[Desktop][Your Library] Bring Back Separate Song Title and Artist

[Frostman233]

Not sure who thought it was a great idea to reformat how one can view songs by artist or by title...? It is much more convenient to have the two, side by side, while viewing a library rather than only being able to view the artist name or song name under the other...

[Frostman233]

Good news!

There is now a new Compact Mode for track lists (playlists and album pages) in the desktop app and Web Player

The drop down menu now has "Sort by" and "View as" options. To turn on compact mode, open up the drop down menu at the top right of a playlist or album page and click on "Compact" under "View as".

On Playlist pages, it removes the album art, and breaks out "Title" and "Artist" into their own separate columns again. This view is similar to before the redesign that added album art into playlists a few years ago.

On Album pages, it moves the artist and featured artists from below each track title, to a new "Artist" column to the right of the "Title" column.

When you turn on Compact Mode, it will be remembered and stay on when you are viewing both playlists and album pages. You can switch back to the regular "List" view at any time.

The new Compact Mode for track lists is rolling out in the desktop app and Web Player right now so you should be seeing it soon. This has been a highly requested feature since the redesign came out a few years ago.

[1240525485]

I'm not sure why song title and artist name were combined? there are two separate column for date added, and song length. I'm not sure why your design team thought these categories needed to be highlighted and the literal ARTIST NAME does not? 

[mwg9]

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Artist-column-missing/m-p/5378173/highlight/true#M1...

I tried a new approach as this thread seems to continue to be ignored.

[bcviau]

When this bug first appeared, and song titles were now mixed with artist names, here are the distinct and obvious usability problems the bug created:

• Terrible experience navigating either song titles or artists, having to ignore half the text in the column regardless of what the user is scanning for.
• Cannot easily scan long lists for standout artists that only have a few songs on the list.
• Each row has to be two lines instead of one, solely because of this bug. This drastically bloats the size of the UI, making long lists a nightmare to navigate. Very frustrating for this to happen after the longstanding bug that increased the vertical spacing between songs (you later added scalable text sizing instead of fixing the gap bug, which did nothing to address the bug).
• The most important two fields are now harder to read than any other field. I would rather title and artist be the only two columns than have this bug.
• A user must click the column title FIVE times to cycle through all the sorting options, for the only two fields that would ever commonly be sorted by.
• Many users aren't even aware they can still sort by artist name, as seen in other posts.
• Releasing a production bug of this caliber has likely shaken many users' faith in your ability to conduct smooth, unobtrusive releases, or even do a cursory glance at your software in a staging environment before releasing it. Not to mention, user testing is a must for an established market of your size.
• After months of coping with this bug, it still hasn't been addressed or reverted to the previous version. No amount of time spent using Spotify in this state makes it any more comfortable to work around.

Please, fix the bug. Spotify UI was better 10 years ago than it is now - it shouldn't be that hard to just keep it up to date for the latest OS versions, and take our money. That's all anyone wants.

[jrham]

Artist and song name MUST be separate. It is incredibly unnatural to view the columns as they are now. Every time I try looking for a song/artist, I strain my eyes as I keep clicking the sort button to clumsily arrange the list by artist. It's beyond difficult to see where one artist ends and another begins because each "song" is stacked and its not in alphabetical order. When ordering by "Artist" in descending order, for example, I have to process through the following:

Go Getter

The Accidentals

Always Alright

Albabama Shakes

Manifest

Andrew Bird

Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)

Arcade Fire

Up on Cripple Creek

The Band

For the Love of Money

The Black Keys

You and Me On The Rock (feat. Lucious)

Brandi Carlile, Lucius

Do you see how ridiculous this looks? How difficult it is to scan the list quickly and accurately?  The artist isn't even bold! The song is! and the order just makes your brain spin because you have to see the alphabet ALL over the place and then remember it's sorted by Artist and its not even what's in bold font.

[jrham]

Any news on this? Still painful. 

[bryyyson]

Spotify doesn't care about music lovers like us who use desktop computers. They only care about how their software works on smartphones and, of course, what THEY want to do. They'll never listen to and consider feedback left on their community message boards (probably never even read it), and they will never switch back to the most obvious music organizational format ever. They prefer a clunky and annoying format for their true music lovers. They don't care about us at all. We should stop posting and getting worked up about it. They're awful just like all the other software companies.

[bdoran1]

Why is this still a thing?  Who could possibly care about the date a song was added over the artist of the song?  Why is the artist still muted in comparison to the song title?  There's got to be a reason you've made it difficult to find the artist.  Why not make your interface customizable?  I'm sure someone out there gives**bleep** about the date they added a song to a playlist, but I'd rather explore the artist.   

[Pete_Noir]

@bdoran1 I like to see the date a track was added, because in large playlists, if I can't remember the title/artist I can usually remember roughly when I added it. But yeah, we definitely need the artist column back. That's the thing - we used to have BOTH of these. Just add a toggle option for showing columns. This "suggestion" reached the required number of votes over a year ago, and no news since. Wow, they really value our feedback.

[ScienceofSpock]

@bdoran1 wrote: Why is this still a thing?  Who could possibly care about the date a song was added over the artist of the song?  Why is the artist still muted in comparison to the song title?  There's got to be a reason you've made it difficult to find the artist.  Why not make your interface customizable?  I'm sure someone out there gives**bleep** about the date they added a song to a playlist, but I'd rather explore the artist.   

---

If I had to guess, It's because they want to keep the artist payouts low, and this is part of an effort to try to diminish the presence of the artists who provide the actual content for their platform.

I mean, from a UI perspective, there is no real need to combine song and artist into one column, and as is evidenced by the complaints here, it is a bad idea. As bdoran1 pointed out, they could completely get rid of the date added column in favor of the artist, but they haven't and likely won't. Seriously though, how does Date Added get its own column and Artist doesn't?!? This is baffling to me. If they do somehow need to combine columns for some esoteric reason that nobody else sees, then combining Song and Album makes much more sense than Song and Artist, but they haven't done that. They have targeted the artist column specifically. Why is that?

I suspect that more user time is spent on a playlist screen than any other screen in the Spotify interface. On this screen, the artist gets a tiny little line, under the song title. So the most important people for the Spotify platform (the artists) get the least amount of real estate (and exposure) on the most used part of their app. Why is that?

As Pete_Noir pointed out, the required number of votes was reached over a year ago, but nothing has been done. Why is that?

At the end of the day, Spotify is just another greedy corporation in pursuit of profits.

[zombieman81]

This is one of several problems that made me cancel my premium subscription a couple of years ago... I subscribed to Deezer and it had all the features of old Spotify I liked including distinct artist columns and some features that I wish Spotify had, like a light mode where the Spotify had over time got darker and darker... I popped back to see if any improvements have been made... Seems not...