The painful bit was that I got automatically logged out with all of those "offline" songs. Is it a feature or a bug? IMO if there was no logout then many clients would just keep playing the cached songs, and people would not notice a disruption that much.
I am under the impression that Spotify doesn't care a lot about UX in general. Inconsistencies in gesture handling, sessions still buggy after years, being logged out as soon as the API is unreachable, directly playing a song when opening a link, etc
They absolutely do not care. My favorite feature is the ability to download podcasts for offline play--podcasts that are then inaccessible when offline because the rest of the UI requires an internet connection to load and function.
You might want to have a look at Spodcast which does just that, create an RSS feed off Spotify "(s)podcasts":
Spodcast is a caching Spotify podcast to RSS proxy. Using Spodcast you can follow Spotify-hosted netcasts/podcasts using any player which supports RSS, thus enabling the use of older hardware which is not compatible with the Spotify (web) app. Spodcast consists of the main Spodcast application - a Python 3 command line tool - and a PHP-based RSS feed generator. It uses the librespot-python library to access the Spotift API. To use Spodcast you need a (free) Spotify account. Spodcast only supports the Spotify podcast service, it does not interface with the music streaming service.
I use it a lot while driving, and have to reach down to swipe the screen to skip a song. This is a pretty mindless, natural motion. Sometimes though (till I found out you can disable it) it would switch into car mode with no warning, meaning I need to look down, see the difference, and push the skip button with some precision, potentially dangerous. Why the car mode couldn’t use the swipes is beyond me, or why it exists in the first place.
I’ve since turned that off but my frustration is now from the lyrics feature. It’s neat, and interesting in very specific scenarios, but I wish I could turn it off. A diagonal swipe brings it up, meaning I have to check it, swipe down, and then try again, too much for a previously thoughtless action.
Yeah I don’t use it for its “intended purpose”, but these are little ux roadblocks that could improve others experiences. I don’t see why it can’t be slightly different.
I cancelled my subscription last week precisely because of the poor UX.
It really pisses me off that they charge what feels like a disproportionate amount (certainly more than I've ever spent on music elsewhere), offer a very simple service only passably well, then waste their revenue on SV dev salaries (with no obvious benefit to the users in features or stability) - and of course their illustrious podcast hosts.
wouldnt really call that a waste if those devs are producing meaningful features and/or fixing bugs.
devs work on the features they are told to, they don't direct what features get put in place or even how those features should behave in UX, most of the time.
seems more a design and/or project management failure, to me.
I'd say if those people are not being utilized to improve the product, then yes it is a waste - who is to blame for the waste is a different matter, but management is the obvious place to look.
Considering how shit their cents per listen rates are in recent years, they should honestly be trying to compensate the artists they host more than their devs at this point. I've cancelled my sub largely because of this fact.
Agreed, the UX is awful. Just a moment ago I was attempting to unshuffle my Discover Weekly playlist on an iPad, and honestly still have no idea how to do it. The big green play button shows a small activated shuffle icon, but how to undo it is either impossible or requires knowing the right sequence of UI button presses, swipes and magic spells.
Trivial example: the Home button that doesn't reliably take you home. It's some sort of home/back hybrid where you're never quite sure what it's going to do (this is on iOS). Instead have two buttons: one for Home and one for Back. Then we'd all know what to expect when we pressed one of them. Not difficult, is it?
More substantive example: poor integration, to the point of being dangerous, with Apple Carplay, and a generally crappily optimised, unresponsive and, yes, dangerous experience for driving with or without it. Every time my Apple Carplay connection fails it's due to Spotify. Every. Single. Time. Screw you, Spotify: I couldn't give a damn about Joe Rogan but if you don't fix your poor quality, dangerous user experience I'll cancel, because it's not worth a horrific car accident just to switch to a different playlist.
(Tangentially, since I mentioned Joe Rogan already, I'm unpleased that a bunch of songs have disappeared from my playlists because of Spotify's poor and purely reactive handling of his podcast. I like the fact that he talks to people from a range of viewpoints, many of which I disagree with: I don't like the fact that it took a social media fiasco and a bunch of artists leaving to label and tag his episodes more responsibly. You should have known what you bought when you acquired rights to his podcast: it's called due diligence. You should have had, and implemented, a business integration plan, in place from day one. Who spends $100M+ without doing this? I'm guessing all you saw is subscriber numbers. Stop being lazy.)
I wish I could reincarnate Steve Jobs so he could go and work at Spotify and fire Daniel Ek and Gustav Söderström in an elevator because I honestly can't think of two individuals more deserving of such a fate.
(Btw, I realise the thinking here is likely that if you have the artists maybe the product doesn't matter so much but, as the Rogan incident shows, having the artists isn't guaranteed. You need subscribers onboard too, to ensure that artists are less tempted by other platforms an options, which means the UX needs to be solid. Clearly it's not at the moment.)
Many (not all though), of their best engineers and designers have left after the IPO, that's why. So, a lot of people that made it a success initially have moved on. They don't pay super well, so the new people that came later on are not necessary the best.
That's why Spotify has been slow on introducing new features or fixing existing ones.
I used Spotify for free a few times and the interface is terrible . like from the early 2000s. no attempt at modernization or improvement. Compare it to YouTube.
The desktop app is indeed horrible. To start with, a substantial part of the right hand screen real estate is permanently to your social media presence. Don't want to connect anything? Still can't dismiss this entire waste of space.
On iOS it's fairly simply to remove songs from the active queue. God help you on desktop. No consistency in design.
I’m sure their UX Researchers try, but like most shops their findings never make it into the skulls of the PM’s and Devs. There’s a massive issue in our industry with R&D ignoring UX research guidance, or just flat out thinking they know better.
Their offline playback support is a joke. The iOS app will attempt to load album art indefinitely before allowing one to play saved songs – if you're on shaky internet (e.g. on the subway), you have to turn off cellular and WiFi entirely.
Google Play Music was the only app to really nail it, but Google sadly put it out to pasture.
> Google Play Music was the only app to really nail it
For what it's worth, I have had good results with Apple Music. It works great as a "custom jukebox in the sky" for me.
I use iTunes installed from the Windows Store and just drag my own music files onto iTunes. It syncs them to Apple Music where the files stand right alongside the streamed tracks from the paid service. I can put them in playlists together, edit metadata for my own tracks or Apple Music ones, see (and add!) lyrics, and so on. They even have an Android mobile app.
The thing GPM did that neither Apple Music nor Spotify do was cache played songs in an offline playlist. You could specify the size of the cache you wanted (e.g. 10GB), and each time you streamed a song it would thereafter be playable offline until dropped from cache.
You're dead on, though, that Apple Music is lightyears ahead of Spotify wrt local files.
That is very cool, I didn't know about that feature. I agree, that would be super neat. The closest Apple Music gets is you can set it up to automatically download to mobile any tracks added to library with the "+" button.
Offline is just bandwidth saving feature. It is not intended to be 100% offline especially when all service APIs are down. It is designed for no network, not handle failures of service backend.
Clients would need to keep checking once in a while to see if your account is still active.
Incidentally: @DownDetector is garbage. It merely looks at mentions on Twitter of people saying something is down. That includes incorrect speculation. And it even amplifies that speculation recursively. It’s reliably wrong, by design.
Is downdetector reliable at all? I feel every time something is down, a lot of unrelated sites also are reported as having problems. E.g. at the moment it reports AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare and Facebook among others having issues.
Because my access to it shouldn't depend on a third party's uptime. The fact that it's "a couple of hours once a year" doesn't make it any better.
We've been conditioned to just accepting that random outages and corporate decisions can take things away from us, but it is a ridiculous proposition that only benefits the bottom line of the service providers. I understand that the "convenience" angle might be attractive to some, but personally I don't think it's worth the trade-offs.
And this is not just about music, or movies. It applies to all forms of data that we have collectively agreed can just live in the cloud, because the cloud will always be there and we don't have to think about it. Until one morning you find that the cloud is unavailable, and so is all your data.
Physical media is inconvenient in a lot of ways, but to me is still an infinitely better proposition than trusting a bunch of random companies to provide me with access to digital media.
We've all come to accept random outages for so many of services we use. I wish we didn't have to because for some of these services I really don't have a backup. Given how infrequent they happen it's not worth my time to invest in having a ready backup for music streaming, when I'm not at home with my NAS. Other forms of distribution didn't have "outages" like CDs but these days when a cloud service outage happens it's like half the internet goes out. These types of outages are quite impactful.
From another perspective living in the US I'm pretty grateful that the power is super stable because so many things I rely on need power and they almost always work. In India it's common to have rolling blackouts so people are quite adapted to outages daily.
I'm not sure I accept that. A whole lot of CDs I owned at one point got scratched to the point that at least some part of a song couldn't be listened to any more. In some cases, the entire CD stopped being readable. Sometimes, they went beyond scratching to breaking. They could get lost. The players broke. Did loss of listenability due to physical degradation of media happen more or less than Spotify goes out? I have no idea. But CDs in boomboxes definitely did not have 100% uptime.
I have plenty of CDs that are nearly three decades old and still play great. The point is that the onus is on me to maintain my collection and my listening equipment. Well-kept media and well-maintained gear shouldn't break, and if it does then at least the fix is dependent on me.
I don't want to rely on a corporation's uptime and solvency to listen to music.
While this particular scenario is quite rare (this is the first time I've been personally affected since starting my membership in 2013), I understand the parent commenter's sentiment. It was a little jarring to realize that all of my library's (and basically any on-demand) music was completely unavailable and at the mercy of this issue being resolved.
Again, a temporary issue and one that happens quite infrequently, but if you already may have conflicting opinions on whether it's better to own or rent your music, this is certainly a valid point.
I feel like it's really just a sort of existential dread about being reliant on anyone for anything, other than oneself. It's like being afraid that if there's a zombie apocalypse then you won't be able to listen to the same old songs on repeat like a scene out of I am Legend
To be more generous, there are also many cases where more obscure music will start evaporating from your playlists. Some of us have serious problems with this kind of UX.
This is why I personally built a home media server. Lapsing licensing agreements, older content, escalating streaming subscription costs, etc all led me to it. The secondary effect of being able to consume the content without depending on anything other than electricity is an additional benefit.
This is something else I forgot to mention, but it drives me absolutely mental. Music vanishing from my playlists, old TV shows I'm watching are suddenly not available. Paying for that kind of experience strikes me as a horrid proposition.
As I've said before: Spotify / Tidal / YouTube Music is great for discovery, IMO. Just not consumption. I use them for checking out new artists, or albums by artists that I haven't heard before. But once I've passed from the "Huh, that was interesting" stage to "Yeah, I think I'm gonna listen to this album again in the future", it's time to buy it, rip it to MP3/FLAC(if I bought a physical copy), and get it into my media collection backups.
The whole point of music streaming services is to avoid doing this. Maybe it works for you, but that does not sound like a sustainable strategy for someone who listens to 100+ albums a year.
I don't see why. Maybe for those like me who still buy physical CD's and rip them, okay--but let's assume you buy all of your music, just digitally, meaning you purchase MP3 albums in full from Amazon/iTunes/Bandcamp, etc. Most of the work is already done for you, since the services themselves already function as sort of a "cloud backup"; your computer or smartphone fries, you can always sign into the service again from your new device and pull everything down once more. The only remaining piece is to have your own offline backup of all the stuff you purchased, in case Epic were to shut Bandcamp's doors tomorrow. It's even less likely that Amazon or iTunes would go away quickly.
And FWIW, I do personal rips when I have to, but I'm also as lazy as the next guy. Best case scenario is I buy a physical disk from the artist directly on Bandcamp which automatically includes a digital version as well. Next best, Amazon albums that include AutoRip. Finally, physical copies from private storefronts or used markets, and I'll do the rip myself.
I have like 400 favorite songs from wide variety of genres, and I've seen some songs becoming unavailable over time. And I don't know what it was, so I have no way to get it back in any way.
I have 1.5TB of music. It's because I have so much that I make sure I've got backups, backups of backups, etc.
Just get some kind of syncing client so that you can just copy the deltas when you're making backups of backups. Offsite/cloud backup couldn't hurt, either.
This is essentially what I've been doing. Spotify is usually decent enough when it comes to recommending new artists based on what I'm listening. When I find an artist whose work I plan on listening on a regular basis, I'll jump to Bandcamp or some other site where I can buy the song or album I'm interested in.
Sadly, the list of such sites seems to be shrinking with every passing year, and I've found many artists I'd like to support by buying their stuff, but they only offer streaming options. I've noticed it happens more frequently with artists that have been scooped up by a major label or one of its subsidiaries, unsurprisingly.
exactly, when i'm listening to music for 8 hours a day, discovering new artists and community made playlists is the killer feature. what i'm starting to hate about spotify is the politics behind what music is available. i invest the time into building out playlists just to have half the songs get blacked out a few days later because "money", yet the record label has the album on youtube as f2p.
also, show me how my monthly subscription is divided up while you're at it.
In the UK, physical media can be got for pennies from charity shops (our name for “Goodwill”) - It’s not a bad idea to stock up on favourite films, tv or music if you’ve got the space while it’s still possible.
Sadly I don't have a proper record player setup here—only my CD Walkman, but I have plans for something else down the line. But I do have a healthy music library on my main PC.
I live in an area impacted by Hurricane Ida. For a long while, we had electricity, but no internet. Having physical media meant I could still watch/listen to things.
You don't own media, you just pay for the right to listen/see it. A subtle but important difference. Just like software with a license granting the right to use that software.
Now of course, technically, Warner can't go after your CD collection, just like Adobe couldn't refuse you to use your boxed copy of Photopshop pre-CC...
You own the physical media but not the data (song) that’s stored on it. That’s literally what copyright is: the right to copy. You don’t buy that right when you buy the CD.
I kind of expected something that's relevant to the comment the GP made about "owning media" in the context of other distribution mechanism going down (ignoring that I indeed have the right to copy discs I own, for limited purposes), not a "did you know that owning music media means what everyone understands owning music media to mean".
Reading between the lines on the discord one, it seems self inflicted. Seems they restarted a service which caused an outage of one feature to extend to a general API outage.
and Twitter had issues a couple of hours ago. weird day, could this be some sort of attack? it's not like any cloud providers have reported issues afaik
Usually this points to something like a fiber cut or backbone misconfig. Sometimes it can also be a data center issue with some trickling effects on other parts of the network.
Assuming that there is a connection between the Discord and Spotify outages...
The Discord status page ( https://discordstatus.com/ ) says this: "We believe the cause is upstream of our service and our providers are working on determining and correcting the issue upstream."
In my experience, vague blaming of upstream providers is either BGP or a cable cut.
And Cloudflare maybe? They just announced they wouldn't be cutting off Russia which might have been the reason but I think the other services affected use Google Cloud?
Is there a minor irony that they recently rejected me without an interview for an SRE role, despite matching 1:1 in my experience to the role they had open?
I'm not bitter, but something is probably wrong when they're turning down qualified candidates without even speaking to them first.
> something is probably wrong when they're turning down qualified candidates without even speaking to them first
Maybe I've only worked at bad companies, but this is the norm where I have been. Literally anything in your resume could have triggered someone to nix an interview. Interview culture is very "best of the best" in ways that make completely backwards sense.
Perhaps you’re not the only person who applied and they saw someone else first? You can’t take it personal when companies like that get thousands of resumes.
I’m not taking it personal. I’m just shocked that they had so many great applicants when there are so many that are struggling to hire (including my company) that they wouldn't even have a phone screening interview.
This is Sweden too, where the situation is a bit more dire w.r.t. engineers.
Yet they're experiencing outages at the same time. If they don't share a platform then that actually makes it look less like a coincidence I'd say, no? (still not saying it means anything, maybe they have some joint dependencies that are down for completely unrelated reasons)
this annoys me as well, why would the app decide to log me out, when it cannot connect to the backend? I have playlists downloaded for this exact reason...
Same, it logged me out and can't log back in. I have dozens of hours of music downloaded on my phone for this exact reason... And I bought Spotify premium for this exact reason, to listen to offline music. What a shame.
I was not in airplane mode, but we were 20k ft above ground. It logged me out about 40 minutes into the flight which makes 0 sense to me.
To be fair to Spotify it never happened to me before. Maybe it’s their DRM that just locks you out if it can’t reach the server with a timeout of 1 hour or so (1 hour conditional on the last attempt being a failure).
According to Downdetector, there's a large amount of services that have outages at the moment: https://downdetector.com/
The graphs for Spotify and multiple other services look very similar, so Spotify being down might just be a part of something larger. Whether it's Russian hackers or some more mundane is pure speculation at this point.
