[ALL PLATFORMS] Spotify Premium is a joke... why isn't Spotify doing anything about it?

[justinmusic17]

I've loved Spotify Free on the desktop for quite some time now, so I finally decided to purchase Spotify Premium.  Each day that goes by using it, I discover more nuances and hassles due to poor design and lack of features.  After searching through these forums, I've realized most of the issues have been reported and voted many times by the community for many YEARS now (I've seen threads all the way back to 2013!), and to this day, nothing has been resolved or even commented on.  It makes me believe Spotify is just out to get our money and doesn't care about their user's feedback.  

- Most of the threads that report the issues are responded with 'this thread doesn't have enough kudos, so we'll mark it as unavailable for now'.  The problem with that though is that they keep merging people's threads, but keeping the old threads open, so those kudos are not all in one thread but in many threads (as kudos are not locked in older threads)!  This makes the kudos counts look lower, but if you tallied up all the kudos in the various older threads it would equal up to thousands of kudos.

Here is a summary of the key issues that most Premium users are complaining about (which you can find many threads on):

1. You can't download individual songs in an album unless you add them to a Playlist or mark your entire Song catalog as 'Downloaded'.

2.  There is no option for 'Offline Mode' to be set automatically when you're not connected to Wi-Fi (you have to manually go into Settings each time and toggle it)

3.  Songs in your own playlists do not get added to 'Songs' catalog, you have to add them separately.  This is especially troublesome when you're trying to keep track of what songs you have downloaded offline.

4. The 'Shuffle' algorithm needs a complete revamp.  It's broken, and has been for many years.  They've tried to defend it, but the complaints keep rolling in.  It is ridiculous with the amount or repeated songs and especially by the same artists.

5.  The entire 'Offline Mode' needs a revamp and should essentially turn the app into a regular music player, hiding all the online features. Currently, we're bomboared with 'You're offline' pages, which makes the app look pathetic and cumbersom when on the road.

These are all such basic features/issues that can be easily implemented/fixed, yet they choose not to for years now.  The competition all has this already from the start, so it's mind-boggling why Spotify hasn't done anything yet. 

I really hope this thread comes to their attention and they at least give us all some hope, or at least comment on why nothing has been done all these years.

[Joe]

I generally agree with you and what's worse is that the focus seems to be on adding features rater than fixing certain issues. What's worse is that, when new features are added, often something else gets broken. After all these years, we should have a mature, stable app.

I'm just going to comment on the specific issues you raised.

1. You can get round this by saving a song (adding it to your library) then you can download it from one of the library views without adding it to a playlist.
2. That would be awesome.
3. This might be deliberate to avoid problems with current limits - only 10K songs can be in your library so not automatically adding playlist songs gives us a bit more headroom. If they removed the library limit, I would agree with you.
4. Yes, indications are that only the first 200 songs are shuffled.
5. Agreed and it's confusing new users who see the warning and don't even think to try going to their library.

I would add another point to your list. When changes are made to the way we interact with the app, please post something in the blog so we know. An example would be removing the ability to play nested playlist folders which was removed from android recently.

[justinmusic17]

Spotify is seriously getting ridiculous  Does anyone have any personal experience with other better services that actually cater to their paying customers and has these features?  August 2017 and still zero new major features.... in fact they made it even MORE annoying by adding an unnecessary and annoying 'Devices available' label to the bottom of the Now Playing screen that does nothing except show help topics.

[Joe]

I got a 3 month trial of Play so I'm giving it a spin. The UI is pretty basic but it works reliably. No connect and no PC app is a shame.