Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

Not to mention that, if there is a queue, clicking Play on an album will play only the first track and add the rest of the tracks to the bottom of the queue. Did the PM honestly think listeners wanted that?

Sounds like they have the same problem all software companies have as soon as the MBAs took over.

Metrics, not for the purpose of making the software better, but to justify someone's existence in the company.

The techcrunch article is my favorite piece on Spotify, and proves that LLMs will not save you from your own stupidity.

For years now the Spotify release team has been rotating their package signing key on every release. [0] This completely defeats the point of package signing, which is to assure you that the next release is coming from the same people as the last one. In Spotify's case this is impossible to ascertain, as one cannot easily distinguish a legit new signing key from Spotify, from a supply chain attack.

With all this extra "intelligence" and productivity you would think such long-standing trivialities and security flaws would have been addressed by now. Not so if the humans driving those agents don't understand basic concepts or recognize a problem even exists.

Instead, merely, "fuck the Linux users."

I cancelled my Spotify long ago when music started disappearing from my library. Pirated music does not disappear.

[0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/spotify#comment-1048914

The Spotify hate is so forced. Everyone's complaints boil down to "the UX doesn't work exactly like I want". I find these changes mildly annoying like anyone else, but Spotify is miles ahead of everyone else in terms of discovery and it's not even close. It's not perfect but no service is.

Don't you just swipe right on a song to add it to the queue?

Keep doing. Hearing people complain about streaming software, when they could be playing their sounds locally with free software, makes my day every day.

Three dots next to the song title, menu opens, "Add to Queue", done.

I disagree, Spotify has been very stable and performant for the last decade I’ve been using it. That speaks to decent software development. UI/product shifts are sometimes eh, but the core library has everything you expect from it. Music discovery tools are decent. I’ve tried Apple Music & YouTube Music on and off over the years and they aren’t better.

Adding a song to the queue on my phone is two taps away (3 dots > add to queue) or just swipe right on the list item. On desktop it’s one of the top options when you right click. It’s really not that bad.

The chief complaint is that the home page changes frequently and is hard to navigate, which is fair, and also pretty typical for tech companies. But all I really need is library & search, which are front & center without that.

I recall it being crap back in 2009 when the mobile software was highly flakey: it would sync over 1Gb of my playlists but was really unreliable so every few days it would get corrupted and require to resync the data in its entirety. At the time this quickly added up to more than my broadband plan would allow and I was stuck without the music and without normal speed internet (it would revert to some super slow level) I complained and they didn't seem to care as it stayed unstable and they kept advising to try again when my data cap was removed, it would fail again and then I cancelled my subscription.

Try using apple music

spotify has no performance review process or any sort of performance management. Never heard of anyone getting piped there for many years i was there.

Heavily disagree. Good UI, lot of innovation, no bugs for me. Very pleasant to use. And totally free.

Looks like they've cleaned them up already.

I should have taken detailed notes, but I didn't. I was continuously frustrated when I wanted to do something I used to do in Spotify, but couldn't find a way to do it in Music. Also, in general, I just found the UI of Music really confusing, even after days of using it.

The two features I use most on Spotify are "radio for a song" and "shuffle liked songs" (of which I have some 5k... and I moved them over to Music into a playlist). I'm pretty sure I had issues with both of these, but as I said, I don't remember. Had both of these gone well, I'd have stayed with it.

Btw, I had the same reaction to the Podcasts app. Having used Pocket Casts for many years, I tried Podcasts and the UI is just terrible for the way I listen to podcasts. The only time I use it is when I need to look for some NYT thing that isn't still in the free feeds.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47440869

Not entirely true. The "premium" channels (HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Bravo, The Movie Channel, etc.) never had ads.

Then there were channels like Nickelodeon that originally had no ads, then added them in the mid 80's. I remember this distinctly because I was annoyed by it. My parents got cable in 1980 when it first came to our area.

yes, the correct sub for this is r/truespotify, and there are a dozen discussions on the problem.

Fair enough! Can't argue with that

I switched last year and discovered I wasn’t as locked in as I thought.

SongShift moves your library from one app to another super easily. In 20 minutes my whole collection, playlists and all, moved from Spotify to Apple. And it was free.

I encourage everyone who is dreading moving to a better app to try it… it’s pretty easy now.

I’m tempted to try Tidal myself because Apple Music’s recommendations aren’t that great.

How so?

Spotify can be switched for YT Music, or Apple Music, or Deezer without any issues.

You can also just buy albums on Qobuz instead.

You can, ultimately, resort to one of the best things the internet offered since its inception - piracy.

If anything, Spotify is one of the easiest services to replace. And I say this as a paying customer.

I get that it looks bad to have vibe coding bugs creeping into your codebase for such a big company, but isn't it common sense that owning your misstakes taking accountability for them generates respect?

I'd cancel either way, I'd just be less mad if they announced it ahead of time.

> Is there a reason to use Gonic instead of Navidrome?

Not really. Both are great! I moved to Gonic because it exposed full file paths which Navidrome didn't at the time, but it has since implemented that as well.

Gonic doesn't come with a front end so it's a bit lighter if that's something you care about.

Meh, its almost line taking money for music without ads and inserting ads and fake music/promo content.

To make it simpler: MANY countries have enacted a law where every storage device (disk, pendrive, dvd) has a special surcharge/levy added, that covers the coat of "piracy".

Levy is then distributed to the rights holders.

Its not stealing if I paid for it!

It's very much easier to ignore ads in a newspaper. It's not so easy when you are forced to listen to them before the thing you paid for. It's not the same.

"But you don't leave" is an excuse the human-hating producers tell themselves. But it's normal for consumers to be protected from the petty misery of natural market forces by legislation. We have enacted many such controls.

> We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads

To be fair, ad-free options for each of these later emerged. I pay up for them.

maybe you did, but I did not. my attention is valuable to me and I do not pay people to waste it. i had tapes, CDs, mp3s, and paid spotify. this is a well-proven market.

Doesn't even feel like they've committed code since December 2023

Agree with this; I want to cancel my spotify subscription so badly. I already have Apple One, which includes Apple Music. But the recommendations and UX are so incredibly bad that I still pay for Spotify.

I was doing my yearly attempt at switching over to Apple Music and the 'similar music' radio had somehow saw fit to include Kendrick Lamar with my indie synth. Swapped back to spotify and immediately loved some of its similar suggestions.

Spotify sucks for artists because music isn't actually worth much and they don't like hearing that. A certain group of people, including some politicians, have concluded that it must mean that spotify is taking advantage of musicians despite spotify only reaching profitability in 2024.

I don’t know how their behavior differs but I live in a country with patchy mobile coverage and Spotify and Apple Music are night and day with how they cope with this. Spotify is far more robust and I assume prefetches more aggressively.

They started with a pirated set of music (sounds familiar?), they invest in the military industrial complex.

they funnelled money and attention to joe rogan. I hate them - not as much as i hate microsoft or oracle - maybe about as much as adobe. but i'm using them because i have not found an acceptable alternative ... yet.

Well, for one thing there's that whole pushing their own AI generated slop music into electronica playlists so that actual artists get fewer plays.

Piracy is also predatory, just saying.