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Comment by NothingAboutAny | Hacker News Reader

It truly has been one of the worst UX experiences and poorly made apps that ever made it to mainstream. I remember a decade or so ago there being a bunch of buzz about them in software dev because they were a microservice node.js/react stack or something with each UI element or portion of back-end having a separate dev team. I can vividly remember thinking "oh that's probably why when I change song sometimes the album art doesn't update." they're living proof your product doesn't even need to be that good you just need to be first to market and not really piss anyone off.

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I worked for a startup in 2019 which was really pushing the "Spotify model" of team structure. Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership. The fact the technology output of the Spotify model - the Spotify app - seemed to be kind of crap didn't seem to matter. I think the main output of the Spotify team structure was blog posts promoting the Spotify team structure.

> Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership.

Gross over-simplification. For anyone curious they have videos out there, though they are 10+ years old now so may no longer be accurate, but in 2019-era this was still a thing (company I worked for did it too).[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvfz4HGtoPc

This video was created in 2014 and was more a description of what they strived for at that point rather than of the full messy reality. Spotify quickly after that grew larger than those ideas would sustain (without changes) and rapidly became more alike any other tech corpo. Certainly around 2019-2020 it was not like in the video by any means. Some structures or names of concepts stayed way longer than the actual practices as described.

(I was active as a coach in Stockholm around this period and know multiple people, both engineers and coaches, who worked at Spotify including Henrik the author of the video.)

The Spotify model is basically just Amazon’s team-owned KPIs and independence, put into a UI so you can really see how much their app is conways law.

This is why all the sections of Amazon.com are barely coherent. AWS does this too but it’s more naturally split and text works better than stateful rich media.

> so you can really see how much their app is conways law

The headache of using the shared playlist "Jam" feature and trying to add a song without playing it directly. There is like a separate queue system for "Jam" and things work differently.

Right now, if you have video clips in Spotify enabled, your lockscreen controls will display 'Artist' - 'Song' - 'Video Available', instead of 'Album Name'. If you disable video all together, it just leaves that area blank instead of displaying the album title.

This has been a thing / issue since 2025. It's pretty clear the video team probably put that in to bump video interactions, then the whole team got put on something else and now this problem is blackholed. The most bizarre to me is: even Spotify's top managers must use their own product when they helicopter to home, right? So they would see this too.

Where is a Jobsian anger for user experience when it is needed. Although in that respect even Apple is in the gutter these days.

Totally agree. They also have some stickiness going for them (at least for me). Now that I've organized my music in Spotify and have my habits in place that deal with the crummy UX, I've gotten numb to the poor UX.

Case in point, I make a daily playlist for running and that UX is frequently changing and often for the worse, but I deal with it because it's a habit that costs me a few seconds maybe a minute per day. The cost of switching to a new thing just feels daunting so I stay.

I also am guilty of enjoying the wrapped summaries at the end of the year :)

We used to have a folder full of MP3 files and call that a playlist. Lightweight, works offline, and never changes without your consent.

I'm going back. Storage on phones is so big now. You can have all your music local.

I carry my entire music library on my phone in Opus format. Smaller than a similar quality MP3 and good enough for the times I’m likely listening offline (working out, riding transit, on a plane).

Good point. Regrettably, newer phones have eliminated external SD cards. I preferred upgrading my phone storage on demand and having external card for stuff like MP3s and videos and manually doing large data transfers directly on my computer.

I definitely enjoy Wrapped. But also something that keeps me in Spotify is the social aspect. If I want to make a playlist for someone, 95% of people I know use Spotify, so I need to have Spotify.

Yeah this is a good point. They also have a feature that lets you build and mix playlists together with others, not my personal speed but adds to the stickiness.

yes, that + jams are important to me socially

I also enjoyed wrapped, but at some point they made it only viewable in the app. It was previously available in the browser. That was the last time I thought about it.

Yeah last I knew the Spotify desktop app loads many dependencies in triplicate or more because each pane is its own independent iframe universe, all so the engineering teams don’t need to talk to each other and they can A/B test incessantly. Inefficient madness.

Spotify definitely has a better claim for "mainstream", but Epic's store/game-app takes the cake for me. Stunningly slow and bad.

> your product doesn't even need to be that good you just need to be first to market and not really piss anyone off.

The product is more than the tech stack

> each UI element or portion of back-end having a separate dev team

Really takes shipping your org chart to another level

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