How Spotify builds products [pdf]

IMO, Spotify has some really large gaps in usability.

In general, there is no good concept of a music collection (despite the UI having words "Collection" and "Library" in it). While you don't own albums in Spotify, I still sorely miss that concept. Starring entire albums makes for a fairly useless/unwieldy Starred playlist, so that's a no go. I've resorted to starring single songs, then later selecting a song from the starred list and then switching to playing the whole album (if I starred the first track of the album, I have to select another album track, then back to first track, to make it play the album and not just continue on the Starred playlist).

Basically, where's my damn list of Artists and Albums I've liked? In iTunes (or mp3 folders back in the day), I would scan the list of artists and select an album to play.

No, I do not want to have an all songs/genre playlist and then sort by artist and then page thru pages of tracks.

The mobile app has poor information architecture. Going back to the starred playlist (or any other playlist) takes 6 taps if I'm on the info screen.

Oh, I freaking hate the mobile info screen. To me, it always feels awkward to hit the song name at the bottom to bring up the "now playing" screen, then tapping "i" to show the info screen, just to select the album or the artist of the song I'm listening to. As far as I can tell, the whole point of the "i" button is to allow me to see the album art--but, bizarrely, seeing album art is the default (so always requires an extra tap to do anything related to artist or album).

Basically, it's a damn tapfest. It's frustrating when you want to switch songs or do some navigation quickly--for example, while in the gym on an elliptical or while running.

Also, there is no search history and the app is forgetful. Periodically, at unknown intervals, the mobile app forgets the album/song I was playing, and I have to re-enter a long artist name all over again. Not to mention there is no fuzzy search. Yeah, try spelling "Irresistible Force" correctly, quickly.

There are the things that make Spotify merely a very convenient music discovery service, as opposed to a complete, fulfilling replacement to owning your own music library.

Finally, there is general bugs, like crashing and streaming getting stuck now and again, which can be very frustrating in the middle of an album (the next song streams, this song is stuck).

On my machines, the 'Spotify' launcher in the app menu is actually a shell script that first pkills the running-but-hung spotify-desktop process...

For me it usually takes two or three attempts for it to realise that it is online ( 'Discover is not available offline' ) and then occasionally it ceases to respond to UI input but keeps playing music.

Another favourite is to load a band's page with their name but no tracks.

But I keep paying them because when the service works it is excellent. It's just infuriating that it takes 10 minutes from making a decision to actually playing music, due to their buggy app.

Absolutely agree with OP, Spotify has a serious problem in product quality. Few examples:

* Totally inconsistent design - I think they are now rolling out a complete redesign to address this

* The current website was absolutely clueless of states when first released (i.e. showing signup buttons for logged in users)

* HTML views in the app shows/loads incorrect data

...and the list goes on. I started using Spotify when it was still invite-only in Northern Europe and converted into paying customer when the Android app came out (2009 fall I think?) but switched to Rdio recently due to all the problems with the service. The underlying streaming tech is rock solid but everything else seemed to go down hill release after a release.

Discover is absolutely useful, but I think Pandora is light years ahead. Is there no way to play the suggestions as a playlist?

* iPhone app gives way too little feedback when it becomes unresponsive. I'm never sure if I should click again, wait, try another song etc. Why not add some "gathering data, please wait..", "Low bandwidth/reception.." or similar

* iPhone audio cues are hard to differentiate between. Why not make them less similar? When I click the headphone button I'm not sure if that sound meant that I paused, or skipped to the next song. It's like trying to learn morse code

* iPad interface. I don't have anything constructive to say about this, but it's just confusing and hard to use for me, and inconsistent with the iPhone.

I would also add that, sadly, rdio has not kept up with Spotify's library. It also seems built less around the user's interest and more to get new music in front of people. Probably great for the artist's reps, but when Drake and 7 Days of Funk shows up under Heavy Rotation and I've never listened to anything resembling either, they've already failed.

And while I applaud their attempts at a native wrapper around HTML5, you can hardly claim that Rdio has "nailed it" with regards to their native app. It's a whole different product.

I find the Spotify Android app to be a pain. I just opened it and it took literally around 15 seconds to show my playlists. I kind of have a good amount of playlists, but that is basically the only way I've found to keep track of things I want to listen to with the exception of starring (so yay for having an unholy mess of playlists for which there doesn't to be anything like filtering or what have you for actually dealing with a large amount of playlists manageable). And there is no obvious way of having different playlists for mobile and Desktop/browser, although I only want some playlists for mobile so that I can use them offline. Some times it also takes literally 30 seconds to load a playlist that I've selected, and up to 12 seconds from starting a song until it actually plays. There is also no way for me to turn off 3G streaming SPECIFICALLY, so it's either offline mode or I have to be careful not to play a playlist with some offline tracks if I happen to not get WiFi unexpectedly for some reason (and WiFi goes out unexpectedly and without warning because wireless is volatile like that, plus no app ever will tell you that you have no WiFi specifically, it will just say "No Internet"). Also a lot of nuisance with Spotify claiming that I'm "offline" when I know that I clearly am not, though that has gotten a lot better. Desktop Spotify is totally fine, though. But right now I'm really craving going back to a 16 GB iPod Nano when it comes to listening to music wherever I want. Downloading and "undownloading" and the clusterfuck of playlists is just a big hassle for something that is supposed to be a lot more convenient than an mp3 player.

They also used to have a horrific splash webpage with autoplay IIRC, but thankfully they seem to have changed that.

Maybe there is some obvious way to fix all of this such as by reinstalling the Android app (did that about half a year ago I guess) or googling (though I've been mostly dissapointed when googling issues, ending up at the Spotify communit/support forum and basically finding out "yeah that's not possible/you have to do this tedious work-around"), but I mostly wrote this because I saw the opportunity to vent, so...

EDIT: Also, when I first wanted to use the browser version, the actual webpage/URL for the player was so hard to find it was almost as if they tried to make it a secret on purpose. But I'm happy that there even is a browser player in addition to the desktop app. And the Linux version of the Desktop app is very good (on Ubuntu at least) so I don't need to use Wine.

thanks!