Hi! I'd like to leave some feedback on the new Spotify (Premium) Update for Desktop: I'd first like to say I don't particularly care for this update as a whole. The desktop version of Spotify always had a clean, concise, and smart feel to it that I feel has been replaced with a new, bulkier, and harder-to-navigate update. Some of the biggest features to me that have been changed have been the looks of the: Artist's Page, Podcasts (a HUGE one), and general navigation within your library. To leave this feedback, I want to focus on emphasizing these points. Artist's Page. For starters, I feel like the artist's page had one of the more minor, "nit-picky", changes that I just don't care for. The entire update is focused on making everything bigger, especially in font size, and therefore it takes up more of the screen in a way I personally just do not care for. The artist's page starts this trend by eliminating the side-by-side look it had previously, whereas some of the artist's information would be next to their top songs, and instead replaces it by just having their top songs in this bigger, bulkier feel. While this change is minor, it makes it harder for new users and old users alike to discover more from the artist. It formats all this information, their discography, their information, etc, into a list-like format that feels too "mobile smartphone" to me. I understand the consensus of the update, in a way to make the Spotify program feel more universal on all the different platforms, but simply, I do not think it looks well done on Desktop. Podcasts. Arguably one of the biggest and most difficult changes that was made in this update was the update made to podcasts. Spotify has always been where I find and listen to all my wonderful podcasts and I've loved doing so on this platform, the look of how the episodes was always clean, put together nicely, and again, concise. However, in the new update, with this bulkier and more large feel, it feels as though every episode has been made into its own individual podcast page. For starters, every episode now has its own page for its description which I frankly do not think is necessary. It creates this hard-to-navigate system where if I want to read a full description, I'm redirected to an entirely new page that makes it less accessible to read all the descriptions I may want to read that do not need their own individual pages. Not only to mention, these individual pages cannot take you to the next podcast episode, meaning that once you click on a minor detail, the description, you are taken to a new page entirely that you have to again click off of to go back to your entire discography of episodes. Put simply, I do not understand the reasoning behind this change. It makes the program harder to navigate and more over-beared, in a feature it does not need to have in my opinion. Again, it plays into this "big" theme for this update where everything is larger than it needs to be, and makes it more difficult to find what you're looking for. Secondly, in similarity to the last comment, another change about the Podcasts page I highly dislike is again, their big look. In this update every episode is made bigger, meaning that even on a big(/bigger) sized monitor you can only fit nearly five episodes on a screen at a time. This wouldn't be that big of a deal if not for the fact that most of the podcasts I listen to, and most people listen to if they're a long-time podcast enjoyer, have many episodes, upwards of 500 for one of the podcasts I listen to, or upwards of 100 for another. This means that simply because of this bulkier feel, it involved more scrolling and more navigation that should be something simple to get to. Thirdly, and perhaps one of the most irking to me personally, is the way Podcasts queues are now approached. Before, you could click on your current episode of your podcast and listen from there in whatever way you formatted the list (from newest to oldest, oldest to newest, etc.). However, with this new update, it treats podcasts as if they're on a constant shuffle, like a song. No matter how you format your list (and your format will reset every time you go onto that same podcast's page), you will always be auto-queued into a random episode of that same podcast, likely one you've already heard. Not only is this highly annoying to be listening to a podcast episode and then be shuffled to a random episode afterward, but it also causes your playback of that random episode to be altered. If I've listened to a podcast episode before, I want my "completion" bar to show that I was at the end of that episode, not that I clicked off some odd amount of seconds through because the random queue auto-played me onto the next episode. Again, this is another change I see no real validation behind. Not only can you not control how your podcast plays as you could before (without doing it manually every time) but now your playback times are interrupted by this weird and too song-like way of auto-play that you cannot turn off. I do like the new feature of showing when you've played through an entire episode of the podcast, it feels nice and clean. However, again, this feature isn't complete. It doesn't show you the episodes you have perhaps halfway listened through (as it did before) UNTIL you click on that individual episode that doesn't display the "played" status. Ideally, you'd be shown both a "completely played" status and a status to show you how much of a certain episode you had listened to, to know what episode you were on like it did in the previous version of Spotify Desktop. Additionally, nearly no one listens to podcasts on shuffle. Even podcasts that are non-linear I listen in chronological order because that's the way the series was created and will continue to be created, making this queue situation even more unjustifiable. General Navigation Within Your Library. This is another smaller complaint of mine that revolves around navigation of the section under your library. Previously, podcasts, artists, albums, and every "sub-header" you see now under the library was under the Library header at the left of your screen, making these "sub-sections" easier to navigate. When I wanted to listen to podcasts, then music, then back to podcasts again previously, it had a much easier way to it than now, even putting aside all of the changes made to the podcast section alone. It makes these sections harder to access quickly and easily, making it more frustrating to an old user who utlizies these features. Everyone listens to music in a different way; so although I understand and recognize that the Spotify listening experience is focused on creating your own playlists, often this is not how every listener listens to music. I for one listen to music almost solely by artist and albums, meaning that playlist features, especially in emphasis as they've been put in in this update, render the features I access most, harder to get to. Not only does this limit the way people can listen to music on Spotify, but also does it take away from these other wonderful features, like supporting whole artists, or listening to podcasts, which are big selling points for the Spotify program. Put simply, these new updates are creating a problem with restrictions within their own content. Concludingly, I generally dislike the whole of this new update for desktop. I'm a strong believer in the idea of "if something isn't broken, don't fix it" and I feel like that massively applies to the new updates creating with a lot of large and leading platforms, namely Instagram and now, Spotify. The previous look of Spotify was one I, and millions of other users, was comfortable with and used to, and was a large reason I continue to use Spotify. It is incredibly frustrating when a program you enjoy updates and exclusively takes away some of those small, key features while replacing them with nothing worthwhile as a trade-off. For recommendations on improvement, I first recommend maybe finding a happy medium between this update and the last. Not every update has to create this uproar for a program and create it as something entirely new because, put frankly, the reason people enjoy a certain program is because it looks how they enjoy it looking. Another way you could tackle this issue is by creating more customizable features between how each individual wants their Spotify to look. That way, even if there was a base "original" look to Spotify, a user could reorient things as they see fit and customize their listening experience to how they want it, not how the program wants them to listen. This is a feature I vouch for in so many programs, again, namely Instagram and Spotify because these apps have come in with overriding updates recently, creating thousands of users unhappy with the new look. This customization feature would bring something entirely new to the table for Spotify, boosting its marketability by having each listening experience neatly directed to how each listener individually wants to listen, a feature not mimicked by other competitors. Or, for a more simple change, you could even just put a "toggle new update" or "toggle old update" that could switch you between the two. This feature alone would be unprecedented and so highly appreciated by so many unhappy users. Thank you for your time reading this! I care so deeply for Spotify and my music experience on its platform, but as this program and others move away from user customizability, it becomes harder and harder for me to enjoy my listening/user experience on them.
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