[Social] Bring back Inbox/Messaging with Notifications

[tesshenkel]

The Inbox/Messaging feature did not get a real shot at even being a feature because Spotify took away notifications for new messages. Give Inbox/Messaging some development so users can continue to privately share songs.

[smawuascht]

Spotify - you're continuing to remove the features I love the most....
If you continue like this I'll have to switch at some point.

• You removed the indicator that showed me if there was a new song in a playlist
• then you removed the notifications for playlists
• and finally the entire notification feature
• now the entire Inbox und the abbility to share a song to an individual friend.
  
  CMON - **bleep**!

What's next? removing the music????? 

[Ta111111]

I bet Spotify will take the feature that let us long press an album to review its songs soon. Then it will take away the 320kbps choice. And load-to-play-offline button will disappear finally.

Seriously? Why not working on adding new feature but removing what made us love you?

The message feature had always allowed me to share music with my friends PRIVATELY. It made me open the app and find my favorite artists more often.

All of my friends have agreed that if Spotify don't stop removing cool features instead of adding new things we'll stop being premium users. 

[Mosstrosity]

Spotify used to be the best social music sharing platform. Its playlist curating and sharing feature was essentially the next evolution in mixed CDs, and with a nearly unlimited selection of music! Users could create personal playlists for friends, family members, girlfriends – I lived half way across the world from my parents, and one way we were able to keep in touch was by sharing songs and playlists through Spotify, which we could then go back through the messaging service to see the paper trail and relive those moments in time by seeing when those songs / playlists were shared.

In the Spotify hayday, the sharing and social capabilities seemed endless. You could see the users following your playlists, and then in turn check out their profiles and playlists – in essence, discover users organically who had similar tastes in music. I had hope that Spotify might even take this idea further and allow users to give people credit when they enabled a song discovery (i.e. when I dragged and dropped a song from another playlist to one of my own, I'd have the option to credit the user it came from and link to the playlist of origin, thus giving credit and giving myself a little music sharing karma. That would even make it possible to see a timeline of how a song was shared and spread in popularity – how cool would that be?!)

But alas, that ability – the ability to see which specific users followed my playlists – disappeared in the night. Poof! Gone. No explanation. And now the messaging service, my absolute favorite feature, is gone with it. I have convinced dozens of friends to go with Spotify over other streaming services because of the sharing capabilities. And while I enjoy some of the newer features, such as Discovery Weekly playlists, personal playlists will always matter more. It's the personal touch that's different, just as a hand-written letter will always be much more appreciated than an email.

And while the message feature only just recently disappeared, it has seen a dramatic drop in functionality over the past few years. It's gotten clunky. Its alerts fail. It doesn't show when people play songs when they have played them. It has under-performed, which is largely to do with a lack of developer resources. The reasoning Spotify gives for the elimination of the message feature is a 'lack of use,' yet this reasoning feels insincere when Spotify has been killing off the messaging feature slowly with neglect. And I believe users turned away from messaging because of the lack of developmental and education support Spotify provided.

In a way, I get it – sponsored playlists / social sharing on a larger scale and machine learning pays the bills, and by forcing users to use those features over personal sharing Spotify has more persuasive power to push sponsored content and increase data to support value add (i.e. more users will click on sponsored content when there's no personal content to compete with). Financially, this makes sense. But what Spotify seems to be overlooking is that by taking the control out of the hands of its users, it is in a sense eliminating the very thing that made it so unique to begin with. Spotify has become that jaded musician who has been corrupted by money and fame, thus losing the 'edge' that made her so unique to begin with. Will she return to her roots and find her voice, or will the money and fame destroy her and push her further into obscurity? Only time will tell.

Am I being overdramatic? I don't believe so. Spotify has been such a large part of my life – of so many of our lives – that it truly breaks my heart to see it being reduced to a sponsored content driven shell of what it once was, focused more on immediate profitability than user experience. I feel like I don't even know you any more, Spotify!

If there were a better music sharing service out there, I'd switch. I've begun looking. Spotify needs some social competition to keep it honest – please respond if you know of a good alternatives. I'd love to jump ship to send a message, then come back when the captain (CEO) rights things. I hope others will too. But with so few options out there to compete, it's hard to see the benefit of leaving other than driving a point home.

I urge you to get back to what made you so great, Spotify. I don't know how much longer I can stay with you while you destroy yourself like this...

Love, a caring Sporify user.

p.s. Do people read these things? This is my first forum post. Even if it doesn't amount to any change, I care so much about this issue that I had to write something as an act of catharsis.

[twerkdotgif]

What kind of "social media" music app is this if it doesn't even have a message option? 

[ryckrychards]

Private messages is what makes a community. Being able to talk to other people, sharing content, talking about anything (maybe not only related to music means that members can socialize, help each other, take out doubts and so on. Any community has this feature. I am a volunteer on a project (community) called Tatoeba which aims to collect sentence and its translations in any language (a large database of sentences and its translations) and we do have this feature in there - not to metion Bussu, Busuu, Lang8 and so on. At all, we`re humans and so, we have another needs - which doesn`t mean that the focus would always be the music)

[Napsib]

I don't seem to be able to vote anymore. I think sharing playlists or tracks within Spotify is a great feature and it's a shame that the Spotify team has taken it away from us! Please bring it back!

[Anamon]

This was very much expected. Since at least a year or two ago it has been clear that Spotify were moving towards removing the social features of their service. Even before that, it was very telling that they refused to fix sharing tracks with non-Facebook users. Then suddenly, following became private. Removing notifications sealed the deal, as messaging became more and more difficult to even find in the interface.

Any method of discovering music other than the ones where labels pay to push stuff to users (whether they're interested or not), is an obstacle to Spotify's business model. They need to become profitable, and the only chance they have at it is with the support of the majors, by become more similar to a payola radio model, with less opportunities for users to stray from the official playlists.

Check back here in a few months to find that regular users are no longer able to make their playlists public. Bet?

[thirtysixdegree]

bring back the inbox!!!! why would you even remove it? it was one of the best feature of spotify, the other one was sharing music to followers which is also GONE!! 

[roby_peppy]

You're right.... I hope to see my messages again !!
MY messages, my conversations...
4 years using Spotify...

Since yesterday I was recommending to use Spotify to all my friends.
I was so enthusiast !

I stopped doing that...

[jonbrochill16]

This was my favorite Spotify feature aside from the service itself.  Please bring this back!