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Comment by ElijahLynn | Hacker News Reader

As a user, I'm pretty irritated by Spotify's "Let's shove podcasts down your throat, whether you like it or not" approach. I can't turn them off. I just want music. It is actively harmful to spam podcasts to those with AD(H)D-like tendencies.

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> "Let's shove podcasts down your throat, whether you like it or not" approach

Unless I have incorrect data, they have to pay like 70% of their revenue to record labels because they hold the rights.

Knowing that, it feels like podcasts was their "big bet" to "own" some content of their own and be able to receive a bigger share? Just an educated guess really on my end.

It's a similar to Apple's app store model. 70% gets passed on to whomever owns the rights and it is often a record company, but not always. As I understand it, some artists (like Paul Simon) own the rights to their music.

Sony Music owns 2.5% of Spotify and Universal Music owns 3.5%. I sometimes wonder if those publishers have made more money on the stock or on royalty payments? It also creates a bit of a conflict of interest for the companies in that they benefit in more than one way when by getting their artists on Spotify.

I do not think anyone has earned much money on Spotify stock except the earliest investors:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...

The record companies were early investors. As I understand it, Spotify gave the big record companies pre-IPO stock in exchange for putting their catalogs on the service.

That makes sense. I can see record companies wanting Spotify to exist just to have an additional customer to help negotiate with Apple/Amazon/Google.

I totally get why they wanted to do it - but I also found their integration into the UI off-putting. The patterns of listening to podcasts and songs are just so different and they offered little support on mixing the two (no separate queues, etc). It felt very half-baked from a UI / UX perspective.

Not that I want to give them ideas, but what's so fundamentally different about music?

How come services can produce exclusive games, podcasts, tv shows and even movies, but not music or books?

It may just be culture. Tidal tried to be a music app with exclusives, and got a couple of big names, but people are used to being able to listen to everything on their preferred platform and get annoyed at artists who go for an exclusive. I think games have the same thing to some extent.

I would note that there have been some "artists" showing up on Spotify's recommended playlists who haven't been heard of anywhere else, which are suspected of being their "store brand" (where Spotify have presumably paid some session musicians to record the song but keep all the rights).

There are plenty of books which are released exclusively on Amazon and/or Audible.

For music: Well they tried. Apple Music and Spotify had a little exclusives war in the beginning, but I think neither managed to grab enough that it mattered

I'm an executive in the music industry and I'm familiar with the details of the situation. I can't talk about the specifics, but I can tell you that your guess is very close to the reality. There is one additional twist, but you really have to understand how the music industry works to guess it.

How an industry works is not such a secret that you can't talk about it anonymously in a forum.

At least on desktop you can tweak the Spotify electron-based app with Spicetify[1].

There is already an extension to completely hide podcasts[2].

[1]: https://spicetify.app/

[2]: https://github.com/theRealPadster/spicetify-hide-podcasts

I had the same issue with Shorts on YouTube. I'd spend hours mindlessly scrolling through shorts because they shove it in your face and can't be turned on. In the end I've resorted to a modified binary called uYou+ on ios to turn it off (turns out it has some other nice features such as ad blocking, sponsor skip and 3x speed support).

Distraction Free YT extension, very much recommended!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/

I never listen to podcasts and when I launch Spotify on my phone, half the screen is filled with podcasts. One day I was on autoplay and it even thought it was a good idea to play a random podcast instead of music.

I tried Apple Music for the last few months, and while it's very bad on so many points, I like that they made a separate Podcasts app. I'm still not decided on whether I'll stick with Spotify or Apple music mainly because of the podcasts thing.

What is the reason for not jumping ship to one of their competitors?

Playlists. I can migrate them to Apple Music but the order in which I added each of these songs is important to me and the last time I tried to export them, such an order was lost.

I know I might be the minority but that's what happened to me the last time I wanted to try something different from Spotify.

If it's only the order that matters, I wonder if you could write a script to add the playlists to Apple Music one song at a time?

Apple requires you to sign up for their developer program ($99/yr) to use the Apple Music API, so you'd either have to pony up some money or do something fancy.

If you can get your data out of Spotify and into a CSV file, I think you could use Shortcuts to create the playlists and populate them.

Look up SongShift app, might be of some use. I was able to successfully migrate my playlists out of Spotify and into AppleMusic seamlessly.

It gets the order but there’s no way to preserve date information. I like having the dates because I can use my playlists as a sort of sonic journal.

Podcasts in the Spotify app drove me to try Apple Music. Apple Music has even more UX problems. In particular around their music podcasts/shows. Like Elton John has one called Rocket Hour. This may have changed but there was no way to bookmark or favorite Rocket Hour or keep track of which episode you listened to last or even to get back to it without searching for it. Other users literally suggest keeping a notes doc with the link (https://music.apple.com/us/curator/rocket-hour/993269779) and then just tapping that.

I dunno if the space needs more competition or what but UI/UX does not seem to be a priority for the main players.

Lookup Marvis app. It's an Apple Music replacement UI meant for heavy album listeners, really improved my everyday music listening experience

Marvis is my music app of choice, but it doesn’t have a way to save or bookmark Radio Shows, which is what OP is hoping for

I think it is same with Amazon Music. All I want to do is play some songs while driving without these fucking podcast shows in my face every single time. It somehow tries to block me discovering/ searching any music and keep nudging me to podcasts.

I worked around this by using uBlock Origin to hide the podcasts section.

> Let's shove podcasts down your throat

The podcast: Joe Rogan Experience

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