

How Spotify builds products [pdf] - bernatfp
http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1018963/Articles/HowSpotifyBuildsProducts.pdf

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Kiro
Considering the number of talented people at Spotify I'm constantly surprised
by the lack of quality in their products. For some reason they are unable to
leverage the talent pool.

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thenmar
Can you give some examples? I'm pretty happy with Spotify, and I've found the
Discover tool very useful. I still read music blogs and forums, but Discover
finds me about 1 really good, yet-unheard group in every 30 I try. In my
experience, that's only a little less signal than the music blogs I use which
are curated by humans with similar tastes to mine.

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astral303
IMO, Spotify has some really large gaps in usability.

In general, there is no good concept of a music collection (despite the UI
having words "Collection" and "Library" in it). While you don't own albums in
Spotify, I still sorely miss that concept. Starring entire albums makes for a
fairly useless/unwieldy Starred playlist, so that's a no go. I've resorted to
starring single songs, then later selecting a song from the starred list and
then switching to playing the whole album (if I starred the first track of the
album, I have to select another album track, then back to first track, to make
it play the album and not just continue on the Starred playlist).

Basically, where's my damn list of Artists and Albums I've liked? In iTunes
(or mp3 folders back in the day), I would scan the list of artists and select
an album to play.

No, I do not want to have an all songs/genre playlist and then sort by artist
and then page thru pages of tracks.

The mobile app has poor information architecture. Going back to the starred
playlist (or any other playlist) takes 6 taps if I'm on the info screen.

Oh, I freaking hate the mobile info screen. To me, it always feels awkward to
hit the song name at the bottom to bring up the "now playing" screen, then
tapping "i" to show the info screen, just to select the album or the artist of
the song I'm listening to. As far as I can tell, the whole point of the "i"
button is to allow me to see the album art--but, bizarrely, seeing album art
is the default (so always requires an extra tap to do anything related to
artist or album).

Basically, it's a damn tapfest. It's frustrating when you want to switch songs
or do some navigation quickly--for example, while in the gym on an elliptical
or while running.

Also, there is no search history and the app is forgetful. Periodically, at
unknown intervals, the mobile app forgets the album/song I was playing, and I
have to re-enter a long artist name all over again. Not to mention there is no
fuzzy search. Yeah, try spelling "Irresistible Force" correctly, quickly.

There are the things that make Spotify merely a very convenient music
discovery service, as opposed to a complete, fulfilling replacement to owning
your own music library.

Finally, there is general bugs, like crashing and streaming getting stuck now
and again, which can be very frustrating in the middle of an album (the next
song streams, this song is stuck).

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secstate
Um. Maybe you covered this, but have you ever just saved an album as a
playlist?

Actually, in this regard, I think Spotify discovered the post-physical-media
world: An artist's latest album is just a playlist they put together with some
artwork. So obviously simple.

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growse
Whilst it is simple, it's important to note that the curating of an album is
an important creative output of a band/group/artist, the other being the
actual tracks.

What I really want from Spotify (or any other music service) is the ability to
have a playlist of _albums_ , not a play list of _tracks_. Spotify has no
concept of an album as a single entity, so I end up using the service in spite
of this. This might be down to how I listen to music, but I'd guess that my
album-centric view of music isn't particularly unique.

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ecnahc515
Something along those lines, but I'd like playlists of playlists. Easily
compose whatever I want that way.

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secstate
I find it funny how polarized folks seem, especially with regards to what
Spotify is doing wrong. But I suppose when you mess with someone's music
you're gonna tend to draw the ire when things don't work exactly as they are
supposed. We can't all whip the llama's ass, I suppose ;-)

I especially remember the nerds I grew up with at the height of the Ripping
Era of music, where we all had our own way to organize everything. I was
always flabbergasted at folks like my roommate in college that just had every
song in a big "Music" folder and then had the tracks arranged just so in
Winamp, hehe.

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jacobkg
If you liked this article, you would probably enjoy a previous one about how
Spotify scales teams:
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1018963/Articles/Spotify...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1018963/Articles/SpotifyScaling.pdf)

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rpc_was_taken
How? Badly. I love the large catalog of classical music, but being unable to
browse it in a unified way is a pain in the ass. They blame it on the
publisher-provided metadata, but it's not all the publisher's fault.

In the iPhone app you cannot read the whole track name, so Imagine finding a
certain piece when all you see is:

    
    
      Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...
      Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...
      Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...
      Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...
      Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...
      Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...
    

On iTunes, pressing and holding over a song shows the complete track label.
They seem to be trapped in a featuritis loop, giving no priority to feature
polish.

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meritt
I cancelled my two-year Spotify membership when I finally reached my breaking
point with them continually removing key features.

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zzzmarcus
What are they removing? I find that they're constantly adding more and more.
They're recommendations particularly just keep improving.

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slimshady
No intentions to spread FUD but Spotify fails to even remember that I like my
playlists to be sorted by recency of addition. I always have to manual click
their tab to sort it on mobile app.

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kevinchen
They do have lots of quality issues with their software -- I'm not sure why
anyone would want to build products like them.

Once, they had a Flash video of a concert on the first tab of their app that
was impossible to stop playing. The best you could do was play your music
loudly over it.

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dokem
Unfortunately the quality of the Spotify products is horrendous. I pay the
~$10 dollars a month because I absolutely love their catalogue of songs and
artists but their mobile and desktop apps are the absolute crappiest pieces of
software that I use on a daily basis. I know this is sounding snarky but the
bugs that plague their products are inexcusable.

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pilooch
Amazed at the very poor quality of their search! I ve setup a search engine
for a service that then links to spotify when the song is available. With use
of proper phonetic filters etc... we were able to get excellent relevance. I
do not understand how spotify works internally to let this unattended. Other
than that, good music ;)

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kosso
Nice! An image in there bears a startling resemblance to an image I did in
2005 to try and describe what I do as a "createc" :
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/81073195@N00/2829444578/](http://www.flickr.com/photos/81073195@N00/2829444578/)

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AndrewKemendo
I like how almost every stage has a trash bin. Sometimes good ideas don't take
off and just need to die and die quickly. A true implementation of lean.

The disconcerting part (which may have just been left out) is that there is no
trash bin in the tweak it stage. That seems fairly standard and how you get
into a piece of bloated software that just keeps piling on features without
making things easier. It could also be that these ideas are also getting rid
of features rather than just adding them but that is not how it read to me.

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cantbecool
The largest issue with Spotify is the max bitrate they use for non-
subscribers. Oh, yeah, I'm just going to deal with your ads for variable
quality, sure.

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nodata
That's not an issue, that's freemium. You can pay if you want to.

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jakejake
Does anybody know what technology is used for the Spotify desktop apps? I was
poking around to see if I could figure it out. It seems like something perhaps
written in C with a hybrid of widget toolkit and HTML. I was just curious
because I'm always interested to see how other people are doing cross-platform
desktop apps.

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InternalRun
Here:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/662121/what-language-
or-t...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/662121/what-language-or-
technology-was-used-to-develop-the-spotify-desktop-application)

~~~
jakejake
thanks!

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brenfrow
It would be nice if when I clicked (X) it closed the program... that can't be
that hard to fix.

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jseban
TL;DR: they hire an "agile consultant" to help them...

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strictfp
This particular agile consultant is pretty well-known and really good at what
he does, so I don't see what you are getting at.

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cuillevel3
So what about that Linux client...

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namelezz
Look like waterfall.

