I’ve had Spotify for a couple of years and have never had any major issues I felt needed to be addressed until January of this year. Since then each update has brought nothing but frustration, and this latest update takes the cake. My first guess is they’re under new management and they’re trying to justify their paycheck and make their mark. What the heck was wrong with the old layout? Nothing! This update that was shoved down my throat today is absolutely terrible.
First off, there’s the obvious and unnecessary aesthetic changes. I hate how large the buttons on the Your Library page have become. It is needless and annoying. The last list size was perfect, not too big that it took forever to scroll through and not too small that you couldn’t see it from a distance. I liked having the list of Your Daily Mix, Playlist, Stations, Songs, Albums, Artists, and Podcasts on the Your Library page with Recently Played underneath.
Secondly, Recently Played is awful. I used to live off of that on my home page. I tend to cycle through a chunk of my music, but now Recently Played is gone from the Your Library page and they have just two sections for Artists and “Albums. Recently Played is no longer a convenient tap away. Instead, it is on the Home page and you have to scroll through large pictures to see what you have, which you can only see about two or two and a half of at a time. No longer a quick tap, which is way more dangerous if you’re driving.
My third complaint is the Artist/Albums pages that are set up in Your Library. Instead, the first few artists under “Recommended Artists ” are my recently played artists, but after that it just suggests artists that I have in my library that I’m seriously not interested in listening to. If I was wanting something different, I would have gone through and actually looked for them on my own.
My biggest complaint is how Spotify is now forcing you to download everything from every album you’ve saved even a single song from. I very rarely find an artist that has a large selection of music I enjoy; thus, I only save between 1 and 10 songs per artist, with a handful of exceptions. For a month or so now I couldn’t listen to an album (online) because it would make me listen to the whole album and not just the 3 songs I downloaded. That was frustrating enough, but I found a doable loophole. Just listen to the artist; that only listed the songs I saved. If I was in the mood to listen to just the songs from one album then I was **bleep**, but at least I wasn’t getting the 20 other trash songs on an album I wasn’t a big fan of. This “update” fixed that loophole. And by “fixed”, I mean they fixed it so that it doesn’t work anymore. I opened Spotify to find that that I had a few hundred songs downloading and all my sorting work was ruined.
Seriously. If I liked the songs I would have downloaded them in the first place. I don’t want that much space on my phone taken up by songs that I do not enjoy. It defeats the purpose of saving things to your library. There are no options to remove or block the excess songs from your library. But one of my fears is now that these songs are downloaded into my library that means if they do ever “fix” this problem then I have to go back through all my artists and albums and remove everything I have already sorted.
The fifth complaint I have is that I can no longer scroll through artists and albums alphabetically. I can’t sort by recently added for the artist or the album, either. I really liked that option to sort by recently added albums. But the quick scroll was great and now it’s gone. I often don’t remember the artist/album name or how to spell it correctly. An example of this would be as follows: (there’s also a bit of glitch I noticed recently that took place before this update that I want to complain about) I went to search through my artist library list for “Cécile Corbel”, but she did not appear in my artist library. Only when I physically typed in her name in the artist library search bar (thank goodness for YouTube recommendations that helped me remember her name and spelling) that she showed up in my library. Even with this newest update she doesn’t show up in my artist library list unless I’ve recently played her. It makes me concerned about how many other small artists I’ve saved that I cannot see when scrolling through the library.
After that, you now have to “add” artist to your library… again. The list under “recommended” consists of artists that you’ve saved, but the FOLLOW button is right there beside the artists. Again, I don’t like most music by most of the artists in my library, so I don’t want to follow them. But back to the “Add artists” button… once you add an artist it really seems like you can’t remove them, and it’s so easy to accidentally hit the wrong artist in that little drop down menu they have. Also, what’s with the “Liked Songs” playlist that was shoved into my library? I had to quickly cancel that ridiculous download. How do you just like a song without downloading/saving it to your library and vice versa? I already can’t remove songs I dislike (which I now have a lot of).
Now for my other complaints about Spotify that are not related to the latest “update” (I quote update because it’s terrible and it didn’t actually show an update in the App store. It just sort of happened). First off, they seem to have cancelled my student premium subscription (I get it. It needs updating, it’s been a year) but I cannot change my email. It reverted back to an old email I no longer use, but when I hit “Edit Profile” it will not let me change my email, so I can’t enter my student email in and it’s not recognizing me as a student. Secondly, turning in complaints or even searching through complaints is convoluted. They make you go through a bunch of steps, links and pages to post a complaint. I don’t fancy deleting everything and reinstalling the app every time I have a problem which is what they seem to think will solve every problem.
To put all this simply, Spotify is now terrible, forces you to download everything whether or not you have space on your phone, you can’t easily scroll or sort through your library, and they’re hiding some of my artists. They really need to stop trying to fix what’s not broken. I get wanting/needing to polish up the designs and layouts a bit to keep the new and shiny look, but this is ridiculous. They need to bring back the original look. If Spotify really wants to make convenient changes then make the home page more customizable. For example, the ability to remove or rearrange the options in Your Library. It would have also been nice to be able to sort saved songs by alphabetical order or by artist instead of just what was recently added. They can still have a recommended songs/artists/playlists section (which I believe they had before under Browse?), just don’t shove it down my throat. It seems like Spotify is trying to make everything more complicated but reduce the number of sections and buttons.
My long-time affinity for Spotify is jaded and I’m seriously considering other music streaming service options for the first time ever. I never liked Apple because I don’t like iCloud and it forces everyone in your family to have all the same music, but at this point it seems better than what Spotify is offering. Thank you for the good times, Spotify, but I’m sick of this **bleep**. Whoever has been directing your updates this past year needs to be sacked. Spotify ought to hire on some people to test any of these major changes they’re wanting to make before they go publishing it. Maybe like a beta tester for a video game? They wouldn’t need to be paid much, maybe just offered premium for free for X amount of time in exchange for honest reviews of the product and updates. But I don’t have much hope, because Spotify rarely seems to listen to customer reviews.
Plan
Premium
Country
USA
Device
(iPhone 6s)
Operating System
iOS 12.2
My Question or Issue
Spotify needs new management.
Staff / Moderator/ 2 years ago in Social & Random