Ask HN: How is the Spotify app so bad? (2024)

It's one of the most popular services in the world, but has one of the worst user experiences of all the apps I use.

This is really common. It's a sign that the value isn't derived from the software itself, but what the software enables you to do. It doesn't need to be good. People pay to access Spotify's library of music and podcasts, despite the UI.

When you run a startup having people hungry to use your MVP despite it's flaws is a classic signal that you're on to something valuable. I could list hundreds of shockingly bad apps that have awful user experiences that I've happily used over the last 40 years because they all did something I really wanted or needed to do. Almost every 'enterprise' app is a total mess from a UI perspective - but they make a fortune because the value that users get from them make it worth putting up with.

People think a beautiful UI is something that every app needs, but really every app just needs to do something useful. None of them need a good UI until there's a competitor with an equivalent service that has a better UI. Only then does the UI actually matter, because it becomes something users will use to choose which service they buy.

I actually like the Spotify app.

For things I am (and maybe most normal users?) interested in, it works really nice: choose a song, listen to it, listen to the bands other songs, listen to their "radio" with similar songs, find new interesting bands, repeat.

I tried to leave Spotify. I tried to switch to Tidal, which boasts better sound quality, and most importantly, better payments to artists.

I switch between listening on my phone, my computer, other computers, and my google home devices all day. With Spotify, I can choose which device to choose to from anywhere, and I can also control it from anywhere. I can play music from my laptop, then change songs from my phone, then send it to my google home speakers whenever I'd like.

Tidal didn't have that. Didn't even have google home integration. Didn't even have a desktop app on Linux. I switched back in less than a day. As annoying as Spotify's app can be sometimes, it's the service that works across all my devices, and can switch between all my devices.

Are we talking about the same app? My experience of Spotify is that it's terrible for discovering new music - "artist radio" just gives me the same few songs and artists over and over, so if it's a genre where I already know most of the big, popular bands then very little of it is new or interesting.

How do you use Spotify to discover new music? What am I doing wrong?

> My experience of Spotify is that it's terrible for discovering new music - "artist radio" just gives me the same few songs and artists over and over

Fully agree, they personalize the radios so heavily that I just get the same garbage over and over again (this is why I use spoqify.com, not a typo)

I usually do:

1. Start a "song/artist radio" from one I like, listen to the artists I don't recognise.

2. When I find something interesting I add it to a playlist (my playlists are a bit thematic with genre/feeling, if it doesn't fit with any playlist I have an "inbox" one to sort later)

3. When I have collected a few songs (5-15) in a playlist, enable "enhance" and listen to the recommendations from artists I do not recognise (used to do it with "playlist radio" but it's been removed in favour of enhance/smart shuffle).

4. Rinse and repeat with other radios (artist radios for the new artists I found, song radio for some songs/tracks I gelled with).

Been doing that for many years, discovered a lot of music this way.

Honestly it works great now and is, I feel, better than Spotify (it was not the case a few months ago; let’s be clear).

Anyway it’s a complicated subject. I read somewhere nobody wants the same out of their music app and that’s why most of the time they end up being weird pieces of software in order to try and satisfy everybody.

I recently moved from Apple Music to Spotify to see what all the fuss is about, thinking it might get me listening to more music, or different stuff than Apple keeps playing. Using it feels like work and I don’t really get the how they expect users to use the app. I’m tempted to go see if there is a video from the designers explaining their vision so I can use it right. As of now it seems like a mess.

Also, their AI DJ makes no sense. The worst part about radio is the DJ saying nonsense between songs, and they added AI to say nonsense between songs. I was just looking for a way for it to play songs I’d probably like based on other songs/artists I like. With Apple I’d simply tell Siri, “play good music” and it would play a radio station with my name on it (without an interrupting fake DJ).

"The worst part about radio is the DJ saying nonsense between songs, and they added AI to say nonsense between songs"

Yup, sounds exactly like what a DJ does. I was driving, waiting at a traffic light, watching the minutes go by. 8 minutes. DJ still kept blabbing. Every radio station I turned to, there was a DJ saying nonsense. There's more DJ nonsense than music. That's the point I downloaded Joox, which I later switched to Spotify, and then later to YouTube Music.

I guess at some point, people listen to so much music that they want to hear a commentary or alternate view on that music. Spotify is probably at that maturity level where its listeners don't even want music anymore.

The AI DJ wasn't even saying interesting things about the song or artist. It was just interrupting to say, things like "let's switch it up and play something a little different."

If it was actually giving me some backstory or saying something interesting, I'd get it as a feature. Like VH1's pop up videos. That wasn't what was going on.

> The worst part about radio is the DJ saying nonsense between songs, and they added AI to say nonsense between songs.

I didn't know Spotify did this. Who on earth would want to listen to that nonsense by choice? That's like making a recipe app that removes all the random pointless SEO filler from before each recipe, but then uses AI to add it back in.

I find the AI DJ's nonsense to be endearing in a funny cringe way, but I definitely understand why people would want a version without it.

If you've got a broad music taste I'd recommend using the song radio for a song which fits the profile of what you're looking for. I've found it much more effective for building playlists of new music then some of their other discovery tools.

>I'd recommend using the song radio

Thanks. Being new to Spotify, I wasn't sure what key words I was looking for in the UI to trigger this kind of thing. I see where to do that now.

"Start a Jam" sounded like it would be it, but after looking it up, that wasn't what I wanted at all.

Spotify has significantly worse quality than Apple Music.

So that could be one reason it takes longer to buffer.

Citation needed. This sounds like audiophile craziness. https://support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/

256b/s AAC is well enough for it to be indistinguishable from lossless.

I moved to Apple Music because of the terrible state of the Spotify UI. I hated having podcasts and more recently audio books taking up real estate and generally just started to find it too difficult to navigate.

Apple Music isn’t perfect, but it has a more focused UI that makes it easier to find music.

They used to have simpler UI which supported default key bindings etc but then kept forcing redesigns which made the UI worse and removed things like ^F search. I switched to Apple Music few iterations ago. It's not as good as the old Spotify UI but still leagues ahead the current one.

I wish Spotify/Deezer/Apple had an SDK like libspotify used to be so that one could just write a simpler & faster client.

For those unaware, it's possible to use alternative clients for Spotify using a 3rd party daemon.

https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd

For those unaware, spotify is not a podcast player. Most podcasters get no money from spotify. Podcasts are a wild ecosystem, spotify is a business that feeds of that. Some audio productions are labeled spotify exclusive podcasts. Well, they are not podcasts. They are, like audible, audio productions on a single platform.

Fun fact, AFAICT the fastest growing major podcast platform is re-uploads of podcasts to youtube. Which makes no sense on most mobile platforms, but at least the visibility of entries to the public will be high.

> Which makes no sense on most mobile platforms

Why? I watch a lot of podcasts on youtube, it's interesting to see the interaction, so the visual component is not a negative.

In fact, the vast majority of podcasts I've heard aren't audio-only. The only one audio-only ones I've listened to are the old Opie and Anthony show uploads.

Podcast is one of two the reasons I've unsubscribed Spotify (as you describe, the UX is terrible).

The other one, I was not able to "teach" the algorithm what I like even after 3 months.

Similar here. "Podcasts" (without RSS feeds) really ground my gears and eventually I got fed up by the algorithm playing the same 8 songs I didn't like (in playlists of hundreds).

FWIW, Tidal isn't all it's hyped up to be either; they also do some dumb stuff. But it's a solid competitor that at least isn't Spotify.

That is probably the answer, even though I do not see why it cannot support both.

For example why is there no "stop after song" feature, sometimes I do not want to be "engaged" but really just listen to one song/podcast and then no more, without having to stop some random sh*t afterwards.

I remember I tried something and it did not work, but now I found 2 different toggles with autoplay. Maybe something changed again? Who knows, now it seems to work, thx for the hint ..

Edit: nope, it does not work and just plays on

Weird, maybe you had something in the queue? I think the no autoplay feature works on the level of the queue, meaning it will stop when the queue is empty.

But the rules for when the queue is reset aren't very clear, or at least I frequently end up with more stuff queued up than I though would be on there.

I know I did not put something in the queue. (Finding the queue alone is a struggle).

But there is an endless auto generated list of songs that come next ..

It is just bad UI.

(Android) It also gets easily confused with Wifi and whether or not I'm online (because I'm in a room with bad wifi reception). It sometimes blocks on playing downloaded content when there is no internet (when listening in bed and internet is turned off). This has not changed in the last ten years. Not sure why they have thousands of programmers, and tribes and squads and who knows what else.

It's barely usable for radio plays (favorites, queue, last played, ...) as it does act on songs not albums in general.

Yes absolutely. This is why I moved away. I live in London and take the tube semi regularly so offline content is non negotiable.

I migrated to Deezer then started downloading flacs from Deezer and serving them with Plexamp.

The android app has been awful for years now.Don't even think of using it if you have a bad connection, even the context menus have an animated loading circle thing.

I'm now actually trying out other services, the official youtube music app won't even launch since I don't have google play services.But there's a lot of free/open-source clients too so I'm currently going through these.

same here, very disappointing.

i suspect the client is loading "something else" (artwork, lyrics, canvas animation) over the network

You know the funny part?

On Linux is even worse.

I find Apple Music excellent for the "I had 800 CD's; now I want those same CD's, but instead in a digital streaming library on my phone".

You can add albums from the Apple Music catalog to your library. In iTunes on Mac you can change the tags if you want ("Making Movies (2020 remaster)" → "Making Movies" or something). You can easily star music, download for offline use, listen in lossless, create playlists, on Mac create smart playlists ("All albums where artis is "AC/DC" and year is between 1980 and 1990") etc.

A plex server with the Plexamp player.

I purchase FLAC on bandcamp and add them to my plex library. The mobile app lets me stream and download to the device from anywhere

It’s the modern day equivalent of collecting CDs. These releases will never leave the platform and you own it outright.

They even launched a suggested playlist feature based on ML analysis of your library. It’s not half bad

Apple Music and Tidal are the only two with high-res audio.

And since they often encode from the 24-bit studio masters you will get better audio quality than ripping from CDs yourself and likely from most “pay as you go” sites.

Looks great and nice to find companies that still care about music.

I wish Spotify would stop giving money to Joe Rogan and instead invest in hi-res audio.

It’s ridiculous that we are in 2024 and they still don’t have it.

Amazon prime music launched with high-res also.

In fact they had such a large selection of high res albums that it was downright suspicious. Albums and bands that never had releases on hdtracks, from decades ago, had 24bit streaming on prime

Really makes you think. There are quite a few blogs that open “high-res” releases in a spectrum analyzer and point out where the frequency cutoff is. They just re-encoded the original without any remastering.

Spotify went for the bigger market instead of the small niche of dubious gains. Can’t say I blame them. They have a lot of competition in 2024

Fwiw, the YouTube music android app is pretty bad too. I generally need to force stop it a couple of times pr listening session because it freezes up getting the next track.

Also find it curious that there's apparently no Bluetooth hot key to "like" the current song, only single click for play/pause and double for skip. Bit maybe that's a Bluetooth headphone protocol thing?

Do you think that this might have something to do with it? https://www.npr.org/2023/12/04/1216950219/spotify-layoffs-17...

Most likely, no.

Not using the mobile version that much, so I can't give feedback on that, but the desktop player is getting worse and worse for the past few years: searching, discovering (by browsing), library/playlist management etc.

It's like the Spotify guys are not even using Spotify anymore :)

The iOS app feels much buggier in the past few weeks. Lockups when returning to the app, phantom pausing, and worst of all, clicking the podcast I’ve been listening to doesn’t take me to the right episode… I have to scroll to find it.

Not great when you’re trying to listen to a 700 episode series!

I was recently in hospital with not-so-great WiFi.

With the mobile app, I would often notice Spotify loading album artwork, lyris, artist information and even video before playing the music. It's network prioritisation is deeply disconnected from the users wants.

I remember when Spotify heavily optimised to play music in the quickest possible time. Ensh*ttification indeed.

There's spicetify, which you can use to remove podcasts from and customize the UI of the desktop client:

https://github.com/spicetify/spicetify-cli

For me the big signal is when there are tons of years-old quality of life feature requests that are unaddressed, like blocking podcasts from your podcast feed (listen to one startup podcast and it'll constantly put more of those automatically playing), or even a less awful high contrast dark mode (or even a light mode).

My biggest bugbear is how the web app is just as atrocious. If you leave it open too long without playing something, it just won't play the next song you select (just keeps loading forever) until you reload the page. That and the general latency in UI responsiveness (Is this a server issue because I'm in Africa?)

For a company with so many engineers, designers, etc, they really miss enough low hanging fruit that they turn into papercuts. All of what I've mentioned have been issues for years.

All that being said, I haven't moved off. I still like the Discover Weekly list and the algo is pretty well tuned to my likes so I can't be bothered to train YT Music/Apple Music/whatever to find me new stuff.

I'm semi-convinced it's the bad feedback loop of analytics => product team.

"I'm totally lost in this sh*tty UI, I have no idea how it's supposed to work" looks very much like "I love this interface, I could spend hours just looking at it" if all you have is analytics data.

Nah, it's not a platform that generates money based off eyeballs scrolling through ads, keeping the interface front and center for longer etc.

Spotify optimises for music/podcast/audiobooks hours consumed or songs added to playlist/downloads etc. Being lost in the UI would very much be a negative signal in the data, and easy to separate out from "I love the app and am able to play the content I want" for any analytics team.

Spotify is used as a case example in scrum training.

No correlation implied.

Ensh*ttification - it's the most powerful force in software development.

When you have investors pushing money to spend, project managers that have to show something, and hordes of developers under your employ, even the best software experiences will succumb to feature bloat, change for the sake of change, and tooling churn.

Windows, Slack, and Spotify are perfect examples of once decent products that somehow get buggier, slower, and more confusing with every release.

Very few companies have the wherewithal to just pause, evaluate their product, and say: "nah, this is good".

* Download music you want to listen to

* $ sudo apt install vlc fzf

* $ rvlc "$(ls | fzf)"