Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies".
I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples:
- Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
- When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the
search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first?
It truly has been one of the worst UX experiences and poorly made apps that ever made it to mainstream.
I remember a decade or so ago there being a bunch of buzz about them in software dev because they were a microservice node.js/react stack or something with each UI element or portion of back-end having a separate dev team.
I can vividly remember thinking "oh that's probably why when I change song sometimes the album art doesn't update."
they're living proof your product doesn't even need to be that good you just need to be first to market and not really piss anyone off.
I worked for a startup in 2019 which was really pushing the "Spotify model" of team structure. Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership. The fact the technology output of the Spotify model - the Spotify app - seemed to be kind of crap didn't seem to matter. I think the main output of the Spotify team structure was blog posts promoting the Spotify team structure.
> Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership.
Gross over-simplification. For anyone curious they have videos out there, though they are 10+ years old now so may no longer be accurate, but in 2019-era this was still a thing (company I worked for did it too).[1]
This video was created in 2014 and was more a description of what they strived for at that point rather than of the full messy reality. Spotify quickly after that grew larger than those ideas would sustain (without changes) and rapidly became more alike any other tech corpo. Certainly around 2019-2020 it was not like in the video by any means. Some structures or names of concepts stayed way longer than the actual practices as described.
(I was active as a coach in Stockholm around this period and know multiple people, both engineers and coaches, who worked at Spotify including Henrik the author of the video.)
The Spotify model is basically just Amazon’s team-owned KPIs and independence, put into a UI so you can really see how much their app is conways law.
This is why all the sections of Amazon.com are barely coherent. AWS does this too but it’s more naturally split and text works better than stateful rich media.
> so you can really see how much their app is conways law
The headache of using the shared playlist "Jam" feature and trying to add a song without playing it directly. There is like a separate queue system for "Jam" and things work differently.
Right now, if you have video clips in Spotify enabled, your lockscreen controls will display 'Artist' - 'Song' - 'Video Available', instead of 'Album Name'. If you disable video all together, it just leaves that area blank instead of displaying the album title.
This has been a thing / issue since 2025. It's pretty clear the video team probably put that in to bump video interactions, then the whole team got put on something else and now this problem is blackholed. The most bizarre to me is: even Spotify's top managers must use their own product when they helicopter to home, right? So they would see this too.
Where is a Jobsian anger for user experience when it is needed. Although in that respect even Apple is in the gutter these days.
Totally agree. They also have some stickiness going for them (at least for me). Now that I've organized my music in Spotify and have my habits in place that deal with the crummy UX, I've gotten numb to the poor UX.
Case in point, I make a daily playlist for running and that UX is frequently changing and often for the worse, but I deal with it because it's a habit that costs me a few seconds maybe a minute per day. The cost of switching to a new thing just feels daunting so I stay.
I also am guilty of enjoying the wrapped summaries at the end of the year :)
I definitely enjoy Wrapped. But also something that keeps me in Spotify is the social aspect. If I want to make a playlist for someone, 95% of people I know use Spotify, so I need to have Spotify.
Yeah this is a good point. They also have a feature that lets you build and mix playlists together with others, not my personal speed but adds to the stickiness.
I also enjoyed wrapped, but at some point they made it only viewable in the app. It was previously available in the browser. That was the last time I thought about it.
Good point. Regrettably, newer phones have eliminated external SD cards. I preferred upgrading my phone storage on demand and having external card for stuff like MP3s and videos and manually doing large data transfers directly on my computer.
I carry my entire music library on my phone in Opus format. Smaller than a similar quality MP3 and good enough for the times I’m likely listening offline (working out, riding transit, on a plane).
Yeah last I knew the Spotify desktop app loads many dependencies in triplicate or more because each pane is its own independent iframe universe, all so the engineering teams don’t need to talk to each other and they can A/B test incessantly. Inefficient madness.
It's a music player, and it's way too heavy for what it does. Well, it does a lot it doesn't need to, too. Uses 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop atm. Since I only have 16GB on my work laptop that's noticeable. I'd love it if Spotify AB could replace its client with a native Rust one, although using an immediate-mode GUI library like fastpotify does might not be the best option...
Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. Feel like Spotify's recommendations have taken a nosedive lately, so that wouldn't hold me back too much.
> Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch.
i use apple music. love it way more than spotify. i originally got it because their descriptions of albums and their playlists are done by actual music nerds. i use the website on linux since it’s my daily/work driver and their app on my phone and macbook when i use it. the apple music app was fine on windows before i switched to linux entirely. definitely leagues better than itunes was.
have the family plan and i never hear complaints from the family members who use it on android.
i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist and suddenly it would just be gone, like not greyed out, just gone. so irritating.
in terms recommendations, apple is a definitely far better than spotify, but it’s still nothing compared to music store nerds, college radio, or friends. recommendation algorithms from every platform are trash and just can’t compete with other people, at all. go to your local record store, look through the employee recommendations or just talk to them, most of them are working in a music store because they love music (its not for the money lol) and then buy the vinyl, you’ll thank yourself later.
Apple music still gets a bit of a bad rap, the first iteration of the desktop and mobile apps for it were god awful. And if you lived outside of the west coast of the US, buffering was a noticable issue as they rather stupidly centralised all streaming out of one location in California for a long time. If you hit skip a handful of times from a UK/EU machine for example that was it, game over, apps locked up and you've gotta force quit.
It's way better now, and the recommendations are pretty good. The app is still crap though (although granted significantly better than Spotify!). Theres some bonkers UX decisions and the mix of Apple Music and iTunes store is piss poor. It's just got some illogical crap going on where depending on where in the interface you right click a song or artist it changes what options you'll get.
This is so confusing to me, many people say that, but a year ago my wife and I tried to switch to Apple Music. Bad recommendations were the main reason why it didn't stick for us. Every time my children would listen to some kids songs a few minutes later it would start playing "random" songs.
Maybe it's similar to Apple Maps, it works good for the American market, but once you try it in other countries/languages the quality is not the same.
Apple Music has native clients on macOS and Windows (the latter being a greenfield WinUI app rather than based on iTunes heritage). No native Linux app, but unlike Spotify they actually allow third party clients to exist and even furnish a library for devs to use, and so third party clients like Cider[0] exist on Linux. It also has a web app that can be installed as a PWA.
‘Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from creators all over the world.’
I left in the middle of their ‘we do Podcasts’ bs, where they were pushing Joe Rogan hard.
I think a lot of people were in that camp. I'm not going to sign up for a Spotify account to listen to Rogan. I don't really have any problem with him and have found many of his guests interesting. No hate for Spotify either--I have never used the service so I don't really have an opinion about it, but the overhead of creating and maintaining another account and app was not something I was going to do for one podcast.
Isn't it just another ad distribution platform? The amount of ads they started to push to paying(!) users recently makes me want to cancel it every day (but I'm also too lazy to seek alternatives).
I get ads in podcasts. Not sponsored segments that the podcast creator inserted/narrated themselves (like used to happen), but ad served by Spotify itself, injected into the podcast. Easily 5 minutes in 30 min podcast[1], though this varies and I'm sure it is configurable by the podcast publishers.
1. This is not by feel, Spotify leaks it by displaying the original length and then updated one once it loads.
Other platforms do this too like pocketcasts. I assume it's the backend distribution network identifying your IP address and inserting 'relevant' ads. I don't believe it's being added by the podcast app (though for Spotify it may be, don't know)
Try using it abroad in a non English speaking country. You’ll notice the ads because they won’t be in English. This happens to me on Pocket Casts every time I travel.
For the monthly price of Spotify, one could rent a VPS and host Navidrome on it. In case you already have spare capacity, then it might be (almost) free.
Quite annoying when, as we see in the tv show “the playlist” that traces back the story of Spotify, the founder put a huge emphasis on performance to differentiate them from the rest and create the best possible UX…
I switched from Spotify to Amazon Music about 9 months ago, and cancelled Spotify Premium as a result (due to price, not bugs). Amazon Music is so much worse.
1. If you have no connectivity, the app will frequently get stuck in the offline state, playing the spinner indefinitely, even after connectivity has returned. I had similar issues on Spotify, but Amazon Music is so much worse.
2. I had Amazon Music eat my entire cellular plan's data monthly allowance in a day, after it seemingly got stuck in a loop trying to download the same podcast again and again. The podcast is unplayable when it gets in this state, even on perfect Wi-Fi, it just never starts playback. This has happened twice now (incidentally on the same podcast, but different episodes), even after deleting and reinstalling the app entirely.
The second bug is a deal breaker, so I've gone back to Spotify.
I canceled Spotify a few months ago have been using a free Amazon music trial. It's staggering how the Amazon interface is just worse in every single way.
Concurrent to this streaming evaluation, I inherited a Sonos system and by the gods is that app pitiful! You would think the premium sound solution that is supposed to "just work" would prioritize UI.
I mean, Amazon just sucks in general when it comes to design. I don't understand why Amazon videos (or whatever their purchased streaming app is) doesn't even queue up sequential movies automatically. It'll play the first Harry Potter movie, then skip to the third, fourth, and then the second, etc. It's not just HP , either.
Why is spotify so popular?
There are different solutions to listen to music.
What does spotify do that almost no one else does?
Is it the music library or something else?
I use youtube music, but I am looking for alternatives (but not spotify for various reasons).
Because as much as the app sucks the everything else is better than everyone else's music app, at least here in India where we have Apple Music as well. Recommendation, organisation, playlist - it feels like Apple Music is doing all that for a different species altogether. Now I already have said how bloated Spotify iOS app is and I still take it any day over Apple Music's native app. Hell, there are flows in Apple Music that has never gonna past a click at certain page whenever I've tried (that's quite a few in times in last few years). Esp. flows around which they try to play with iCloud and social aspects. Hell, I can't even decide what not to see on my Apple Music home screen. Sometimes I've to do few sipes to reach what I am looking for. Even with all the bloat Spotify never tires me like that.
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it just works. I’ve never had any of the issues people are mentioning in this thread. The app isn’t slow or buggy for me, I’ve never had artists I listen to disappear from my playlists, and I can find pretty much every song I want to listen to. Most people I know use Spotify too, so sharing stuff is just a little more convenient.
Other people no doubt have legitimate complaints, but using Spotify is barely registering as a problem compared to other applications I have to deal with.
$25/month for 5 users "all you can eat" music library every month is incredibly hard to beat, even if self hosting terabytes of your own music library.
I have been on Spotify from almost the beginning, and see zero reasons to switch. The app never bothered me at all - I find the reactions in this thread startling.
I have no issues with Spotify either, but my usage pattern is pretty simple.
I search for the album I want to listen to and then listen to it. Sometimes I search for an artist and then locate the album in their discography and listen to it.
The ‘Jam’ function is fun when you have a group of people listening to music together.
I use the discover weekly / radio / and other discovery features all the time, and still never had a problem. I mostly use apple hardware + osx and ios, however, so perhaps mileage varies on other platforms. It worked fine in Firefox on Linux when I tried, but I didn't push it too hard - usually when I'm at work, I just listen via the phone.
I have absolutely noticed all the complaints and stupid problems with the App on desktop. It constantly breaks in stupid ways. Every few releases, the "Discover Weekly" generated playlist loses the ability to hide/disable songs which is supposed to provide signal to the system to recommend fewer songs you dislike. So of course it barely works even when the UI element is there. 1/4 of the time the discover playlist is exclusively songs Spotify should be able to figure out I do not like at all. But song recommendation hasn't really advanced past what EchoNest demonstrated over a decade ago, and unlike most situations I comment on, I actually did a project to try and make a ML model for music like that and understand why it's difficult.
One time an employee even stated in the support forum that the ability to disable songs on the Discover Weekly playlist was purposely removed! Yet it was back within a year.
Spotify as a service is also pretty shitty. Their catalog has constant churn from whenever they change licensing deals, but they make no effort to point old playlist references to the exact same song under a different database id. It's infuriating, because it means that playlists rot, and often within a year! Every time I look at my saved songs, more are just missing. They colluded with rightsholders to rip off artists even more, and they have been purposely colluding with a company (run by a friend) making "AI Music" to swamp the service with so they can manipulate the royalty pool to pay out even less money to real artists.
I don't switch because the whole "Play songs" feature works just fine, I like the discovery features when they are semi-functional (I even use the AI DJ garbage sometimes, and it works well!), and the alternatives are Youtube (Which I hate but will probably switch to if Google ever succeeds at banning ad blockers from Youtube), and Apple, who's entire theory of business is hostile to me and I don't own any iDevices.
I use Youtube also, I subscribe to Premium so that includes music and is ad-free. Never not found a song or artist I was looking for.
I listen to music mainly in the car or maybe as background when I'm cooking or doing other chores. I am not someone who has earbuds in all day or who does focused listening or spends time making playlists or seeking out new artists in my favorite genres. So the playlist management, discovery, etc. features and whether they work well are not really relevant to me. I care that its main functions are easy to use and work, and YouTube music does that.
Spotify has gone downhill in that regard for sure. It floods my pages with "created for you" which is just the same 4-5 artists played in the last few weeks ago kludged together into a playlist. Alongside some of the worst music you could imagine (Payola? Idk..)
Any recommendations anyone has for music discovery I'm all ears. I recently moved away from a town that had a 10/10 radio station and I'm really feeling the TOP-40-only pain.
I miss my old Google Music premium account. Those song radio stations had amazing variety. It's incredibly obvious that Spotify plays what you like unless you go out of your way to listen to something new or a new releases playlist but I wish there was a knob I could twist to adjust the temperature of my playlists.
they try to sneak in stuff like payola because they dont have to pay high premiums like taylor swift so its in their interest to move ppl away from top artists into arcane.
Another reason why they are so popular is that they were first to market. They’ve been good enough that they have not lost first mover advantage that other first movers often lose (MySpace for example)
I've cancelled mine 5 years ago after they keep showing me ganster music and podcasts on my main page, even though I no history of listening or liking such content. So they keep trying to force it into my life. Secondly, they messed up the explorability of artists, playlist and related music. They also removed music from the catalogue, meaning on my playlist there are big memory holes of my favourite music, as they don't even show the artist or song name anymore. They also broke the offline-mode for when I drove my car.. so even if I switched it to offline-mode, music would still not play (after they downloaded and using 10GB+ on my phone). Then they added Joe Rogan and pushed other politics and stuff, more mainstream gangster shit. I just needed a good music player with a good discovery system and decent offline-mode. It used to be very simple. Now its a mess.
So my only path/answer to this was to cancel it. They poisoned the well so efficiently that I will never trust another streaming service again for my lifetime. I hate rewarding bad business practices, businesses pushing their ideologies towards me. No thanks.
I ran sound at a friend's wedding recently and unfortunately the music was all on Spotify. Every time I tried to play a specific song from a playlist, "Spotify can't play this item right now" and it would skip to the next one (or the one after that). I ended up having to yt-dlp all the timeline-specific songs.
But how would the App be deciding that? Listening for large crowds? Listening for it's own output from high output speakers?
Spotify will keep the entry in a playlist even after they lose the rights to a song, or worse, keep the rights under a different internal database entry. That's how you get songs that they "Can't play right now", which is a horseshit error message for "Spotify doesn't have this song anymore" but they don't want you to recognize just how much their catalog is constantly rotting and rotating.
They’ve left Airplay out of their Mac app for the history of the company and I have no idea why. They have hundreds of engineers. I have airplay running on a raspberry pi since 2019.
The black and neon is truly a not-good choice for a UI. Nevertheless, they persist.
Apple Music has a much better UX. Things like “play next” when you want to play that song next but not clear your other queued up songs are little treats that Spotify took years to catch up to. Many of the other bugs—which people document for them!—go untouched for literally years.
It’s fascinating to me how companies like this ignore easy wins for their users. Have a couple engineers burn down all of those and you’ll win fans (or at least not create enemies.) Take the wins!
i'd love it if spotify split into two companies:
- an enterprise platform that just provided a an API to access/play songs and direct the payment to the correct rightsholders
- a consumer app that built on top of that to provide the 'spotify' we all have
let a whole ecosystem of music streaming apps take off that cater to different niches of listeners.
each app would be able to differentiation themselves with their UI but also features like recommendations/playlists/etc. And spotify wouldn't see them as competitors because they'd still be getting their cut because they all go through their API.
This seems a bit harsh. In my experience, it basically works fine for playing music. I haven’t noticed it being particularly slow either. Could it be due to having different hardware, different expectations, something else?
Until you want to play back a playlist in random order over airplay or bluetooth, then the decade old bug with thousands of replies on their forum confirming it surfaces, and it only loops the first 100 songs in the playlist.
The number of bugs in their service that have existed since inception is insane. It's a buggy mess, and the UI & UX is comically poor. Not to mention the resource usage, as someone else pointed out below its incredibly insane that they think it's ok for it to be such a massive resource hog.
> Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
If I remember correctly, it has a plus on the side to add it to the playlist. Clearly different I guess (and why would you want to listen to a song before adding it to the playlist amirite?). I also love the way you have to refresh a list to get 3 new songs instead of just getting a scrolling list where you can go back.
I think the notion that it's the worst piece of software is a bit of a stretch here. I've used various streaming music players and Spotify has been the best by far. Doesn't mean it's perfect.
I get that not all edge cases (eg swipe gestures) are bullet proof but that doesn't make it terrible software.
It's objectively really bad at a lot things. I've always had the feeling that the music is not even a primary feature of their product.
The last time I used it, I uninstalled once I realized that my kids could watch Logan Paul YouTube videos through the Spotify app. These masquerade as podcasts, but like a Trojan horse they are just vods of YouTube content. And at the time there was literally no way to disable this. No way to either turn off podcasts or specific content through parental controls or otherwise.
I just wanted to give my kids a way to listen to music while reading. I have since switched to our local community radio station.
Yes, the Android app is particularly bad. For the past couple of weeks, it's gotten to a point where the app will take 30s to load on my phone. Nothing, not even reinstalling the app fixes this.
> Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies".
I left Spotify about a year ago and have tried Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz, and Youtube Music. They all have equally worse UI/UX. The Tidal and Deezer apps on Windows were absolute dogshit and would constantly bug out, randomly stop playing, freeze, take ages to load, etc. YTM's UI is awful, and it does not use your liked/saved songs and albums for its recommendations if your Youtube history is turned off, which isn't explained anywhere that I could find. Just absolutely baffling product design decisions all over the place.
I'm blown away by how much all the big music streaming apps suck. Music player UIs were a solved problem 20 years ago.
More and more now I'm using Bandcamp, Subvert, local music enthusiast Discord servers, and even Reddit to discover new music. It's a giant pain in the ass, but it's still less unpleasant than the apps.
The vast support for Tidal in these discussions is pretty baffling. The whole thing is just an abandoned Jack Dorsey side hustle. Basic things like gapless playback don't work. Playback on dodgy connections is spotty. I have my own fair share complaints of Spotify UX but it actually works as a music player anywhere and everywhere.
I gave YouTube music a try, mostly for the free premium and I have to say, it's ok. It still hiccups sometimes when I'm on the subway or a plane but I don't miss Spotify.
I do have a more pared down selection of mp3s loaded on my device in case of emergency, but I use it less and less now.
I recently started encountering full on crashes on iOS, as well as random freezing. Not to mention whole navigation just feels 'off', like canceling navigation mid animation. Nowadays, non-native apps don't have issues like that.
have you tried apple music app on mac? Apple music is also wrong in so many levels I personally believe teams that work on inside Appple hate it and made so bad intentionally. There is no other explanation.
> - Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
There's a ton of these inconsistencies. For example, the new releases albums where songs become available over time also do not have it. It's infuriating how inconsistent the UI is sometimes.
Not so long ago they also had two versions of the "swipe right to queue" UI, one with long swipe (the current one), and one with a much shorter one. I preferred the shorter (with the hard break) one because it is much clearer when a song actually gets added to the queue. What often happens when you're adding multiple songs to the queue, if you only swipe a little bit, it is unclear if it was enough to add it to the queue. With one song this isn't a problem because a message with "added to queue" is shown, but for multiple songs, the messages are shown on top of each other.
I am a user since the beginning and had premium for almost as long. The state of the app is bad. Crash fest. They pretty much brags about that they slop code it. But was it better before? Let me give you a hall of fame of historical bugs/features.
1. Impossible to purge the play queue. Had to delete every track one by one.
2. Completely broke liked songs years after the feature was launched.
3. They broke offline mode like a billion times. Just download everything again. Especially annoying back in the days when mobile data was expensive. Still does not work like half of the time.
4. Changed to a yellow typeface! I am not even kidding.
5. Included some bittorrent like file sharing in the background.
Another annoyance is the “genres” in your liked songs. They change seemingly at random and when you select a genre eg country it has the most ass backwards way of grouping songs so I’ll get rap songs playing despite having selected folk or whatever
I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples:
- Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason.
- When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first?