Is Spotify only getting worse?

[Vermat99]

smithyIt's almost two years i have Spotify premium. I tried to remember all the changes spotify made and realized it only got worse. That's my recap.

Bad things:

- REMOVED iPad layout. Now it's just the phone's one scaled up. Which is easier to maintain but way worse.

- Videos not available in my country (and many others). So i just have playlist with grayed out songs.

- Lyrics from Musixmatch removed and the Genius feature is worse. Apple music's lyrics are just better.

- A new black framework added to the song preview in windows makes the song's cover smaller, just to let me know i'm using Spotify. Useless.

- No Jayz/Beyonce discography, also Watch The Throne is disappeared. (may not be spotify's fault, but it remains a downside)

- No more notifications panel on windows. Can't know when new music drops. There is a Release Radar playlist which is incomplete and full of remixes, and a random popup on the phone for SOME new albums.

- Overall iPhone experience: nothing new, same glitches, same big "PLAY" button everywhere, performance good but nothing improved in the last year.

- Overall Windows experience: no major changes, it's still a mediocre html interface. They still forgot to disable webview's drag and drop...

Good things:

- Added the ability to change track porgess from the notification in iOS. This is actually really good.

- Some improvements to the artist profiles, with rankings and other stuff.

- Daily mixes (really cool feature).

- ???

I think that this is the reason why they doesn't provide any changelog for the app updates...

I was a true fan of this platform, but now i'm asking myself if it's time to change, what do you think?

[CourtneyM17]

For me, the price is the most reasonable reasonable (I get the student discount and I have the Hulu pair up thing which is really cool too).

For me, that answer depends on what you use the platform for. To me, Spotify is a place where I go to discover new music (because the discover weekly playlist feature is great) - and I find it easy to make playlists, and listen to my music when im not interested in discovering either. A lot of the things you listed as bad things do not really matter much to me as a listener (such as videos and lyrics because i can just look that up on google if i need those). If you're looking for those things, I guess I would suggest Apple although I dont use apple at all due to how i have never owned an apple product and dont plan on trying to listen to apple music instead.

As far as Beyonce and Jay Z go - they pulled their material from Spotify because it is a streaming platform that lets people listen for free and they want to make people pay to listen to their music on any streaming platform. That's not a big issue to me either though, not a huge fan of either to the point where i want to change streaming services. Just depends on what is important to you as a listener. 

[MelissaLamm]

I totally agree, the price is reasonable and the platform is excellent for discovering new music. Layout changes don't bother me so much, and I haven't noticed as much of a differene on desktop version. I love that I can Chromecast Spotify on my TV, and listening offline is actually amazing. I have more music than I ever did with an iPod and at such a reasonable price. 

If an artist removes their track or discography from Spotify, that's really up to them. I know a lot of people use Spotify almost exclusively to listen to music, so if an artist removes themselves for whatever reason, I kind of see it as their loss. Although it does suck when they are your fave artist and you can't listen to their albums 😞

[Vermat99]

But that’s not the point! Spotify is great and its desktop app is the best out there. 

But is Spotify evolving fast enough? Two years ago Apple Music was much worse then now. But they improved the app by a lot, added lyrics, videos and artists. I just can’t see this on Spotify and asking myself when competitors will catch spotify’s level.

[camaxide]

They are not evolving, they are devolving.. The Spotify Desktop was much better 4 years ago than it is now - it was also much better 2 months ago then it is now - It is difficult to browse through an artists albums now having to enter and exit every single album rather than scroll down and see the list of songs within each album in a simple manner like before. It is more difficult to scroll down and see song and artist names as they are now stuck below each others compared to the much better on the side like before (now empty spaces and album name is in focus, which is far less interesting). When trying to add a song to a playlist it will just cancle and close all the menu-popups if a song changes, and now and then it just randomly closes also during playback. It looks like a "small touch screen" version is enforced to replace the desktop app, and it really makes the whole experience a lot less nice. Before I just enjoyed listening to and browsing for new music, now I'm sitting annoyed whenever I browse around and add songs to my playlists.

[camaxide]

So here is an example - this is on my lowest end monitor, a 1080p 8 year old 24" monitor, I can rescale the window and use almost half of the width and still fit everything inside it, going fullscreen just looks unoptimized, what are all this dead space doing there? The full screen window can fit only 12 songs in height - this could be easily 24 by simply placing the artist name on the side of the track rather than below. It was like this for 10? years and was always optimal, suddenly they change it for what? On a 1440p or 4k monitor it looks even worse.. My PC is not an iphone... please make the Desktop App actually designed for desktop.

[camaxide]

  

[laf5]

Damn broski, I thought that something was wrong with me, and some problems with my computer. But over the past couple of months, spotify has become r3al shh111t (they censor words), I can no longer use this application. He constantly gives me various errors, does not turn on music, music can turn off on its own, and so on. I fell in love with this program a couple of years ago and now I'm disappointed, I don't know what to do