@mpj wrote:
Hey guys, just to reiterate our position here: We are working on changing so that tracks from added albums are not counted towards your collection limit. Our hypothesis is that this is actually the main culprit rather than the limit itself. If it turns out that this isn't the case, we will, of course, raise the limit.
@Ark-hive: I'm sorry you feel that way. I genuinely am. It makes me feel bad about myself. I read the stuff that is posted on these forums, and it sometimes does make (or break) my day when people are happy (or angry) with the stuff I've helped build.
We really try the best we can to build a the best product for the most amount of people possible.
It's tricky to build a product like Spotify. You want to please everyone, make everyone happy. That's why I work here, because it's a product that delights millions people, many of them my personal friends. After hearing that you work at Spotify, people come up to you at parties, telling you about what their needs are, and how Spotify could be changed to suit their need better.
But it's just not possible to make everyone happy.
To make as good as possible a product, when designing collection, we looked at how users behaved when using Starred. 99% of users don't come close to 500 tracks. So we figured that 50 times that might be a decent upper limit that would make most people happy. But there are, of course, users for which this limit will not work. I always ask people about their music collection, and from time to time I run in to people that maintain multi-terabyte collections with millions of tracks in them. It's just amazing what people do.
To cover more ground, we do some work and increase the limit to, say 100 000 tracks. But I would still be having this discussion here, because there would always be someone with a bigger music collection that is feeling screwed because we don't cover their use case.
So, then, we could go the way Rdio has gone, and do completely unbounded collections. But that decision also comes with implications. On Spotify, your songs list is one long list. You can scroll your entire collection of songs from top to bottom, you can play the entire thing from top to bottom, you can select all of them, and you can drag all the tracks, etc. I.e. it works like you would expect a list to work. We can do this because we have an upper limit. On Rdio, you have the advantage of a completely limitless collection, but to make that work, their list work differently. If you go into Rdio and go into your collection and view your unfiltered collection, and try scrolling to the bottom of it, you'll notice that it's very cumbersome, because it doesn't work like a normal list does - instead, it works like the Facebook news feed, loading more and more as you scroll downwards. Scroll to the bottom of a 10000 track list will be very time consuming on such a solution.
I'm not saying that approach is wrong. In fact, I think that is actually a better solution for a user that has 10000+ tracks because that user would probably not have much use of viewing their entire collection in one big list anyway. But I would also say that it's a worse solution for users that have a few hundred tracks, which is the overwhelming majority of our users. At the very least, I know that people would be yelling at me at parties if we switched to Rdio-style lists.
It might still be an approach to consider. Perhaps it would actually be the best way. Or perhaps we make a special user interface that the collection falls back to after you hit 1000 songs or something. Who knows? No decisions are set in stone at Spotify - everything is changing, especially people, so we have to be very away.
We are listening to you guys, and all other users, and these things are CONSTANTLY debated internally. Keep the heat on, we appreciate it, even if it's hard sometimes.
Thanks for reaching out, more of you developers should so people could understand the process and decisions behind certain changes. Keeping people in the dark is one thing Spotify seem to enjoy and that's a very bad treat to have from a customer's point of view.
How you guys handled the Paint it Black "upgrade," with its removal of features, arbitrary limits and no explanation whatsoever of new features hurt your reputation irreparably in my eyes. Judging from many comments over the past few months I'm not alone in this.
It's sad to see however that while the thoughts behind new features are good and serve a purpose for a lot of people, they're very poorly implemented and often at the expense of features already in use. Library and Starred are the prime examples here with the new Your Music. Most recenly I've heard cries about Activity Feed being removed - something I use and appreciate a lot - but the "Social Feed" replacement seem to be non-functional (shocker!).
Library was a good feature to see and shuffle ones entire catalogue. It could have been upgraded to include more information about where the tracks actually were and so on, but it was removed. With the limit to Your Music, there's no replacement in that regard. I didn't use it that much; few times a week to search for duplicate or just to shuffle everything to go with the flow. But I still miss it and wish there was a way to bring it back more powerful than ever.
Starred was used so differently by people I'm still a bit shocked it was removed. I personally used it as a playlist for my most loved tracks and the upside was it was one click (or touch if you're on the road) and was shown universally irregardless of where I was. It acted as a layer on top of everything else. Many used it as a collection which I think wasn't the most optimal way, and others used it simply to star tracks for later listening or to get a one-click timeline. The thread about Starred which was locked and largely ignored by Spotify has plenty of more usage scenarios. It was so simple it became an extremely versatile and powerful tool for so many people. Now if I am to save an album or artist, I can't see my most loved tracks since all of them will be marked. The 'playlist' is still there, the functionality is not.
Here comes Your Music, the jack of all trades and master of none. Nah, it's a great way to actually clean up those album/artist playlists and was sorely needed as a collection feature. I personally didn't use Spotify in that manner and I have most playlists by mood or setting instead with Starred for my top loved songs and Library as an overview of everything I had. We were told over and over again how Your Music could replace them both, yet every argument raised about lost functionality fell on deaf ears and caused a lot of frustration and angry posts. To this day we still can't save as many songs as we like, nor can we keep them offline on the desktop and you can't see your most loved tracks in an easy manner when browsing about. I don't even have Your Music on my phone yet. Incompetence is a word I'd like to use in this regard, but perhaps really really bad management would describe it better as I don't beleive this is the fault of any one individual.
I saw your post over at Quora from back in May where you explained it was now time to cater to "parents," rather than yourself (Spotify devs, power users) which is all good. Quote: "Your Music was built for users that (A) don't save music at all and users that (B) just shoved full albums into the left-hand column as playlists. [...] Power users tend to like Spotify a lot already, we need to give our parents some love now."
I'm not trying to talk about "-" 'features' to separate playlists, but I keep asking myself why Your Music had to be implemented the way it was, at the expense of other features in use such as Library and Starred? I still haven't received an answer to that and saying "We really try the best we can to build a the best product for the most amount of people possible" is rather insulting...
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"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."
- Jorge Luis Borges
Staff / Moderator/ 3 years ago in Social & Random