Spotify just hit 300M Premium subscribers | Hacker News Reader

Spotify just hit 300M Premium subscribers

engadget.com

14 pointsksec18 comments

Spotify is one piece of software (out of many) that, in my experience, has degraded substantially in performance and usability over the last 2 years. It's gone from something I loved using to something I dread

A lot has shared the same experience you described. Myself included.

Time to switch? I went from spotify to tidal and am very happy. This script basically ported everything for me for free. https://github.com/spotify2tidal/spotify_to_tidal

I switched to Apple Music and haven't looked back. The UX isn't great, but the audio quality alone was worth the switch for me. It also actually shuffles your music instead of cycling through the same small subset of songs.

I use Apple Music too. I recently noticed it randomly playing videos, though. I can't hide the overlay despite the checkbox being unchecked for "keep video playback on top of all other windows". Apparently the only way to disable it is via Screen Time, by which you disable video as a content entirely. So weird.

I was talking to some coworkers in another room, came back to my desk and a song by Lotta and Doja Cat was playing and the video was like 3/4 of my screen. It was pretty NSFW. No idea why it played a video without me explicitly pressing play on it.

Long story short, Apple Music generally does the trick but stuff like this kind of kills me. Coworkers probably think I'm a pervert. Song wasn't great either.

I've thought about alternatives but I pay for Apple One and really don't want another subscription.

Haven't had anything like that happen but can see the frustration... I think my biggest complaint is their CarPlay app. It's wicked buggy.

Has Spotify improved since 10 years ago? I know it has podcasts now, but... I don't know, it feels like it has only shifted uncomfortable for the longest time, and it worked as well as it needed to quite a long time ago. Whenever I revisit it, I have the sense that it didn't need to change, or shouldn't have.

I also have the sense that I'm not their target customer too, though. Maybe a lot of people here love what they're doing. They did reach 300MM premium subscribers, after all.

I sincerely don't know how people prefer Spotify over Youtube Music, really, I have used both and Spotify is worse in every aspect specially in UX, absolute dogshit usability. I have tried it mutiple times over the years hoping that maybe just maybe they realize, I still remember when I went from Winamp to Grooveshark and when they killed it my first option was Spotify and was amazed at how much effort the design guys put in making the app pure crap. After a few months using it Google decided to gift me 3 months of Google Play Music and never went back, it's day and night.

> I sincerely don't know how people prefer Spotify over Youtube Music

YouTube Music doesn't have desktop apps, so that makes it a no-go for me. (I don't use Chrome, and have no interest in trying to pin a Firefox PWA for YouTube to my desktop to play music.)

You mean official apps, because there are multiple unofficial desktop apps (I used Windows and Linux variants even), I've been using them since forever, I truly can't recall when was the last time I used the web.

https://ytmdesktop.app/

The growth rate is surprising to me. Anecdotally, I know at least 5 families who have canceled the service and are outspoken in their distaste (even if many just jumped to equally dubious all-you-can-stream offerings). For most folks, it seemed the AI slop made the service objectively worse just as subscription costs increased.

I've been a subscriber basically ever since it launched in the US and haven't noticed any discernible difference in the service in that entire time. What has turned people off? I haven't noticed any AI features at all to be honest. Then again I only use it for music, not podcasts nor audiobooks.

same. long time user, haven't really noticed any major changes

I am on the paid plan since mid-2015 and nowadays I regularly get ads for concerts in the UI.

The ads cannot be disabled and there is no amount I can pay to stop them.

I even wrote to support, only to get a sloppy reply telling me no: because premium will always only have "an ad-free listening experience".

Podcasts are shoved in your face everywhere, and their official playlists have been flooded with AI music.

Recommendations have gotten noticeably worse since the glory days of Discover Weekly. It's possible that my tastes have just stagnated in my mid-30s*, but I just found myself listening to ~40 essential artists, so I decided to just buy once on Bandcamp, knowing that the music creators are getting a larger cut than Spotify would ever give them.

Also, I can only give a thumbs down to Paul Simon's Call Me Al so many times. It's not a terrible song, but the way it snuck into every goddamn radio station I request became comical.

*Although algorithm discovery stopped appealing to me, I actually replaced Spotify with Radio Paradise and soma.fm and have been enjoying these public stations a lot more. I'm just a boring dad who now prefers carefully-curated for everyone over automatically-created for me

I had to subscribe to keep my developer account working for Bongo.to so that's one of them!

Spotify algorithm has gotten so bad. I just use Youtube Music and it just works(tm).

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