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Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

It’s a music player that regularly cannot play music. I don’t understand how you get that wrong for so long.

Because you keep using it. What incentive do they have to change?

I ran sound at a friend's wedding recently and unfortunately the music was all on Spotify. Every time I tried to play a specific song from a playlist, "Spotify can't play this item right now" and it would skip to the next one (or the one after that). I ended up having to yt-dlp all the timeline-specific songs.

Probably due to business/commercial licensing, I'm sure they have separate account for playing music in a public space

But how would the App be deciding that? Listening for large crowds? Listening for it's own output from high output speakers?

Spotify will keep the entry in a playlist even after they lose the rights to a song, or worse, keep the rights under a different internal database entry. That's how you get songs that they "Can't play right now", which is a horseshit error message for "Spotify doesn't have this song anymore" but they don't want you to recognize just how much their catalog is constantly rotting and rotating.

They’re profitable and customers keep paying. Incentives->Outcomes.

I canceled my subscription and moved to Apple Music

> Spotify has 777 million monthly active users worldwide, which includes 300 million paying subscribers.

> Generates approximately €4.8 billion ($5.5 billion) in revenue, representing a 14% year-over-year increase, alongside a record gross margin of 33.4%

Oh, I know they are doing fine without me. lol

But if you don’t like what they are doing, vote with your wallet. In this case, there actually are choices, which is nice.

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