Announcements
The Spotify Stars Program: Celebrating Values Week!

Help Wizard

Step 1

NEXT STEP

Announcement 2.png

The New Desktop App

dan

UPDATE - May 5th, 2023

Hey folks,

 

We appreciate the feedback you've provided us with regarding the new desktop UI; it's being taken into account!

We're chiming in to redirect you to the current main thread regarding the latest updates to the desktop app and we'll be closing new comments here as it is an outdated thread 🙂 


Thanks!

 

UPDATE - April 16th, 2021

Hey folks,

 

We've tried to cover most of the frequently asked questions concerning the new update in this Spotify Answer - Make sure to check it out!

 

We'll continue to go through all your posts in this blog, so if you have any other questions besides the ones in the FAQ, feel free to add them in a comment below.

 

Thanks,

The Community Moderator Team

 

UPDATE - April 8th, 2021

Hi Everyone,

Yesterday we published a blog post on our engineering blog which goes into more details on the new UI, the reasons behind it and the process of building it.  If you'd like to read a few more details like that you can check it out here.

I'd also like to mention a few things coming in upcoming versions of Desktop

  • We're working on bringing back a list-like Discography view, something many of you have mentioned missing in the new UI.  We expect this to land in an upcoming release, so do watch this space and make sure you remain fully updated.
  • "Discovered On" playlists for artists will be back in an upcoming release.
  • We're working on bringing to Desktop the ability (like in our mobile apps) to see all the saved songs by a particular artist from within the artist page itself.  Again this will be arriving in an upcoming Desktop release.

Thanks,
Dan

 

ORIGINAL POST -----

 

Hi everyone

Dan here from the Desktop team again. I wanted to make another post to once again thank you all for your continued feedback, and also give a little more detail about what we’re doing from here on in.

 

In short, the new user interface is the future of the Spotify Desktop client, and over the coming weeks we’ll roll out the new UI to all Desktop users. Many of you will have noticed already, but we’ve based the new experience on the more modern and scalable Web Player codebase, and in doing so made both versions more aligned and easier to use than ever before.

Why are we making this change?

We believe in the future of the Desktop platform and want to make sure it can still serve the needs of our users now and into the future. 

The existing Desktop UI codebase became increasingly hard to maintain as time went on, and you may have noticed a growing gap between the Desktop and Mobile apps in some cases. For those of you interested in the technical details, a blog post on the engineering blog is coming soon. The short story, however, is that our desire to continue pushing Desktop forward and bringing new features to it became incompatible with the reality of maintaining the legacy experience.

 

Meanwhile, we had a Web Player serving similar user needs, but built in a much more modern and scalable way — with a more cohesive Spotify “look & feel”. We therefore resolved to use the Web Player UI code as the basis for both Web and Desktop in the future, and have been spending quite some bringing the Desktop-class features that you’ve come to expect to this shared platform. You’ve had a sneak peek of this as we’ve been testing and building things out, so once again I’d like to thank you for both being a part of it and giving great feedback on this thread that has definitely helped us improve.

Benefits of this approach

Firstly, I’d like to say that this really is a new beginning for the Desktop app. Long-term Desktop users will start to notice more rapid iteration on the app than they’ve seen in the past.

 

I’d like to call out some of the things in the new Desktop, and also give you a little taste of what’s to come.

 

Design - We’ve focused on consistency, are using more color to enhance the experience where appropriate, and are making better use of cover art and album images in the app. We're also better aligned to other platforms, put an increased focus on accessibility, interactions and animations, and have tightened up our design language, so it’s more in line with what users have come to expect from Spotify.

 

Functionality - We’ve brought the functionality that users expect from Desktop, like sorting/filtering, drag & drop, and advanced settings and options, whilst improving areas like playlist creation and curation, profile pages, and more. In many cases these improvements have landed in the Web Player, so the work here has benefited our combined users on both platforms.

Tip! You’ll also find new keyboard shortcuts for many tasks (press ctrl+? to see them) which makes certain actions much faster and easier for any user.

We are also aware that there are a few aspects raised in the community that haven't been fully addressed as part of this update, but items like the Search Bar and discography on artist pages have ultimately been brought closer in line with other Spotify applications. That said, we will continue to iterate on the experience across both platforms moving forward.

 

The future of Desktop

As mentioned above, this change to the Desktop UI gives us the ability to move faster in bringing you new improvements, features and functionality — so you can expect to see continued improvements to the client in the weeks and months to come.

 

Once again, I’d like to thank you all for helping us shape the Desktop App over the past year on behalf of everyone here at Spotify, and please do continue to post your feedback and use our Ideas section here in the Community to tell us what you’d like to see and why.


Thanks again,

Dan

2,290 Comments
Kazuma6666

Well, I came back here to see how things were progressing. I canceled my subscription a month ago and I am happy with Tidal. Seems I was right to change service, as nothing changed.

slug_camargo

I've been using the new version and trying to get used to it, warts and all, but the one thing I just can't make my peace with is the artist name and song title in the same column.

 

It's nonsense.

 

It clashes against every basic principle of layout design and data presentation; it makes the app look ugly as sin by contributing to the vast wasted empty space on display - which is made all the worse by the fact that the other three columns range from barely utilitarian to downright useless; and it brings attached brand new functionality issues, from the ludicrous need to click up to five times to sort a list, to the ridiculous fact that a new playlist's default name is either "new playlist" or a song title --who would ever want to use a song title to name a playlist?

 

You can sort of justify lumping what are arguably the two most relevant pieces of information in one single category on mobile because of the constrained real estate, but it doesn't make any sense on a PC. I'm using a 1080p 24" monitor, which is not even a large monitor by modern standards, and Spotify looks like something that was designed for a 4:3 CRT being uncomfortably stretched out because it wasn't updated since the late 90s --and it's not even maximized either!

MitchellH

Just coming back to see if Spotify has answered this. So happy with Deezer HiFi Family. I keep linking this thread all over Facebook and Twitter. Can't wait to see the next earnings report. Everyone in my office has switched and several friends have too.

baoutch

A thought.

 

I think all of this comes from the fact that we all are very intimately bound to the music we love, it's literally part of who we are, some songs are often linked to the most important events of our lives, the song of the birth of my daughter, the one from the death of my grandma, first time having **bleep**, and so on. There is a very intense emotional link with music.

Yesterday I could cherish that CD offered by my ex gf, or mix tape made by my brother.

 

Today it's different. Music is no more ours. Same for the app we use to listen to it.

 

It belongs to some company, that has no interest other than make money. This is their only goal. I work for some big companies as a freelance web developer and I've seen this pattern many times. Companies, especially big ones are actually run by a very very little number of ppl that can decide basically anything. Often when some big shareholder says ok lets cut costs and make one single codebase, and as we'll publish company's results on may, lets make that release available in may, there is no one that can oppose that will. Noone. Devs / qa / everyone has to do what they're told to with absolutely no saying to it. Whatsoever.

Plain and simple good old dictatorship. I've seen this situation many times.

 

My thought is, we, as customers, must adapt. That is diminish that emotional link we have with those middlemen providing such a important and emotional thing that is music. So I think we should be prepared to leave at any time. Stop feeding the most greedy. Take your playlist, make sure you'll be able to import them somewhere else (use soundiiz for instance) and do not rely so much on those guys.

Money is the only thing they understand, obviously that guys that will really profit from those decisions will not read this forum. They probably don't even know it's there. 

So stop giving them your money, chose a company that - currently - offers higher standards in customer satisfaction. When this company turns and become too greedy / crappy -> move again.

 

We must stop feeding the greedy and disrespectful companies.

 

 

nippleDonkey

@baoutch is right, the only way to make them listen is through your wallet, however as with any monolith they get too big to fail.

 

If we optimistically looked at the following numbers:

 

This post has 1900 messages with thousands of likes scattered across them. Let's assume that double the amount of messages represents unique users willing to cancel their paying membership.

 

Spotify has around 155 million paying members. Even if they are paying on average £10 per month that's £18.6 billion in annual revenue.

 

3800 paying users nets them £456 000 per year.  In terms of percentage to their actual income it is 0.0024%

 

Take into account new business growth, the sad truth of the matter is we don't actually matter one little bit to them.

 

Although i wish my membership cancellation would feel like a kick in the groin to Spotify, the only satisfaction I'm really going to get is the knowledge of knowing i don't have to keep replacing their latest version of trash with a previous version.