I've used Spotify for ~9 years years exclusively for music streaming and I guess I get a podcast suggestion on the homepage every once in awhile but I just ignore it and move on. You can permanently hide the "friend" view in settings, no one I know has used it since college.
Aside from moving some small things around so they take 2 taps instead of 3 or 4, their UI has barely changed at all. It has a working Linux client. It has boundless capability to help you discover new music.
I don't know why people on here act like Spotify is an abomination, you can still just buy and own your music if you insist.
Literally the only thing I would change is for them to pay the artists more. And I'd happily pay triple the price to make that happen.
1. I used to actively look forward to my weekly recommendations. By the end, they were recommending music that was already in my most played. And lots of generic indie folk crap that all sounded the same. I didn't seem to be able to convince it that I didn't like it.
2. I'd search for specific albums by specific artists and get guided instead to playlists.
3. Forcing it to play an album in the original order was strangely difficult when playing on a smart speaker.
4. Downloaded music wouldn't play on a device with poor internet. Sat on a train enough times unable to listen to music that I used VLC instead.
5. It sometimes took 20-30 seconds (and even a restart of the app) to get it to play a track. On a newish iPad (same on iPhone) and decent internet.
Spotify's whole mission seems now to be less about appealing to music lovers, and more about generating a constant background noise.
I'm not sure why they keep this hidden but it's all the Spotify-generated playlists. Still, I feel that they are boxing me into arbitrary niches of genres so I make sure to look for new music elsewhere.
> 4.
I have noticed this as well. I typically turn my internet off completely at which point Spotify does not try to load from server and lets me listen immediately.
> I used to actively look forward to my weekly recommendations. By the end, they were recommending music that was already in my most played. And lots of generic indie folk crap that all sounded the same. I didn't seem to be able to convince it that I didn't like it.
This is the way of the Discover Weekly, it recommends music that is sonically similar to what you listen to most. Eventually you run out of music that is actually good that is sonically similar to what you already listen to.
You can also do
* song/album/artist radio on any song/album/artist you hear, which will be matched to that song/album/artist and not your personal pref.
* release radar - new song release weekly by your favorite artists or similar artists
* automatic mix playlists with a friend that bring in their music preferences
* daily mixes - 90% songs you like and already listen to, separated by genres, with a handful of new ones mixed in
... and that's just a small percentage of what is or can be automatically generated by Spotify. There are endless user-created playlists to explore.
> I'd search for specific albums by specific artists and get guided instead to playlists.
The search can be filtered by whether you want songs, albums, artists, playlists, podcasts, or profiles. It's the top, most obvious option on search, right below the search bar.
Their search has also improved massively in the last few years to where you don't need to filter and can just type the song name and artist/album name in the same search to filter out all the similarly named songs by other artists - it no longer indexes the search on just a single attribute.
The rest sound like device issues. Never encountered them across Androids, iPhones, Ipads, Macbooks, Linux laptops, etc.
Yeah, I actually found a lot of great music from Spotify's suggestions that I wouldn't have listened to otherwise. However, their suggestions for me are now stuck in such a specific (and frankly kind of weird) musical niche that they've become useless.
A big part of it is probably because I try to only use Spotify for discovering new music. Anything that I know I actually like gets added to my local music library instead and is never played through Spotify.
edit: Is there a way to tell Spotify to forget what it thinks it knows about my taste in music? I think I'd prefer starting over from scratch instead of trying to feed it more information about what I already listen to.
Contact the support desk. They helped me migrate to a new account once and migrated everything in my library over. Idk about the recommendation engine bc that wasn't a concern of mine but I had a human on the other side helping me figure out my situation through email. This was 2019ish
How are you getting so few podcasts? I never use Spotify for podcasts but it is 50% of the Home Screen - every other row. At some point they took to embedding podcasts in playlists but it seems they stopped later?
I don’t like how they play hide and seek with key features - they added lyrics, then they go rid of lyrics, then they added genius, then they got rid of genius, now they have lyrics again… why not give me both?
Also embarrassing that they have infinite resources to screw up the podcast ecosystem, yet they’ve fallen behind Amazon Music, Apple for quality and format choice (lossless, Atmos).
Aside from moving some small things around so they take 2 taps instead of 3 or 4, their UI has barely changed at all. It has a working Linux client. It has boundless capability to help you discover new music.
I don't know why people on here act like Spotify is an abomination, you can still just buy and own your music if you insist.
Literally the only thing I would change is for them to pay the artists more. And I'd happily pay triple the price to make that happen.