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Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

I've had the theory that Spotify is a legal department that happens to own a tech company. That would explain why its app is so terrible. And from what I've seen, music licensing is very very hard to do correctly, especially internationally and with so many different labels.

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Can you explain what makes it terrible? I only use Vanilla Music (open-source) for my mp3 collection, and Spotify for streaming. I don't think I've ever tried any other commercial apps. The Spotify app seems fine to me. My only issue is that the volume in ads is higher than the volume of the music. I wish Google would forbid this in their appstore terms.

- Downloaded songs will randomly disappear and you'll only discover this when you try to play them without an internet connection

- Regularly have to restart the app

- Regularly on bluetooth headphones will get an error that you cannot play any songs.

There are thousands of small UI problems and bugs. To me, the biggest joke/travesty is their "algorithm" which literally builds a top20 radio station echo chamber around you the moment you dare casually play a song. Then you're imprisoned rapidly by your own choices. The autoplay decision-making is atrocious. You are guaranteed to hear a song you just played manually within 10 songs. It's so painfully dumb. You could write a better system using a random number generator.

To me, the biggest joke/travesty is their "algorithm" which literally builds a top20 radio station echo chamber around you the moment you dare casually play a song

This is literally by design. Amazon doesn't want you to search, they want you to buy what they suggest on the homepage. Spotify doesn't want you listening to what you want, they want to shove profitable songs down your throat. you know how radio in america is controlled by the labels? Same with spotify.

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