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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Spotify on the desktop is also guilty of this: the default cover art view is microscopic; clicking the "expand" button brings it up to a merely small view.

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If you drag the bar containing your playlists out into the main web view it adjusts the size of the artwork.

Agree. But I think the overall reason is obvious: customers don't care about album art either. If they did (and used their buying power to show this), Spotify / Apple would change their products.

I care about album art and am frustrated with both Apple and Spotify. Does anyone have suggestions where I should direct my buying power so I can listen to music and view high res album art?

Buy vinyl on discogs.com, or vinyl from any of your other favorite online retailer.

I buy Vinyl, but most new Vinyl releases suck. They just stuff a bunch of songs on 3 or 4 sides that end up half empty, so you need to flip the record all the time.

Vinyl has always had this shorter time length.

> A standard 12-inch 33 RPM vinyl record can have a playtime of roughly 22 minutes per side for a total of 44 minutes. A 7-inch 45 RPM record can fit approximately 5 minutes per side for a total of 10 minutes. Generally, any longer, the sound quality would start to deteriorate.

https://peakvinyl.com/record-playtimes/

On classic vinyl releases you got a single record with roughly 20 minutes of music on each side. They recorded the album so it fit nicely on two sides.

With new releases the vinyl is usually an afterthought, so it usually doesn't fit nicely on two sides, so they just throw an extra disc in the sleeve and spread the songs evenly and you end up with 3 or 4 sides with 12-15 min music on them.

This is good though. A double or triple 180 gram vinyl is better than one album squeezed on a single disc.

Purchase digital albums via the label or Bandcamp, which come with the art either in the directory or already tagged. Use a third party music player.

> Use a third party music player.

Any recommendations?

I use SongOwl on iOS. The interface is much nicer than the Apple Music app, but it still depends on iTunes/Music for syncing music from your computer.

Open source: Clementine (and a fork, Strawberry), mpd (and ncmpcpp/Cantata/vimpc), Deadbeef, Sayonara

Closed source: foobar2000

There is no buying power on Spotify? There's different preferences that hardly come out of UI usage patterns since for those in love with album art there isn't a way to make it central. It's just not there.

I would offer it's a generational thing. If you came from vinyl or early CD, with books with lyrics and recognisable artworks you've just got expectations or wishes that aren't being fulfilled anymore. No value judgement, I get that young people discover music wholly differently. There's survivorship bias in there as well, but I know the labels, recordings and albums I want my song or aria to be from by picture. And I'll probably listen to those specific albums and recordings until I pass, so 50 more years of caring for specific album art here.

I love vinyl and half the reason I buy it is because of the artwork, but I've also had and love my Spotify account and have had one since the month the service came to the USA.

Folks complaining about Apple and art are just preaching to the choir, the vast majority of users could care less, and thats what frankly Apple and Spotify are catering to, micro thin Jony Ive devices that are one micron wide and cost $1k, small album art is a distant secondary consideration.

There needs to be a fallacy I can simply name for this kind of thinking. In a world where you can't downgrade software 99% of the time, how do you show one of these companies that the change they made is shit and you don't like it? Go on Twitter and complain? "Buying power" is also an extremely crude signal. I might stop using Spotify for all kinds of reasons, like their shoddy revenue sharing. It's not like there are 100 competitors that are each nearly identical except for some specific element like album art size and I can choose the one that agrees with all my UX desires.

Edit: It seems like a kind of UX paternalism has crept into the software industry. In the Winamp era it was possible to radically customize your music player (even making it massively ugly if you want). Over the years, more and more configuration options have been removed so now you get "dark mode" and that's basically it. Nearly all other options are chosen for you either by designer hubris or, more likely, the vendor's commercial priorities.

Boycott campaigns work, so don't know why it couldn't be applied here. Most folks don't care about album artwork though for this to ever be a thing, and I agree.

I used to buy cds and vinyl all the time bc of the packaging. If spotify totally did away with cover art I'd be annoyed, but enough to stop subscribing? Nah.

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