I’ve been using Spotify since “the early days” (2007), which has mostly been a pleasant experience. I’ve loved the range in their music library, the collaborative playlists, the iPad-app, the offline playlists, their design, their social layer and so on… And I still do. But other parts of their service are starting to really annoy me, and I’m considering changing streaming service if I find something better. In this post I’ll briefly touch upon some of the annoying parts of Spotify:
Design of desktop-client:
The desktop-client has only deteriorated since I started using it. Their recent update, with new “artist-pages” removed the option of searching through cmd/ctrl+f, and forces users to use the small search field in the top-left corner. Completely unnecessary.
Furthermore, the font/text on these new artist-pages are loaded as images and not text. And these images are not optimized for high-resolution displays like the one on Macbook Pro Retina. Some might say this is a minor detail, but a company like Spotify should not get such a detail wrong. Amateurish…
**Release dates:
** Spotify-founder Daniel Ek was eagerly promoting that Daft Punk’s single Get Lucky was immediately available on Spotify, but he’s been quiet about how the album was available on iTunes (and torrents) a week before they released it. I’ve had to go elsewhere to find the three albums I’m currently listening to (The National, Vampire Weekend, Daft Punk).
I know this isn’t entirely Spotify’s fault, as other stakeholders (record companies) also have their say, but after operating for 7 years and more than 5 million paying users I expect them to have more negotiating power.
Integration of other online services
Companies have understood that a lot of innovation happens externally, and record companies should also understand that a lot of music is created by individuals and freely distributed. It’s unbelievable that I still can’t add a stream/URL from YouTube to a Spotify playlist, but instead have to switch between browser and Spotify if my favourite songs available free online. Other services like turntable and musicplayr have managed to do this, why hasn’t Spotify?
These are the top three reasons why I’m no longer a Spotify-fan, but rather just a user. If any of their competitors (Rdio, Google, iTunes, Deezer etc) manages to fix these issues, I’ll gladly take the time to copy all my Spotify-playlists and leave. But even more, I hope Spotify takes action and persuades me to stay!