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Spotify has never automatically deleted offline content for me, but it does have extremely confusing UI which makes it very easy to wipe all downloads without confirmation.

Basically, the download button is a single down-arrow at the top of your library. When you tap it—and download your music–the down-arrow turns solid green to indicate your music is available offline. It doesn't disappear. It turns green, Spotify's primary color.

The kicker is: if you accidentally (or out of curiosity) press that green arrow again, it will wipe all your downloads without confirmation (disabling "offline mode"). Did that on a flight once and lost all my music. It's absurd how that UX made it out of testing.

Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. Tapping this icon deletes your library from your device:

https://i.imgur.com/zrSid1T.jpeg

Really makes you wonder what "designers" get paid for.

A product manager needed to change stuff to justify their job. A designer who isn't changing things that the product manager wants changed is replaced by one who does. Therefore, designers get paid for doing what product managers want.

Sometimes the changes get A/B tested, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the A/B test is gamed, sometimes it gets gamed by accident, and sometimes the tests get ignored when they are clearly wrong.

Finally, sometimes the directive is "get people to stop using this feature because it's unpopular with management".

Case in point, that time when Spotify removed all references to the word "queue", and replaced it with "up next" while also changing the behaviour of it. Ridiculous change which they eventually reverted thankfully.

Or that one time when they removed the "set as current playlist" feature, which they still haven't restored. That feature was the only way to change playlist without breaking in the middle of a song, besides literally waiting until a song is over and doing it then, wasting time.

I like Spotify, but they do some infuriating things sometimes.

Don't get me started on their beef with Apple which has resulted in my HomePods still not being able to take music requests via Siri almost 3 years after I got the first one.

Yep, I know that, and you're right it's a very confusing UX that's easily invoked by accident.

There really should be at least a modal to confirm if the result will mean deleting more than say an album.

If you're offline or on roaming mobile data (not sure if they can reliably determine this though, at least not on iOS) when invoking it then they should make you answer a somewhat complex question to confirm that you indeed wanted to delete the songs.

It's even worse for playlists that change (daily mixes, made for you, or curated playlists).

When updating them, Spotify will first delete all old songs and then try to download the new ones. If a lot has changed and you're on a spotty Wifi connection this effectively deletes everything. Happened to me several times while on vacation.

There is the solution of enabling offline-mode before leaving for vacation, but as you mention it's very easy to accidentally disable it and once it's disabled all your playlists are toast.

Apple Music and Youtube Music both suffer from the issue of vanishing content.

I have playlist where a growing percentage of songs are grayed out, not available, while they do exist in the store, just as part of a different album now.

Very frustrating. Does Spotify do that ?

Spotify does this too, at least in my region (Estonia). It's frustrating, but not that frustrating to go back to downloading MP3.

It happens, but pretty rarely in my experience, though I'm probably not the most avid consumer of music so other people might have a better grasp of the extent of this issue on Spotify.

It does indeed happen. There seems to be a few different types of it. Sometimes a whole band will just disappear off the platform - chalk it up to contractual disagreement. Sometimes a particular album will not be available on Spotify, but other albums from the same band will be - likely some issue with the label that produced the album. Finally, sometimes the particular version of the song you like (e.g. a certain live version, acoustic version, whatever) will disappear but others will remain (e.g. studio version).

However, it really doesn't happen that often. I probably have a few thousand songs save on Spotify and perhaps a dozen have been taken off after many years of using the platform.

Spotify has left me doubting my sanity a couple of times by removing albums I could have sworn I had listened to before in the platform.

And I had, but they removed them since, listing nothing in their place.

I've had it happen on both Apple Music and Spotify. Given my 40h+ master playlist, I tend to notice it. I always have a few gray holes.

As for replacements, my understanding is that they are often due to the better royalties on original artist re-recordings. I always try to switch back to the originals, and AM, my current service, only sometimes still them. Frustrating to build a collection on shifting sand.

One of Spotify's biggest problems is their terrible UI, lacking even the basic functionality. I don't understand how they haven't been able do the bare minimum for 15 years now.

Like what?

My three biggest pet peeves are:

- You can't turn your queue into a playlist (and you can't see previous queue as part of the queue, only as limited history.)

- Clicking a song or album sometimes clears your queue and starts playing that instead (I know there is a logic to it, but a mistake or mis-click is easy).

- There is no shortcut to add to queue, just long press then find the menu item.

It's possible everyone else is only listening to albums or curating playlists then playing them, but I like to pick things as I go like a jukebox and it sucks at it.

> - There is no shortcut to add to queue,

There is, just swipe the song to the right.

that's neat! totally not discoverable though

You can also tap the kebab menu and select “Add to Queue”

What I'm missing is multiple "currently playing" lists, each keeping its current position as I switch to play a different one. Use case: listening to a discography of the band, and if I wish to listen few songs from some other band. I can't go back to where I was with the first band. Foobar had multiple ad-hoc lists since forever. Now I balance between Spotify and Youtube music in these cases.

Yeah I really wish there was a global history of my plays that I could look at.

You could link Spotify to last.fm, it saves all your plays.

I request my Spotify data (via their gdpr site) annually and put it in a sql database so I can do my own analysis.

most of the views (in the iOS app at least, idk about android) are asynchronous, in that they will always prefer to load data from their servers over using locally cached stuff.

meaning that, if you have a bad internet connection and tap on eg an album, it'll open the view for that album and you just have to look at the progress indicator for in some cases up to 20+ seconds, even if you have downloaded that album and all the info is there in the local cache.

this happens annoyingly often, e.g. when leaving an area where you're connected to wifi and your phone hasn't yet switched over to celluar data.

I tried Spotify shortly after it was released. It was in a bad shape and missed essentials (e.g. basic filtering by name or in lists) to the point of being unusable. I usually am an avid writer of feedback, but here it was clear to me (sic!) that devs simply lacked resources to implement all the essentials and they were coming in short time.

But imagine my surprise when I checked Spotify a couple of years later and the situation was still the same. Ok, I thought, they must have had different internal priorities, but once they get those, they will make UI at least semi-usable.

A few years passed, but the answer was still no. Once again I didn't write because clearly they must have had thousands of actual users writing and demanding the essentials and those things MUST be on their way, no way they weren't!

Several years later and the situation was still the same... This is when I stopped making excuses for the developers. They must be technically incompetent, be dim product-management wise (not understanding features, people, customers, lacking a vision, not to know how to collect, analyze and work on feedback) or stupid/unmotivated. But probably everything of the above.

I only criticize the technical aspects, not the business side. And I don't even criticize a much more challenging podcast/video side of things. I am merely talking about the lack of essentials in the basic music player. They couldn't even do that! I can bet money that the podcast implementation is on no better level. Other people's comments support that assumption. I am not surprised in the least.

I've been hoping to Spotify to go out of business since they went and took Rogan's podcast and a few others as Spotify-exclusive. Not always a Rogan fan, but he's occasionally had some interesting guests. However the Spotify experience was so bad I abandoned podcasts that required me to use their client.

(Suppose I should think of dialing back my Spotify hate a little now that apparently in the renewal they're no longer keeping Rogan as Spotify-exclusive)

You hope they go out of business because they bought the rights to some podcasts?

I have no clue who this Reagan guy is. But sometimes you don't want to support people.

Music is usually considered art and you are a boring downer of you complain about artists political or personal controversies. That is another thing. And the artist always have the benefit of doubt of the protagonist in the song not being the artist himself.

Jon Reagan is one of the most famous podcasters lol

His older brother, Ron, is also pretty famous for some stuff he did a while back.

Ron the actor?

Yep he was in some great flicks.

He’s a podcaster, not musician. Basically a talk show I suppose?

My point was more the GP wanted to see Spotify go out of business because they bought a podcast. I just thought it was a bit of a wild statement to make.

The OP was annoyed they bought a podcast they liked and then put it behind a UI/UX which is hard to use. Presumably if Spotify went out of business Rogan would end up back on the open market. Turns out the new deal lets Rogan put shows back on YouTube so it doesn't matter.

BTW, I agree about the Spotify UI. I never liked it and was a GPM user until they destroyed it by pushing me to YTM. Now I use AM, since if I'm going to tolerate a poor UI it might as well work well with all my devices.

Out of curiosity I tried to find the podcast in question on the Spotify iPhone app. Literally 3 taps and I’ve found a full list of episodes.

I’ve also tried on my Mac, slightly more presses (four, to be exact) as I had to press ‘podcasts & shows’ to refine the search slightly more.

I don’t see how that’s hard to use. Each to their own though I guess, I’ve not seen how difficult it is your side so can’t really comment.

I don't care for the Spotify UI in general.

For podcasts, I think people who are big into podcasts are also particular about their player. I know I am. For me, there's space for a music app and a podcast app. They are both audio, but otherwise very different.

Heres my anecdote: the app randomly craps out when playing a podcast. Seeking randomly breaks, it is not as "fluid" as Youtube, really struggles when there is a break in data coverage which makes usage while driving a car a massive pain when you need to be focusing on the road. There are other random quibbles but this is the jist of my experience. I am so glad I can finally dump this garbage now that Rogan is coming back to youtube. I can find other sources for my music but Rogan's occasional good podcasts forced me to install this junk in the first place.

Its amazing how so many apps really struggle at the edges. For a company as big as Spotify they should do better. Its probably a side effect of their company's culture.

The biggest problem is not the difficulty of using, but the impossibility of using. The issue is not so much that features are difficult to find/access, but that the most basic of features don't exist anywhere at all.

I would like any company that makes anything "exclusive" to go out of business.

My most hated Spotify feature is the address confirmation of all your family members (family plan). I entered our new home address and it wasn’t even there. My parents are on the other side of the world, Spotify should understand that families are not residing always in the same area.

The plan is explicitly described as "Premium accounts for family members under one roof" on their website. https://www.spotify.com/us/family/

Spotify’s offline content was not been reliable for me. I am rarely offline, but recently I was taking a flight and my whole library was unavailable.

I was so annoyed that I actually cancelled my subscription.

I was on a Grand Canyon river trip and offline content decided to offline itself giving me no music for three weeks. That was annoying and made me cancel my subscription for a couple years. I tried Apple Music but I think Spotify does a better job making recommendations for me.

>Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy

By being able to compete with it on the price they pay artists. It's a uniquely powerful negotiating position for the publishers that a) won't last b) won't extend to TV/video

Spotify isn't a great example because barely anyone makes money with it. It only works because the musicians are exploited to the max. The reason this won't happen with film and TV is because of unionisation. Why not just buy discs? People keep repeating that discs are dying but so many releases are coming out there is way more than I can buy.

Yeah I know discs still exist for now, I'm talking about when they suddenly don't anymore. Hopefully that's far far into the future.

And as for Spotify exploiting artists, I don't know how accurate this[1] is, but if it is then it seems pretty fair to me? Maybe slightly on the lower end of what I had expected, but not that far off.

If you have a million monthly listeners (and today you have access to over 574M monthly active users[2] via Spotify) then you're making $5,000/month in static income, meaning you have zero hours of work and still have enough to live on (depending on the size of the band I guess).

The notion that artists (or movie stars for that matter) should be making 10x that or more is a little ridiculous if you ask me.

1: https://purecalculators.com/spotify-money-calculator

2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/367739/spotify-global-ma...

I don't think you have any idea how much work, luck, work, talent and work it takes to get to a million monthly listens.

"Zero hours of work" - I know artists get underestimated, but this is next level.

Btw, taking the very top .1% of earners in a field, like movie or pop stars, and using their returns to imply that musicians and actors are fairly compensated, is a very silly thing to do. Tbh, as someone who knows a lot of talented and struggling artists (and teachers and janitors and nurses etc), it's revolting.

If you want to give out about overcompensated people why not look at CEO's, like Daniel Ek (Spotify CEO) and his $3.8 BILLION net worth. That's about as clear a signal that there's exploitation happening that you could ever ask for.

1) "Exploitation" of artists has happened long before Spotify. Even the popular ones with music deals. So Spotify isn't making this better or worse.

2) Talent and success in music have never been tightly correlated. Marketing is what sells music, not just talent. Marketing requires a lot of money (And payola).

If anything Spotify levels this playing field a bit.

> 1) "Exploitation" of artists has happened long before Spotify. Even the popular ones with music deals. So Spotify isn't making this better or worse.

How exactly does the fact that artists have been exploited before mean that Spotify isn't making things worse?

> 2) Talent and success in music have never been tightly correlated.

That's not remotely true. And even pop stars lip syncing songs other people wrote are working very hard, and often exploited.

> Marketing is what sells music, not just talent.

Sure; like nearly everything else. And guess what - most of the artists on Spotify are doing their own marketing.

> If anything Spotify levels this playing field a bit.

"Artists can be paid as little as 13% of the income generated, receiving as little as £0.002 to about £0.0038 per stream on Spotify" [0]. That's not leveling the playing field, that's exploitation; and if you want to defend it I think you need to start bringing actual evidence instead of just spouting your own (deeply unpopular) opinion as fact.

0 - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/apr/10/music-streamin...

Totally agree with you CEOs are overcompensated. There should be a law regulating how much more a CEO can make over the lowest rung in the company, the problem is there are just so many workarounds to that (stock options, spinning off the actual workforce into a sub-entity, etc) that it would never work.

I do understand that a million monthly listeners is a large amount, sorry I was over-exaggerating a bit in my last comment. My point was that Spotify helps with discoverability through their playlist-generation, but I guess that doesn't automatically mean anything more than the odd play here and there, and not necessarily more "monthly active listeners".

I'd love if artists made more on Spotify than they do today, but isn't the big problem all the middle-men in the music industry? It's my understanding that companies like Spotify shorten this ladder at least a little bit, but thinking about it again I guess I agree that the pay is a little too low.

Continuing to list your existing music on Spotify does indeed require 0 hours of work.

> People keep repeating that discs are dying but so many releases are coming out there is way more than I can buy.

That’s the issue I think. I listened to music from ~1000 albums last year. At $10 a pop that’s $10k which is just not possible. Spotify is really the only way that listening like that is enabled.

> Why not just buy discs?

because they are bad for the environment.

Buy mp3s.

tell that to person buying cds, not me.

Are they worse than streaming? I don’t know the math, but it seems like constantly sending the same album over the network would use a lot of energy.

I was interested so I looked up some numbers: $0.3 per kwh in California * .005Gb mp3 (3m at 128kbps) mp3 * .06 kwh/Gb for internet traffic = .00009 dollars in energy to sling 1 song to your device. Heavy margin bands there for the traffic estimate especially, but Spotify probably has a 95%+ cache hit rate so I think they would struggle to come out worse than the physical disc.

It's funny that Spotify figured out how to do it long before most of these TV streaming services even existed, and they still manage to get it wrong.

Spotify's Android app had a nasty bug that would delete everything you'd downloaded to an external SD card on reboot. Worse than that, it would then automatically start downloading all that same content to the internal storage, without any regard as to how much free space there was there. If not noticed it would fill it all up and then crash.

Took them like 6 months to fix that.

> Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy.

I have a friend who’s indeed paying Spotify - but for connecting his account with some “illegal” software, from which he can then download MP3s (or FLACs) to share with his friends.

I would look into Kaleidescape if you want blu-ray quality viewing in your home with the convenience of streaming (although you have to download ahead of time). Only downside is the price and need for their proprietary player + server.

$9k ($4k player + $5k server) for a basic system is not a very "only" downside, and it seems kind of pathetic if you can't even access it from a regular desktop.

It's great that it exists, but I'm priced out.

Is it, though? Does _any_ of this need unique hardware?

I'm glad for you, but at least twice it happened to me that the songs on my phone ended up being unplayable after I enabled Airplane mode. (You just get the exclamation mark next to the supposedly downloaded tracks.)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯