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Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

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nojvek

Oh man. With Spotify bundling music and podcasts in one mingled experience, it drives me mad.

And their Spotify DJ crap and random banners. Spotify 5 years ago with minimal interface and just music was great.

They have ruined the experience for me now. Same with Apple Music and Google Play. So much jank.

Most apps ruin their initial allure by doing too much. Having too many hands in the kitchen.

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The recent Psychic thing in the Spotify app was just bananas. To think they claim they can’t afford to pay artists properly yet pay PMs huge salaries to come up with crap like that.

I’d guess that paying pm a few hundred thousand compared to increasing royalties by a single penny would pale in insignificance

Of course. My point is that the app was “complete” a long time along yet they add more and more unnecessary features.

i disagree. Some of the new features are welcome imo. for ex: daylist and now searches can find songs by lyrics

Searching is a core experience I agree. So is being able to organize/discover music.

There is still so much crap that isn’t core to the music experience.

It's a conundrum, because stagnation is also not good. Shareholders expect results.

It is. The major music streaming players all have pretty much "everything" except niche stuff. (Spotify tried to differentiate with podcasts but it's probably fair to say that was fairly unsuccessful--or even a net negative for some.) And how much can you twiddle with the interface in ways that don't, on net, piss off at least some of your user base? And I would guess that pretty much everyone who is in the addressable market for music streaming at current market rates that are maybe breakeven with a tailwind already have it. (Which probably not coincidentally are in the ballpark of what people paid for music pre-streaming.)

For apotify it's not even share holders anymore. They need to figure out how to survive at all. It's either flail their arms in a desperate attempt or just give in like jack on the titanic.

Most of these services have an API of some sort. I wonder if they are complete enough to build a client app good enough that people would pay for?

I subscribe to Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, Sirius, and get Amazon Music (via Prime). I think a great client could eliminate one or two of those subscriptions.

Last I checked, I believe using the Spotify API for a player (or, explicitly called out, a music quiz app) is against their terms

I’ve been down this path, all of the APIs specifically restrict monetization of apps that interface with their API, except under very specific circumstances.

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