Interesting, I felt foolish about an hour after having written this post, realizing that in most scenarios, it really shouldn't ever be any amount of effort minus half a second of planning and felt foolish for writing off unicode. (Normally I go the other route, unicode all the things).

I suppose I feel that I was probably right to call myself arrogant then, to find out what you noted about Spotify's creators/creation. Interesting, thanks for the perspective check