Spotify's redesign isn't going down well | Hacker News Reader

Spotify's redesign isn't going down well

news.sky.com

56 pointsbelter78 comments

It's so annoying to me that we perfected media player layouts in the era of Winamp and iTunes and ever since then the experience has slowly and steadily devolved.

I will gladly pay Spotify $10/mo or whatever else to be able to stream all the music in the world. It is a fantastic service at a great price. What I don't want is to have to deal with an over-designed app, popups and push notifications asking me to listen to random music or podcasts that I don't care about, constant redesigns, social features, "AI" assistants, TikTok style shorts...the list goes on. Give me a search box and let me make playlists. That's it.

But, but, endless, cancerous, growth, and not a sustainable business model delivering customers what they want, is what we want, right?

Tbh, I think Spotify is actually in critical danger. Their base product of just streaming music is extremely replaceable by Google and Apple. Those two have the advantage of being able to preinstall and advertise their platforms making Spotify the next Firefox.

I imagine management at Spotify is doing anything to distinguish their product as more than just a music service.

Apple Music has been a thing long before Spotify has been around.

I remember buying an iPod shuffle back in the day and having to install iTunes. It's been a thing on iPhones forever. Yet Spotify is still here.

How long ago did MS try to copy that approach with the Zune?

Apple Music won't be a relevant thing until I can use it on my work computer, ie not tied to the Apple ecosystem.

I used the have Google music, but when they went and changed it to youtube music I ended up hating the new thing so much I went to Spotify.

Which sucks as a UI, sucks that it thinks I want to listen to the same tracks in the car as when I am working, but at least it is better than the other ones.

I believe Cory Doctorow calls it "the En-shit-ification" of things.

Winamp, iTunes, Amarok, and Foobar2k.

This really doesn't solve GP's requirement of being able to listen to "all the music in the world".

iTunes music has been around for what, 2 decades?

Have you used the Apple Music app lately? They have been following Spotify's cue more and more with every successive design change. Getting to a simple list of songs takes 4-5 clicks from the home page. All emphasis is instead on podcasts, radio, new artist promotions, curated channels and playlists and other similar stuff.

My point was that "the ability to listen to any music in the world" is orthogonal to "good UX/UI for a music player".

Yar Har Fiddle Dee Dee

I fully agree but think for a moment. I don't know how many SWEs work in Spotify but I suspect that not many are needed to maintain the application in its present state. So designers and PMs need to keep reinventing the wheel to justify paying top $ to all these people.

What you want already exists. It's called Qobuz. I switched from spotify and I am pretty happy. It does not have any bells and whistles but it's exactly what I want. Just music and playlists. With the added benefit that it has lossless audio.

The UX of Spotify have gone downhill every since they pivoted towards podcasts, and became particularily bad when they introduced the filter-system for your library and the homepage. Please, fire the product managers creating meaningless work just to keep their job. The only good addition to Spotify in the last five years is the _RE_-launch off in-app lyrics.

When Apple Music launched and updated the UI few versions later I thought Spotify has an upper hand with its simpler UI and better discovery of music. They somehow managed to make their UI worse. Incredible how companies that become popular because of their simpler UI down the road make it complicated and worse.

I doubt this redesign is driven by product managers creating work though (not that that isn't a real phenomenon) but the more insidious effect of the attention economy. Leaving users to drive and curate their own experience doesn't match the "engagement" you can gain by endlessly shovelling an algorithmically optimised feed of content into their eyes and ears, while they endlessly scroll. And the more control you have over what content is being seen, the more effectively you can monetise it by prioritising whoever pays you the most.

yeah, the first paragraph says, "will see their home screen get a substantial makeover that founder Daniel Ek says will see the platform "come alive" with different content - from videos to audiobooks."

It's not just a product manager driving this.

Seriously, when has a PM ever unilaterally stepped up and said "we need to drive engagement"? They've been hired to drive engagement. That's their job, and they need to justify their jobs only in the sense that we all need to justify our jobs.

"Engagement" is driven for by product managers and other oxygen wasters looking to justify their jobs.

The managers are just following metrics. Existing user satisfaction is not one of them.

I actually reached out to their support because the autoplaying (sound on) playlist previews on the music tab caught me off-guard. I asked how to disable the sound on them and got this as a response.

> We've checked this further and it sounds indeed like you’re seeing a recent change to the app we’ve made for some users. We’re always testing possible improvements, so you or someone else may see something new or get a limited feature temporarily.

> We understand you have some feedback about the auto previews so we suggest sharing your thoughts on our Community page: https://community.spotify.com/. In the meantime, we can recommend keeping your phone with the silent mode on and making sure your phone's sound volume is also reduced to zero.

The community page is a joke. Requests sit for months, years. Just a way to "accept suggestions" and make you feel warm and fuzzy.

Good luck!

I've been waiting 3+ years for them to add an option to purge songs from the play history: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Mu...

Apparently deletion technology has not been invented yet.

This is why I quit using Spotify. I couldn’t tune my recommendations after Alexa played music for someone else in a different language.

I simply delete my account when my recommendations get too overfitted and create a new one. As a bonus, I get another free trial.

Former Spotify employee here. I worked on the original re-design back in 2013-2014 on iOS, the one that gave the current modern look.

I don't like this new redesign as well, as it is extremely busy and tried to do too many things at a time. At some point, the features are just good enough, and they shouldn't have messed too much with it but gradually introduce new things, instead of going for such a messy redesign.

This is very common once companies get large. The engineers and designer that made it a success move one, and New Designer Directors, new PMs come in, and they want to make their mark, and start changing things around, even if they don't need to.

I still prefer play.spotify.com (the web player), as it is still the old design style.

Whatever it is they are doing... When I open Spotify, I usually know what I want to listen to. I strongly suspect the redesign is going to make it so that it takes me more time to get there, which is a bad thing.

Hi! Curious if you know and can share why Spotify does not allow removing items from the listening history? Are their AI models so crazy huge that editing history would cost them billions to recompute?

This is enshittification writ large: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

> I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

The title could be "everyone's redesign isn't going well", I am very glad news.ycombinator.com is staying with a tried and true design.

How many here, when they go to reddit, use their new design ? IIRC slashdot tied one too but reverted. And need we mention dejanews --> google groups.

If it works, stick with it.

But how else can we justify the salaries of all these PMs and designers? /s

i feel like with programming, im making this up, but like 99% of the time if you pitch a rewrite you'll be shot down and its probably right. of that 1% of rewrites,.9 of them probably should have been shot down.

do designers not do this or have this culture? "lets redo the design of everything", how does that not get shot down?

I guess it's because redesigning the UI is so much easier than rewriting the backend. There's not as many edge cases to test for, or that many dependencies.

Other than reddit, I think the vast majority of redesigns went well.

How many people are still wanting their iOS 6 or old YouTube designs back? It’s a bit of a shock when it happens but eventually you just get used to it and realise the old one actually did look worse.

Reddit is an exception. It looks fine, but it runs like shit.

Thinking of the Reddit redesign: depends what you mean by "works".

Does it work for end users? As long as too many don't leave or are replaced by new users who didn't know any better, who cares?

If it encourages people to download an app instead of using a broken web UI, allowing for better data collection and monetization, then it "works" just fine.

That depends on if they're using Reddit's own app or a third party one.

> I am very glad news.ycombinator.com is staying with a tried and true

Me too.

But I'd also enjoy laughing at a comically bad "Show HN: I redesigned HN".

Reddit doesn't care, the average age of their user has decreased significantly over the past few years, which coincidentally also means a large part of the user base has no idea what it looked like before the redesign. The new users are happy with the instagram-style, image-based, infinite scrolling design.

I like the Reddit redesign from a design POV but holy shit this is one of the slowest websites I've ever used.

Their shitty JS code slows to a crawl on my fucking AMD 5900X.

Does it even matter if it has good feedback or not? Everybody hates every new app redesign, yet everbody still uses them and hates more the next ones and companies keep making millions and billions of money. I wish people would just uninstall any app they don’t like or they would consider addicting.

Some time last year I finally realized it's really only going to become worse in the foreseeable future (I could've seen this earlier, but had faint hope left that at some point they'd have to listen to their customers). It has consistently gotten worse over the last 5 years I've been a customer and podcasts were my final straw.

I moved to Tidal. It's not exactly perfect either (still pushing crappy playlists on you), but at least they take their job somewhat seriously: Playing me my damn music without too much fuss. Their algorithmic recommendations have become quite good too - even this Spotify somehow managed to mess up, playing me the same 10 songs all the time.

I've migrated too, but the biggest letdown for me so far is the total absence of genre playlists. If you're lucky you'll find 3 playlists by users when you search for something like "Deep House", it's really not great for deliberate discovery :/

But the quality of the audio has locked me in hard.

I’ve found that their editorial playlists are pretty badass but the problem is they don’t have obvious names. Like I’ve got one I really enjoy that is basically non-country music with pedal steel guitar that’s titled “Space Western” and there’s a slowcore playlist I dig called “Sad & Slow To The Core”. All of that to say- you’ve just gotta poke around. They didn’t even introduce user-generated playlists until fairly recently I think

Yeah I made the switch to Tidal a few years back and am quite happy. UI is simple, usable, attractive, software works mostly flawlessly, and the algo is indeed amazing. Spotify’s recommendations were so shallow for me compared to Tidal. I actually now discover most of my new artists through the Tidal algo

Oh and my favorite aspect of Tidal is being able to browse the credits for releases and find things like names of producers, writers, session players

I thought superior UI was the reason to use Spotify rather than YouTube Music, at least if you don't care about Spotify's exclusive podcasts?

I prefer not using anything than bad ux. I uninstalled the app because the android app ux was bad and i couldn’t tune the recommendation engine. Now autoplay? Good luck if there are no settings for this. Same applied to fb, insta and similar apps btw.

I know that my anecdote is largely worthless at scale - but I've been with Spotify since high school and there isn't much, if anything, that will get me to leave.

It has my entire life wrapped up in the platform through all of my playlists - but the real value, for me, is still being able to access the profiles and playlists from friends that are no longer here that are preserved forever(.) - our stories are saved in the both the playlist name and songs within it that have never been removed from their catalog.

I, like most everyone else at my school, was only using Pandora (in high school) - but it was not widely loved as it had been steadily going downhill (before 2015); when Spotify was released it, nearly instantly, captured me with the design [1], catalog, and ability to discover adjacently related artists. My 'Daily Mixes' are all very, very good - and I understand that is because I've spent the better part of a decade curating my experience.

UI is whatever at the end of the day - sometimes changes are abrupt, clunky and non-intuitive (looking at you, Reddit Redesign ::middle finger::) but the underlying truth, for me, is that I'm fully adopted to the service - I've 'been there', so to speak:

- I remember in 2014 when '1989' by Taylor Swift was released and her music had not been added to the Spotify catalog; it was a waiting game but it eventually got there

- The 'Spotify Wrapped' was really fun to share with friends - and it still is! It was pretty funny to see 'Reddit Recap', along with other services, follow the format. Plus, I still have access to all of my old 'Wrapped' playlists since 2016.

- They sent me a 'Car Thing' for free, I was able to have Hulu in undergrad, they've sent me some gifts for being a 'superfan' over the years which was fun.

I hear what you're saying about uninstalling apps - the /spotify sub is kind of an echo chamber of complaints - which is okay and is their prerogative - but I just don't feel compelled to participate because I've been with it so long and it has consistently achieved the singular goal of what the service is, and does it very, very well (in my opinion).

[1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Community-Blog/10-Year-Evol...

(.) of course Spotify will remove those accounts at some point; but I've made my own backups of them so they are "immortalized" for when that day does come eventually.

Cool. I wonder how they'll continue their "items must be bigger". Next up: Having to scroll to fully view a single cover.

Whitespace makes up for design & development skill and effort. You can get away with drawing & programming just one button and making it fill the screen instead of programming two.

For anyone looking to leave: FreeYourMusic is a cool tool to transfer saved albums and playlists. $15 one time fee, and for my library got about 90%+ accuracy matching songs from Spotify to Apple Music. Saved a boatload of time.

Overall I think Apple Music is missing many things I'll miss. Spotify's recommendations engine is just better (though, maybe as I use AM a bit The All-Powerful AI will improve). The Apple Music apps have a better designed UI IMO, but they're buggy and full of jank; iOS is good enough, but MacOS and web need a lot of work.

[1] https://freeyourmusic.com

I'll commit to canceling Spotify as soon as they roll out autoplaying video. What's the best alternative system I can have lined up to switch to on that dark day?

they did....

I doubt anyone who can do anything about it will read this, but if I get a single piece of autoplaying media that I didn't choose, I'm ditching Spotify that day.

I will cancel my Premium subscriptions once I see this update rolled into my phone.

I promise.

And I will uninstall the app, too.

I will keep my account for the hope of a future rollback.

Spotify...SUCK ASS with its new UX! Holy Balls!

Why doesn't Spotify have a dislike button? There are two or three songs that infest my daily mixes. They're like itches I can't scratch.

Hiding an unwanted from a playlist seems to be just a client-side action that doesn't tell the server anything. And the feature isn't implemented on Linux or Tesla anyway.

Every year Spotify gets worse, and I say this as a 10yr premium subscriber

The only thing spotify should be doing is provide an api to access music with correct tags. That is all. That would be a big improvement over what they have been doing for years.

I'd be curious to see before and afters, I've never used Spotify. Been using SoundCloud for the past... 10 years? Has everything I need and nothing more.

Why would Spotify work on a UI/UX instead of adding HiDef audio?

Pandora is a nice alternative to this crap

Does pandora even let you choose the songs? Pandora sucked for at least a decade because of their stupid “radio” model.

Why? This is so frustrating.

Pandora is still better

I don’t know why people suggest Pandora as an alternative to Spotify. They’re completely different things. Unless something has changed in the last few years Pandora doesn’t let you listen to albums, or even songs by a single artist. It’s like radio, and Spotify is like a music library.

True, but after many hours on Spotify, a curated (even by 'AI') "radio" on Pandora is a good change.

good for me, I never update.

This design seems just fine: https://www.navidrome.org

Try live: https://demo.navidrome.org

One often wonders how an obscure open source project with a minimal amount of commits can achieve the same or better as these multi billion dollar publicly traded paragons of innovation.

Do we really need to wonder that long why a tight knit group of people is able to outperform a big corporation on design?

This thing is not only better designed it has all the same functionality as Spotify and a few other things. It is a complete replacement.

What do all the people at Spotify do?

Agreed that (ceteris paribus) a discrete open source project can have an edge on design, because it it's generally going to have a smaller scope, a more crisply defined mission, and fewer stakeholders to put their grubby fingerprints on the vision. As a designer, my most hated enemy is a system that cannot be simplified, because there is some arbitrary requirement that it remain as bloated as it's always been, plus let's keep shoveling more features on top of it because a VP said so.

An additional advantage a FOSS project has, in theory, is that it probably doesn't have shareholders that demand growth and increased engagement all the time. So many bad product choices can be explained by the observation that companies with a huge market share still have to keep growing somehow, so they're going to try to keep users in the app longer, or just throw out a bunch of new features they hope will stick, whether anybody wants them or not.

Or, the cargo cult method: redesign the app to copy whatever is currently growing, hoping that will work.

Obviously, not all open source projects are well designed, and not all bloated unicorn products are badly designed. There are other factors.

Sutor, ne ultra crepidam.

Warning: https://demo.navidrome.org hijacks the back button, open it in a new tab

I quite liked that, but I have to say that this is an exception.

Most FOSS UI/UX is pretty poor. (and I say that with affection as a person who generally prefers FOSS).

If I had to speculate though, it's that sometimes things with fewer opinions can end up being better than things that have many opinions.

Think of all the benevolent dictators in tech, or the cult of personality around certain people like Hideo Kojima and Quentin Tarantino. A large part of that can be attributed to them taking every detail into consideration and micromanaging.

Certainly not advocating for that, but a strong resolute singular opinion, if good, can be better than corporate consensus.

Would be more helpful if the site had a single screenshot or video of how it works without needing to create an account.

You're not creating any accounts, it clearly says: "Please login with username demo and password demo".

I challenge the 'clearly' in your comment: It's a saturated blue text on a blueish, gray background. I would not have seen it without your comment :)

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