I'm reading these comments and I'm thinking "are we using the same Spotify?" I don't see any AI music, I don't get Podcasts pushed on me, the UI is fine, playlists are fine and I get new music I like suggested to me often.
Spotify is awful for me, I concur with the original article. YouTube Music is heading slowly the same way. At this rate I'll have to cast around for another phone that can take an SD card again.
The service I really miss is eMusic, they had little in the way of well known music so leaned into small label music and it was wonderful.
- A section with 8 of my recently played playlists
- A section of "Made for <my name>" with 6 Daily Mixes (which I generally like), Discover weekly (which I like now that it's tailored to me: I used to hate that it only contained pop/hip hop hits), Release Radar (love it), and the AI DJ (which I find very annoying)
- A section called Recently Played which looks like all legitimate things I've played
- "New Releases for You", which are all by artists I've listened to very recently
- "Jump back in", which has several playlists and artists I've listened to recently
- A sidebar of all of my playlists I've created or followed
Of the ~50 actionable items on the page, the only one I dislike is the AI DJ, but it by no means feels forced on me since it's just a single square.
The last time I used Spotify (and the reason I left) podcast were constantly featured on the start page and it was impossible to remove them (and I have zero interest in podcast in my music application).
There's one prolific ai musician producing logo beats (boring) and psychedelic ambient (pretty much random drones) that I just can't shake from my playlists as they release lots of stuff under several different names.