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Comment by j-r-d | Hacker News Reader

Because companies were already paying for it. Where I work now moved to Teams and they openly said it's not as good as Zoom, but we need to move because we're already paying for Office and so it doesn't make financial sense to pay for an additional duplicate service.

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That seems to be the reason for a lot of services. Amazon/YouTube/Apple/etc. Music don't need to be better than Spotify, but just good enough that someone won't pay for a competitor. This limits the competitors potential revenue and helps keep them from growing into stronger competition.

Plus, you use your market incumbency to stifle competition in other ways (e.g., putting advertisements for Apple Music in settings).

Also you can just wear your customers down over time apparently. I wish I could make Apple Music's subscription nag screen go away for example, I have local music I sync to it iPod-style for when I'm travelling through areas with poor data reception and every single time I open the app it whinges at me that I'm not subscribed.

What will it take to make these companies realise I'm perfectly happy with my current music streaming service and I don't want theirs regardless of the price it's offered at? I find it very disrespectful as a user when software can't take 'no' for an answer; my 'no' isn't 'maybe if you wear me down with enough nag screens' it means 'no I'm not interested please go away'.

Unfortunately because you're not a customer, they'll never stop.

Often times they won't stop even if you are a customer as in the case of Microsoft insisting that I backup all my files to their OneDrive that came bundled with Office. I get constant nag notifications to "finish setting up backup" even though I have alternative backup solutions and only want to use OneDrive as an offsite storage, not as a sync system.

I would love to tell the software to "never bug me again", but instead we only have options of "Yes!" and "Not now, please bother me again".

Oh, Apple is way more forceful than that. I keep finding myself in the situation where I pause YouTube on my headphones, speak for a while with someone, click to unpause and instead of resuming on YouTube that starts Apple Music playing the same U2 album. I'm still refusing to set that damn thing up, much less have it be the default recipient of the play button.

macOS I assume? I use a little app called noTunes (it's on github) to prevent that from happening.

edit: should be this one: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

iPhone

To be fair, this is mostly due to Youtube and their very strict "no video playback when the app isn't open" policies. If you were using any other app, anything from Spotify to really niche audiobook apps, you wouldn't have that problem.

I’m paying for this and use YouTube almost exclusively when the app isn’t open.

>>> need to be better than Spotify

I think you meant to say not WORSE than Spotify.

The product has gone to hell, they need to fire all the product managers. I don't know how you fuck up a music UI this badly but...

Hi. I use Spotify in a web browser (at the office), on Linux (at home), and Android (mobile). To me, the Spotify UI has barely changed in 3 years.

You wrote:

    > The product has gone to hell

Can you provide some specifics? To be clear, I am not defending Spotify. One big thing that is lacking: They need a plug-in system like modern web browsers. This will allow them to offload a lot of the UI innovation to tech savvy users. At the moment, only Spotify can make changes to the UI.

Right

Open a random play list, start playing a track.

Close the client, try to get back to the track you paying right now... Pick a big list will it get you back to the track. There used to be a few ways to do this, now there is one (and it's ugly).

Is there a rhyme or reason to show or not show the tracks of an artist that I have liked/followed? Is that display consistent?

Why are we mixing liked artists and liked playlists now. Why is "like" some global list. Albums, songs, Artists are not the same thing. Globing these preferences together is like telling the waiter you like ice cream when he asks for your drink order, at breakfast on a Tuesday.

Why do I have to click into an album to find the publish date of a track? They have this whole right panel now with half assed track info and nothing useful.

The UI needs burned to the ground and an adult, who likes music needs to tell them what they need to show...

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