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Comment by transcriptase | Hacker News Reader

Their UX is infuriating compared to a few years ago. Why does it take multiple clicks to get to search? Why are my playlists etc not front and centre? Pop-ups about new albums from artists that they know I’ve never listened to and never would?

Every time I use it now, my inner voice is saying “get the fuck out of my way” to the UX itself.

What are they optimizing for?

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I think they’ve realized that as long as they don’t the licenses to the music itself, another company can always come along and eat it’s lunch (a la Disney+, Peacock, Hulu with Netflix. So they’re trying to raise the barriers to listening to “songs” rather than “whatever Spotify serves me”

Yet now they've removed playlist radios in favor of the "enhance" feature. Someone is asleep at the wheel.

"Radios" in Spotify are a shadow of their former self anyway. They used to be a theoretically infinite list of songs that you could up and down vote, which would then influence the next songs to be added. Now it's just a playlist of stuff Spotify deems similar and you essentially just have to deal with it.

Discovery via their radio used to be great. Whenever I tried it more recently it was kind of awful. I've switched off of Spotify many times over the past few years, only to regrettably come back and be disappointed again.

I wish Apple would just make a proper cross platform Apple Music client, then I could switch in peace. All the other alternatives lack some of the more obscure artists I listen to regularly. And while I try to purchase as much as I can, not everything is available digitally and I don't really want to import CDs from the other side of the world.

Yes! Radios have been totally gutted. It was my primary way of discovering new music. Now it’s biased towards music I already have liked.

Jesus Christ Spotify. Is there anybody working there who actually likes music anymore? No I don’t want to listen to the fucking Gillian Flynn novel.

> All the other alternatives lack some of the more obscure artists I listen to regularly.

Even YouTube?

they get paid by Labels to promote certain songs and artists, similar to how labels pay radio to play only certain songs. Everything, from Amazon, to Spotify, to the Google Play Store wants you to click on promoted bullshit, not search for what you actually want. Welcome to the internet in 2023.

The difference should be that users pay Spotify for a subscription.

Raise the prices if they need to, but don't try and have a subscription + "whatever ad bucks we can make" model.

Their advertising business is the only reason they succeeded and Rhapsody, Zune Pass, and Napster/PressPlay didn’t. It’s ingrained in the company

I thought it was because the major labels are also the biggest shareholders, and therefore incentivized not to hamstring the company?

Their business model has always been the latter.

Vote with your wallet.

Guess for a lot of us spotify users that'd mean stop paying for their service? am pretty close to doing so after almost a decade of paying for spotify.

yes. there are good alternatives. switching can be easy or painful depending on if you're willing to use opaque 3rd-party services to transfer your playlists (also, when I exported manually, some songs just disappeared from my "Liked"). but I highly recommend taking the plunge.

Interesting, what services do you recommend? I’m not familiar with them. I’d like to just get the song/artist names from playlists rather than all the playlists themselves.

Get to hang out with a friend who’s a former Spotify employee tomorrow so this will be a likely topic of discussion

What are some good alternatives? More visibility!

Additionally, artists can sign up to get prioritization in the radio and recommendation algorithms... at the cost of some of their royalties. You're likely already missing out on artists who don't pay the troll toll if you rely heavily on Spotify's recommendations.

You can jump straight to search using {Cmd,Ctrl}-L the same as a web browser, but for folks who're not used to key commands the decision to hide the search bar is absolutely deranged.

Nice, thanks!

Wonder why they seemed to have never prodded me about this? Rather that than (as already mentioned) prodding me about new releases from literally-who artists (to me). ;)

> What are they optimizing for?

Probably engagement. The more clicks, the better.

I've switched to Tidal. It pushes some ads too, but not nearly as badly. The discovery algorithm is slightly worse but pretty close. Most importantly it doesn't keep playing the same 3 songs (at least it's more like 30).

I left Spotify for their policies (pro-Rogan, shit pay to artists), and landed on Tidal. it's not perfect, but it absolutely fits the niche that Spotify did and feels way less stupid.

Is Tidal still prioritizing US hiphop? I really liked it (about 5 years ago) but left because they pushed e.g. Beyonce to me on every visit on every possible surface despite me having a completely different taste in music.

I don't think I've ever seen any hip hop while using Tidal, so probably no, at least if you're not interested in adjacent genres. Even the ads (stupid playlists I don't want to see, I can only explain them forcing them on me with financial interest) include a probably average amount of it.

mm, maybe. I got a lot more Kanye than I wanted (>0) early on, but I was able to just ban that artist. for other stuff, it does seem to favor US hip-hop on my account, but I don't listen to a lot of hip-hop and it's mostly US-based, so YMMV. I would say that if you're making playlists of non-US and it's pushing US suggestions, that's kind of a problem, yes.

In the desktop app Search is always available for me in the sidebar. Not for you?

I agree in general about their UX, though; it's part of the general enshittification, these companies always trying to squeeze us for more attention. The constant change has its own friction. And tt feels especially egregious on something as personal as our music.

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