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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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