (royalty and license) costs are minimal. Just like they inject all kinds of cheap music from unknown artists in your recommendations.

> The queuing functionality is horrible. There's way to add a new album to the end of the current queue.

That's precisely why I chose Tidal over Spotify when GPM died