I am honestly looking to move to a competitor because of their podcasting and audiobook efforts. Well, and I don't necessarily care about those things per se but Spotify used to be a focused music app, and they keep removing things from the app in favor of whatever new "growth thing" they want to do this year. I never know when I load up the app what is going to have changed and take me an extra 5 minutes to find what I want.
They have done so much damage to their app's usability by trying to "grow" that someone could probably sell me on some ultra-premium subscription that actually had a good music player that functioned more like the music players of 15 years ago.
There’s a lot about the Music app for Mac that makes me wonder how a trillion dollar company can produce such a crappy website (yes it’s a webview, not native), and the iOS app is jittery and buggy in its own way, but in the end I do agree it’s the best option around, and I’ve been a happy-ish paying customer for almost a decade now. (part of that time I had Spotify too)
You can avoid most of the annoyances by always using the Songs view and hitting Command-B to get the columns browser like iTunes. Then edit the columns to browse in the menu.
That's a neat trick! I just wish there was a Playlist option and Favorites. (The "Groupings" component is empty for me, not sure if that is supposed to have the playlists)
For playlists you can choose “view as songs” in one of the menus and then enable the column browser. I have a smart playlist for the classical genres that I do this for.
The groupings is a tag that’s free-form text: one nice thing about Apple Music is you can edit the tags, even if you don’t buy the music. I typically split “Classical” into “Baroque”/“Classical”/“Romantic” and then rewrite “composer” to be “last name, first name (years of life)”
They have done so much damage to their app's usability by trying to "grow" that someone could probably sell me on some ultra-premium subscription that actually had a good music player that functioned more like the music players of 15 years ago.