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Comment by goatbrain | Hacker News Reader

As an aside - but not completely, because it speaks to incidents such as this re Spotify... but have people been noticing a deterioration in the Spotify experience recently? For example, the UX of the app getting too complicated; the algorithms no longer have the "delightful serendipity" they used to, etc and so on. I suppose that is to be expected from any behemoth (especially one that is not particularly profitable and subject to the squeeze from other parts of the industry)... but the loss of the ecosphere that built around it seems to only hasten the problem.

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I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Spotify - for the most part it's great, and I'm happy to be paying for a service that provides so much value (and it's a great example of how having a reasonably priced option defeats piracy, for uh, people I know). That being said, being advertised podcasts and audiobooks is super annoying (and yes, I consider "being presented with" as "being advertised" if I can't hide them) as it wastes a large area of the home screen.

The discovery algorithm in general has never been as good as say Pandora, but I guess I agree that it's felt worse recently.

Most annoying to me recently is how there seem to be three different ways to indicate I like a song, depending on which device I'm listening on (desktop app on my laptop or desktop, or mobile app on my Android phone) - I swear I've seen hearts, plus signs and thumbs-up symbols, without any clear indication of any differences. I know a sibling comment mentioned this change, but they made it sound recent - I _feel_ like I've had that point of confusion for over a year...

I'm in the same boat - have been very happily paying for Spotify family for many years, love the access to music, but hate the way they push crap I don't care about. And their recommendation algorithm has never really worked for me.

In part out of frustration with Spotify, and in part to hedge against streaming disappearing one day, I'm in the process of ripping my exiting CD collection to FLAC, and buying either digital or physical copies of my favourite albums.

I've found it pretty refreshing to open my music app (Finamp) and only see exactly what I want to.

It’s nice to be in control for once. I am getting more and more into offline consumption, and to me if quality of the media isn’t the highest but decent Im okay. My attention though is extremely valuable to me to let companies services try to mess with it.

> In part out of frustration with Spotify, and in part to hedge against streaming disappearing one day, I'm in the process of ripping my exiting CD collection to FLAC, and buying either digital or physical copies of my favourite albums.

This is bizarre to me. So to punish the record industry for ruining Spotify you're... giving them even more money?

In 2024 you can buy directly from the artists in many ways that are more beneficial to them than a streaming subscription.

I make it a point to buy a couple of albums a month from Bandcamp. The artists get a much larger cut than whatever I have been streaming of theirs, and in exchange I can listen as much as I want, completely offline, without any surveillance of my listening habits.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-e...

Yep, I buy from bandcamp where I can. Where I can't (usually bigger artists) I can usually buy from qobuz.

Who said I wanted to punish the record industry?

I'm not sure any of my issues with Spotify (pushing podcasts and audiobooks, nonsense UI changes etc) have anything to do with the record industry.

The record industry are major shareholders in Spotify. They are effectively one and the same.

I too have been noticing a deterioration in recent months. Things that generally worked smoothly before have random bugs now. For example, turning off shuffle and resuming a song will sometimes just stop playing Liked Songs after the song ends, shuffle will turn off/on seemingly at random, etc. Also there seem to be odd inconsistencies in the UX between mobile and desktop such as liking songs and seeing Smart Shuffle songs in playlists.

I've been generally very happy with the Spotify app for years and it's disappointing to see the quality slipping.

I’ve noticed a small and hard to quantify degradation in recommender relevance over the last 12 months.

To add, I think I’m seeing less discovery and more popularity bias. I used to discover a lot more.

> the algorithms no longer have the "delightful serendipity" they used to

There is a limit to "delightful serendipity". At some point, you will have heard everything you could potentially be interested in but not normally listen to. After that, it will be either not your thing or more of the same.

Also, algorithms don't read your mind, they just match your usage patterns (mostly what you are already listening to) to other people usage patterns and give you what they have and you don't. For example you may listen to psy trance, and the algorithm notices that many people who listen to psy trance also listen to folk metal, so it will give you some of that. And there is a good chance for you to like that even though it is a completely different genre you may not be aware of.

But once all the matches are done, that's the end. There may be a few paths left for you to explore, because you are an individual and not an average, and tastes change, but there is no easy way for any algorithm to find that. The only solution is to go with stuff you probably won't like, so, not so delightful serendipity. Or just give you more of the same.

The UX changes every other month it seems, which is upsetting and jarring every time. Lately, the app keeps forcing me to update my password which is annoying. I miss the heart button. Why would they remove it?

I never like spotify's "for you" playlists.

Your heart button is gone? Every song I play still has it right next to the title?

It's been gone for close to a year now for me.

Maybe the intel mac client has never been updated.

> Your heart button is gone?

Yeah, and she ain't givin' it back. Sigh ... guitar solo ♪♫♬

A sharp degradation. The UI also constantly freezes now and I've run into a lot of bugs.

Yeah super low quality of recommendations, fake mixes that are clearly made automatically and have no relevance to the title or between songs. Sounds like they tried to replace humans by computers and it shows really badly. That's the next one I'll consider in my regular review of subscription (Waking Up is another close contender, together with duolingo)

It has been drastic. Some of the UI changes have been off putting to me, but I can chalk that up to taste, or their pursuing other forms of engagement. But along with those changes has come a sharp decline in quality. There are days that it seems like half of my clicks are dead! I would happily move to a new platform at this point.

Making a great product at a reasonable price is not good enough.

Everything is owned by the same tiny group of people and they need the number to always go up.

More and more frequently, as the blood is squeezed out of the stone, that means laying everyone off and dumping the work on fewer and fewer people.

The app refreshing every time it comes into focus is annoying. Not sure when this started but it’s frustrating when what I click on isn’t there after the app refreshes

It's like they've never heard of caching.

Absolutely. It no longer appears to make any effort to avoid playing me the same set of songs in every algorithmic playlist.

I can choose pretty much any "song radio" and the same set of artists shows up. I mean, I like Alice in Chains, but not in every play list.

Not just that but the mobile app has changed from purely vertically scrolling categories (with horizontal selections of playlists/albums/music in the category) to song cards that try to preview a short clip of the song/video. It has to be some attempt to capture the "infinite scroll" of social media apps while pushing well-monetized tracks, but it's very frustrating for any attempt to actually, you know, listen to music.

Yea it's a mess. The heart conversion to plus recently was idiotic. Trying to combine the functionality of two distinct actions was not a smart idea. I also keep getting sponsored shit that I can't turn off even with a premium subscription.

Why don’t you pull the plug then?

Where should I go? I looked at Tidal, seemed like a possibility, but I'm not sure if they have the same selection. I have no interest in YouTube Music, Apple Music, or Prime Music.

Rotate through some 30 trials and see. I did this with Tidal and Qobuz, both were good in different ways.

I ended up with Bandcamp+Spotify. I find new stuff on streaming and then buy it on bandcamp. Store all the FLAC files in a plex server and stream as much as I want from my library.

Plexamp even has some new ML features where they can generate playlists based entirely from your own library.

I think this is more a matter of me having already heard all the songs in a certain genre over time? I mean, I feel it's getting worse, but only because I keep hearing the same things.

Yes, it's gone from recommending me interesting new music that fits my tastes to a mix of only songs I've heard before, or top billboard hits with no in between.

Everything is working fine for me, same as the last few years. I mostly listen to weird electronic music in my car with an iPhone.

I have not noticed any difference

Their recommendation algorithm has gone to complete shit. I used to get a stream of good songs I was actually interested in whenever the album I was listening to ended. Now It seems to just play the same 4-5 songs immediately after my album finishes which fills me with an intense rage and has made me hate some songs that I otherwise would enjoy.

I wonder if this is a broader with the industry.

Need to show growth > Hire more and more people > A lot of them have nothing to do because companies always over hire > Change parts that work in the name of improvements because they have to show they are working > enshitification

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