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Better Playlist Organisation; Navigation. Stop Removing Features and Add Some Instead

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Better Playlist Organisation; Navigation. Stop Removing Features and Add Some Instead

This isn't necessarily about a specific feature. Rather multiple. Or rather, the fact that multiple features on Spotify have been removed, with no substitute put in its place. A few examples:

 

- Android: Being able to swipe up while at the top of a playlist, and instantly search for a song inside the playlist (apparently this is added back after a long, long time. Haven't checked yet though)

- (Discovered only yesterday) Desktop computer: Search for a song on your existing playlist. Click on it. Once you clear the search bar, you are instantly taken to where that song is on your playlist.

 

Those two ideas aren't really why I'm here though. They're actually just two examples of practical, useful features that Spotify has removed. And I'm feeling very frustrated because I haven't seen any practical, useful features in its place. Or any added here at all, in a long time.

 

My idea: Stop removing good features like these, start adding more features. Especially for us music nerds. I see (countlessly) more suggestions to add them back than from people asking to remove them, so why were they removed in the first place?

 

It feels like every time I come to the Spotify Community, it's because something has suddenly stopped working in Spotify. I Google how to do it or why it isn't working, and I end up landing on an idea post saying "Please add this back!!! We miss it!". I find out Spotify has removed the feature, and the response is always "Hey! If it gets enough votes, maybe we will add it back!". I find out the feature has been removed, and then have a carrot dangled in front saying "We might add it back!".

 

Sick. Of. This. Sorry, who exactly suggested it be removed in the first place? Why are we voting to get things BACK. This should be about adding new things and enhancing music: the listening experience, discovering music, curating and organising music and sharing music.

 

I am really tired of how stripped down and basic Spotify has become. This is for music streaming - well we've got that and have had that since Spotify has been a thing. Everything else has pretty much been here too, yet gradually been removed.

At the very least, if you had far more encouragement towards the development side - encourage and promote third parties to create their own "Spotify apps/plugins/extensions", at least whenever you removed features there is still a community and tool to cater for the complete music nerds.

 

I don't care about streamlined. I don't care about a "Sleek clean UI" if it is going to be a featureless app. This is just "Search song, play song, save song" at this point. The *only* redeeming thing is the discovery side; finding new music which I know is a big part of Spotify's mission anyway. That said, I want something fun! A tab that gives you an in depth history of what you've listened to. Top artists, genres, listened to. Something akin to Last.fm in some senses, but integrated with Spotify.

 

I want better organisation of my playlists. I want to open a single playlist into two windows, which would let me move songs around in a playlist way faster. To be able to search for a song, click on it and arrive on it like I used to (before it was removed).

 

And if you can't do this, I'd love far more growth for the Spotify API. If casual listeners don't care about this stuff, at least give others the option. I'd love visual effects that react to the music. An equaliser to boost the bass and treble; cut some of the mids... Give my songs some EQ if I want to; even if I don't need to. Just make this interesting 🙄

 

I would love to know what Spotify's vision is; why you're removing things and where exactly you're trying to take your company. I love streaming music, but I also want to be able to control how I organise it or interact with it. You have so much user data on hands - put it to use for the end user and get creative.

 

This is also not a duplicate idea. This is a reflection of the overall experience of Spotify. The question is not about the removal of a specific feature, rather the fact Spotify is consistently doing this and "dumbing down" the program. I would love to hear Spotify's stance on why they are removing so many practical features; particularly around search tools, playlist customisation and making access to commonly used options and settings more difficult. Also why adding things is difficult; whether that's expense, labour, time, maintenance etc.

 

Cheers

 

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Additional tags included:

 

Spotify no longer visible, can't find, find song on playlist, organise music, music listening statistics, music listening history, spotify api, spotify removed feature, spotify can't find, spotify api, spotify user data, spotify last fm, spotify ui, spotify ue, spotify user experience, spotify user interface, spotify android, spotify analytics,

Musician, and lover of music.
5 Replies

This.

 

I would like to add that Spotify should hire/rehire good usability professionals. There should at the very least exist use cases to guide development, which would limit the damage being done by removing functionality or implement it poorly.


Case in point: In the newly released Wear-version, playing offline files is available. Very nice indeed!
But: There is no way to freely select what content to download to the Wear device. Actually, it's even worse - you can listen to an album on Spotify Wear, but there is no way to select to download that same album for offline usage... You can only select from various automated lists - not your own, carefullly curated lists.

 

Or: remember the removal of the play widget in the Android version a few years back?

 

Another thing: If I am a paying customer - why should the content that I have curated for myself and that of my friends, always be put in the most faraway location in the GUI? Why put podcasts at the top, when I am not even listening to podcasts in Spotify (there are several podcast apps that are about 10 years ahead of Spotify in that regard).

I could go on, but my critique is best summarized in: Read the article above, listen to your users, get back to what was the reason for your existence in the first place. Thanks.

Funny, I was just rereading this piece when I saw your reply.

 

Thanks for adding more to the conversation. I know it's a bit of a rant, but I really wanted to create a discussion. Because this isn't about one idea after the next; rather it's about the general trend and theme of features being removed/changed, flipped from here to there etc.... Yet there isn't any meaningful addition.

 

When I first joined Spotify in 2014, my playlists felt so special... As in, I had chosen all these songs and I can play them whenever I want! My oldest playlist has 90 hours of music... At that point you definitely want to organise it a bit, and Spotify's UI makes it incredibly difficult. The best tool was called Skiley, which got everything in somewhat reasonable order, but still not quite ideal.

 

Being able to do this sort of thing in Spotify would make it easier, and frankly from a development standpoint it isn't *too* complex. Not for a company of this scale, anyway.

 

Just keep the features and build on from there. Slowly and subtly reorganise things as new features are added, but please; please don't spend time just moving the same features from here to there, or basically giving Spotify these "facelifts".

Musician, and lover of music.

I agree and recognize where you come from, I believe.

I have been using Spotify since its beginning and am a bit saddened by the lack of focus.

 

I just want them to remember that: If you don't get user loyalty - you might get resentment, which would make it that much easier for your users to change to something else. We're in it for the music, remember?

I think if we could create custom EQs and add them to a song or songs, save EQs to add them to songs quickly, etc, would be a really awesome idea. Because I find that with certain songs I might need to mess with my APO EQ a little bit in order to get the sound I want, and I would be able to add a custom EQ for a song on Spotify would be awesome. Also, the ability to make a saved EQ layout so you can add them to songs quickly would also be nice and having a folder system for EQs as well. 

Totally agree and likewise very frustrated. I'm also wondering what is "the vision" of Spotify. E.g. I wish that someone from Spotify could explain how and why they think that the current "remove current song from playlist" experience is still not streamlined after all those years?

For a top / highly visible company they're making just mediocre software and apps. And there is no sign that it is getting better any time soon.

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