Spotify Introduces Video Clips, Podcasts, and Activity-Based Playlists | Hacker News Reader

Spotify Introduces Video Clips, Podcasts, and Activity-Based Playlists

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60 pointsareski31 comments

I feel like Spotify is regressing in terms of music discovery and usefulness in general. It's still nice to be able to stream (almost) any album but the radio and shuffle have _always_ been terrible and the removal of useful music discovery (which is also terrible on Spotify...Rdio & LastFM both destroy Spotify in this realm) applications in a recent past updates only made it worse. Now, they are adding these 'features' that have little to do with music and more to do with marketing and corporate relationships.

I'll most likely continue to be a subscriber because as I mentioned the ability to stream (almost) any album is great but it would be nice to see some progress related to music or music discovery rather than these gimmicks. Stop trying to be a universal storefront for everyone's media consumption (video clips from ABC, who wants that in a music app) and do one thing right...

In the meantime, I'll continue to subsidize Spotify with useful music discovery services (and self made hacks) and just use Spotify as my "I know exactly what album I want to hear and don't need shuffle" music application.

I feel the opposite. I subscribe to Spotify specifically for music discovery in the form of listening to playlists other people (not algorithms) created. IMO these tend to be much better than anything I've seen a computer come up with.

I'm also pretty excited about podcasts and news. Podcasts, because it may eliminate another app on my Phone that I always felt Spotify should have been able to do all along. News is exciting because I really don't know any other way to stream on-demand audio news into my phone (and car). Maybe there is already an app for that? I looked around lightly and never found anything.

I feel the direction they are taking isn't 100% music albums, but more the audio-everything on the go. I listen to Spotify 99% of the time on my commute, and love the focus on audio-only.

>News is exciting because I really don't know any other way to stream on-demand audio news into my phone (and car). Maybe there is already an app for that? I looked around lightly and never found anything.

I agree with pretty much everything you said, but thought I'd point out NPR One is great for this purpose: http://www.npr.org/about/products/npr-one/

Spotify itself also has some frequently-updated curated playlists for most genres that are great for discovery.

Mmm... I feel discovery has improved tremendously over the past six months or so. Actually quite impressed with the obscure connections they manage to make these days. LastFM used to be awesome, but nowadays the recommendations are just running around in circles.

Other than that, Spotify has always been pretty useless for anything but having a large collection of music on tap. Any remaining usefulness died when they killed the apps.

Soundrop was the best music discovery service I've used in my life, and it shut down as a result of Spotify killing their app platform. Still searching for something even close to comparable.

I'd be really interested to hear what services you use to 'subsidize' Spotify discovery with? Email in my profile if you feel like taking it off HN :)

Great to hear there's something shiny for the developers to work on, but as a paying user, there are some massive regressions they have introduced and apparently won't fix. Their twitter customer service is particularly glib.

Want to find a track in your a playlist? Or go to an artist page and find a track within that? They removed the filter functionality ages ago and are very opaque about communicating updates.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Desktop-Bring-ba...

By co-incidence, it looks like they announced something on this ticket today. But it doesn't excuse their past attitude.

Finally, at least they listened. The decision to take out searching within a playlist baffled me (or I guess it was more of a oops we forgot it).

No, I think they implemented a whole new view, probably more extensible, to allow future features (IIRC the look changed a bit). They just didn't prioritise fixing the regressions they introduced.

and oddly, it's existed in the iOS app forever. The desktop client is a second-class citizen, unfortunately.

One of the consequences to the minor interface overhaul they pushed in the recent months was the inability to search through your local media indexed in Spotify.

Surprise this article makes no mention of the elephant in the room, namely Apple's imminent "Spotify killer" (http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-beats-spotify-killer-wh...). Spotify have evidently concluded that they need to be more like iTunes, which is unfortunate.

Apple isn't going to kill anyone with a paying product that apparently doesn't provide any extra value over Spotify's free tier that they have to go to antitrust investigation worthy lengths to try and pressure labels to kill it for them.

Apple is not going to kill anything unless they suddenly learned how to make competent software for non-Apple devices.

They've been hiring Android developers recently to work on the Beats music app, which is likely to become the Apple streaming service, so there's a good chance it'll be on Android too. No idea whether it'll be any good, of course.

I suspect the main thing that will limit Apple's streaming service is availability: iTunes Radio is only available in the US and Australia. I think they're being punished a bit by the record labels, after Apple took over the digital downloads market, much to their displeasure.

That said, if Apple's streaming service comes to the UK, I know I'll drop Spotify in a heartbeat. I couldn't be more disloyal to Spotify: I only use them because they're the only service with the exact combination of features I need (besides Rdio, who I don't use because their desktop app is - incredibly - even worse than Spotify's).

Their words, not mine. And Apple doesn't have to kill Spotify: it's important to remember though that Spotify exists basically at the pleasure of the music industry at this point. By all accounts they aren't contributing a lot to the bottom line, and I have always gotten the sense that record execs are just viscerally uneasy with Spotify's freemium model--they want to move towards a world where people become (re-)accustomed to paying more, not less, for music. How this all shakes out with Apple is anyone's guess but if there is one value which Apple certainly does not espouse, it's "free". I think record execs are way happier to be in bed with that sort of company in the long term.

This is Spotify trying to differentiate themselves from other music streaming services ahead of Apple's announcement, I think.

As it stands now, most music services are basically at feature parity with each other: Spotify, Rdio, Slacker, etc. They all offer listening to whatever album or song you want on-demand for a price, as well as algorithmically-generated radio stations based on artists or whatever for free.

The only thing any of them can compete on anymore is how well their app works and how they can exploit their given niche (on-demand for Spotify and Rdio, curated radio for Slacker, market share for Pandora).

It's hard to care about anything new they are adding when their existing software is so inadequate. I mean, I love the desktop client. But Linux has no desktop client so km forced to use the web client. The web client is months if not years behind the desktop client. It is missing folders, drag and drop just to name a few. The web experience is just so awful compared to the desktop. I wish they would focus on what they have deployed instead of half baking this crap. /rant

But as a subscriber, I do still really love the desktop client when I have the option to be on a Mac or PC.

There is a Linux client and there has been one since I remember. They even have a proper .deb repo.

https://www.spotify.com/en/download/previews/

Sadly practically unusable on high DPI screens

They do have a desktop client, however it has a well incompatibility with newer versions of libgcrypt on recent debian/ubuntu. They don't seem to care about fixing it.

Plus, the desktop apps, on my laptop, spawns like 7 SpotifyHelper process that take hundreds of mb of ram, which out of 2gb is pretty significant.

Still better than the flash-based web app which doesn't even play without cutting out.

The web-one wins for me since my ad-blocker stops the loud ads.

How about they bring back third party apps?

For the life of me I don't understand why they removed 3rd party apps. I used Classify, SoundDrop, SongKick and others all the time, they were so useful.

I understand that they wanted people to use their Web API and SDK, but it was so nice and convenient to have them embedded inside of the Spotify desktop client.

The running feature is interesting. It detects how fast you are running and delivers songs that match your pace.

I'm excited for this. Discovery is an area that can definitely stand some more work.

Did anybody find out how podcasts are integrated into Spotify? What interests me is if there will be a dynamic playlist of unlistened episodes. This would be great, as I don't know any good podcast applications for Windows.

EDIT: Spelling.

It isn't quite a Windows application, but PocketCasts' web app works well for me (and syncs with my phone): https://play.pocketcasts.com

I've not yet been able to find: Anyone know if they're hosting the podcasts (or even caching them) or are they just streaming them as any other podcasting app?

Will this break the already minimal podcast statistic tracking?

> For example, in the morning, a user might see playlists like “Wake Up Happy” or “Sunrise Run”

I don't know what the Hell names like that are supposed to tell me. I guess there is some specific kind of music associated with 'wake up happy' and 'sunrise run'...

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