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New update - SAVE option - is there a limit?

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New update - SAVE option - is there a limit?

Hello,

 

Is there a limit on the number of albums you can SAVE to YOUR MUSIC section? I'm only half way through saving albums from my old playlists and this feature stopped working... 

 

 

If I UNSAVE another album, i can SAVE a new one.

 

 

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298 Replies

the decision is final I guess:

 

 

Mattias Petter JohanssonDeveloper @ Spotify

 

We picked 10 000 for now because a very small fraction of our userbase are affected by the limit. We could spend engineering time optimizing for, say, 25000 items, but that would only move the needle very slightly - we're talking less than 0.01% here. At some point, you need to stop optimizing for cases that affect extremely few users and focus your time and effort on the cases that affect a larger part of your user base.

That's an arrogant way to treat customers that could be your biggest supporters. It speaks of arrogance. And I've worked in software development. That's a huge mistake.

Well, this pretty much settles it.  I'll be cancelling my Spotify Premium here in the next day or two and extending my Google Play All Access beyond the free trial.

Arrogant. All customers are customers. And as said above - it's a pretty big chance that those customers you are neglecting are probably your bigest champions. So **bleep**ing arrogant, I've had enough of this already. I'm leaving for Rdio. It'll also be interesting to see what happens with Bests now that it belongs to Apple.

Mueh, double post, srry.


@servantez wrote:

the decision is final I guess:

 

 

 

We picked 10 000 for now because a very small fraction of our userbase are affected by the limit. We could spend engineering time optimizing for, say, 25000 items, but that would only move the needle very slightly - we're talking less than 0.01% here. At some point, you need to stop optimizing for cases that affect extremely few users and focus your time and effort on the cases that affect a larger part of your user base.


I would say 3333 limit. Dunno why but you people dont say it stright that this is 3333 per device even when you have only one device for listening music offline. That's what adds say: 10000 songs and from my premium user perspective it is simply cheating. If you don't care about more advanced users who were your consumer base in the beginning and want to focus on people who barely listen music it;s your call. Me and my friends are moving to google play because you don't listen us not even with your 3333 limit but also with new ui and removing functionality of starred playlist. You may lose your core consument base and stay with those folks who like to listen music from time to time. At some point they will stop paying premium because "why should i pay so much when i'm listening music from time to time". Srry but i thing that google play music will kill you in future because many ppl just waiting to check it in their countries. I have it in my country - Poland from last month but registered just now coz i cant stand your excuses in my community mailer. Hoped it wil change for better but you just took my last  hope and probably lost your premium consumer.

 

@ Spotify developer: Great work mate.You just said that as a consumer i can f..k o.. because i'm not your target. yeah. Stay with your daddy as consumer as you said in your answer. now i now why new crappy ui has so big letters and so big rows. Now i know. Spotify is for eldery people. They will pay for it because they are main music listening population. Why? Because in their youth they had only radio without tv or some crappy internet. Youre brilliant mate. Keep it going.

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.

 

 

"To make as good as possible a product, when designing collection, we looked at how users behaved when using Starred"

 

That is exactly the issue here. It seems like you guys think that a music collection of records is just the same as a wild list of tagged/marked songs. You promised a collection for years and then gave us a something that is only a shoebox size collection and not at all a way to mark songs anymore. 

 

I have several hundreds of Cds sitting at my shelves and I know a lot people that have music collections of >1000 Cds. But I never came to the idea of putting all of them on spotify since creating playlists for all of them is much too much work.

 

But since there was a collection feature available one day I (and I guess many others) started putting all the records on spotify and boom.... that is really frustrating!! Not even an error message saying what even went wrong! 

 

 

I bet nobody ever had the idea of putting all his records into an unsorted starred playlist!! How could that be a usage blueprint for a collection? You should have gone out and ask people with music collection how many records they own.... and you should be aware that people would collect more if they do not have to pay for every single record... that's what you actually sell to people!!!

 

And if I interpret your comment correctly, it seems that a updated collection version that supports more than a few hundred records is still lightyears away....  sad to hear that... 😞

 

 

I would also like to chime in and say that basing the "collection" feature off of starred is very flawed.  Starred is literally just another playlist and can't be considered as a place where people stored their albums.  Sure, a large number of users are probably only using playlists or will only add a couple thousand at most songs to their "Your Music", but you can't forget people who enjoy the full album and collecting those.  With a 10k limit, I think you're really only catering towards people who won't add much.

 

I certainly appreciate that album adds won't be counted soon (any idea when?) as that is how I use the new feature - I only add full albums that I enjoy enough to be in my collection that I'd like to easily browse to.  For individual songs I use Playlists (I am glad they were kept separate but in the same area).

 

Thanks for listening to our feedback, but I was very disappointed when I heard about this limit and it largely killed my excitement because I knew as someone who loves full albums I would hit it much sooner rather than later.

@mpj:

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.

----

 

 

Your hypotesis... That's what this argument IS about ALL ALONG.  Your deduction skills are shocking. 

 

I have no words... 

 

 

I don't know why this still upsets me. I've cancelled my account some time ago and moved to Deezer - they know how COLLECTIONS work. 

i also got as far as the Ds when i hit the 10,000 track limit. at a rough estimate, i've got over 100,000 tracks by 300+ artists. 

"your music" is broken.

"My only solution so far is to make a playlist for each artist and use the Your Music as a my fave's kind of deal."

 

this is what i had been doing ever since the big update. unfortunately, spotify removed the ability for me to shuffle my entire library, so i decided to migrate my hundreds of artist playlists into "your music." i hit the 10,000 track limit in the middle of dead can dance's discography.

 

had to delete everything out of your music and reload my legacy starred playlist (i.e., favorites) back in.

 

with the big update, spotify removed the library, which used to be a list of every single track in every one of your playlists, so now there's no way for me to shuffle everything i've saved.

what i once thought was an exciting feature i've now discovered to be hobbled in a fundamental way, and i'm stuck with playlists that don't update automatically, and no way to shuffle them all together.

"A developer from Spotify explains the limit here. "

 

apparently, the spotify developer's comment has been removed. however, and rdio developer's comment remains, and i was particularly amused by his last sentence:

"The engineering work is fairly trivial to do if done properly."

 

ouch.


@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...


- - -
"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

"Solved?" Spotify! No, no. Create a new label such as "Answered" merely because this isn't "solved." Ya' gave me false hope, Spotty!

http://DanielHauff.com
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http://MeatVideo.com

Same problem here. 😞

As someone with THOUSANDS of Vinyl LPs, THOUSANDS of CDs and Tens of THOUSANDS of songs in iTunes, let me add my disappointment to the rest of the crowd.  I understand Spotify's decision to support the masses, but I would guess that those of us with huge collections are more likely to become permanent subscribers than those with 500 or fewer songs.  I've been systematically looking at Spotify's competitors for months now, and have spent the last several weeks looking at Spotify's breadth & depth.  I already have Slacker & TuneIn accounts (they work directly with my car) and was just about to subscribe to Spotify when I discovered the limitation.

 

Sure, 10,000 songs is a lot -- however, it's just a fraction of what I listen to.  I suppose I'll keep looking for the service that meets my needs.

 


@mpj wrote:

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.  


Just to clarify the proposed solution to this 10,000 Your Music song limit...

 

If I save an album in Your Music, then none of the tracks on that album would appear in the Your Music songs list.

 

Have I understood that right?

I would like to say that I have this problem. I use the "Save" button on albums to keep track of whether or not I liked an album / artist.

 

For the record, I was very confused when I was pressing the "Save" button on an album, and then watch it deselect itself over and over again. Took me a little bit to figure out that the 10,000 song limit was the problem.

 

I would say that saved albums not counting toward the song limit would resolve my issue, but I think something should be done. Right now I'm combing through albums and removing them from my main list to make room for other newer stuff -- despite the fact that I enjoy the songs/artists I am removing, which is unfortunate at best.

Hello

the limitation of 10 000 songs is not enough

is there a technical reason for this limitation?

if it is not raised to 100 000 i think i ll quit spotify

 

Edit: i found a work around:

i just create a folder and i move every folders/playlists in it !

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