I don't know where to start with this. Over 10 years ago, Spotify was great in my view. Being free and in my case, i had no adverts either, was just limited to 5 plays of each song.
Onto the interface and payments. On the current free version, it in no way is inviting for people to pay for it. Comparing it to the old free version, it is abysmal. You click on tracks of an artist, and it plays another track by them, or something similar, and often only a sample, and it is full of things telling about what you can do IF you pay.
I liked Spotify enough to pay for a premium family account. Soon after 2017, the interface already was getting worse, to the point I just installed an old Linux version and blocked updates.
I remember the time just after covid when Spotify literally disabled the old version of the app from working despite loads of users (including me) being willing to pay for it by using premium, but not wanting to use the horrendous new interface.
I moved away from Spotify at this point and moved to tidal because of how bad the new Spotify was.
I received an offer to have 2 months premium for free as a past premium member that hadn't had it for over 24 months. I took this offer, but I am certainly not going to pay for it after my time is up.
The interface is an apsolute mess. People can only judge this if they also know just how much better Spotify was a deacade ago.
It seems like it is not made for people to enjoy listening to Albums anymore as it seems to have the need to have the artist name and link under every single track name as if it was a play list. This just maked it cluttered, and accedently selecting the artist far too easy.
The search is now a disaster in my view when searching for lesser known artists. One as an example. Not that many will know him. But I searched for "posy" spelled exactly as written, and the top result taking up about 50% of the space for the search results was "post malone" with a huge oversized image. That is NOT what my search has even written...
I have to literally scroll down the oversized page to find the ONLY result that is specifically what I have written. This should have been at the top. It is only there now because it is in my search history.
I remember the classic drop down search menu that could fit 15+ artists on it as well as not taking your last screen to a whole new page.
It also shows that Spotify lost a huge amount of paying users when there was "the new desktop app" thread in 2021 with basically over 450 pages of complaints about how bad it was, to the point the thread was locked, almost like it was too embarresing for Spotify.
I left numerous posts with feedback back then and very little seemed to have been improved.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/The-Blog-Vault/The-New-Desktop-App/ba-p/5175848/page/444#comments
This example still makes it really hard to navigate to all the albums by one artist, which you used to be there right away as soon as you selected them in the search bar.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/The-Blog-Vault/The-New-Desktop-App/ba-p/5175848/page/440#comments
I also posted here about the lack of space, which they now have just filled with a number of listens, as if that is relevent..... Why can't we just have the artist and album here like I suggested - and used to be the case "back in the old days"!! It seems so strange to choose to have the artist name directly under each track title.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/The-Blog-Vault/The-New-Desktop-App/ba-p/5175848/page/446#comments
I also posted here in response to a picture on the previous page, as silly as my post looks, well it is as silly as spotify looks. The album titles are about 10 times the font size of the regular text. Wasting a huge amount of screen space. Why not just make the Album text fractionally bigger in a different font?
Basically I think the desktop app is not at all user friendly, and is designed as if your monitor is a touch screen and you select everything with your fist. The old version, you could fit at least 3 times as much in one screen. It is lucky you can scroll out now with Ctrl and scroll as I have it at about 60%.
I just find it really sad the way this app has gone. It is trying to throw so much stuff you don't want in your face. Maybe it is just the way some people listen to music. That "scroll through previews" option is a bit of a joke in my view. Unless it is just the trend of social media now for those with a short attention span. You can literally play the tracks on the album and skip through them, so what is the point? Even with premium, and supposedly the best sample rate spotify has to offer, these previews sound incredibly compressed and worse than youtube. The fact you didn't have this without premium and this is a feature of premium, it is such a huge gimmick and failure of a feature in my view.
