Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Someone on the SpotifyCares team didn't get the memo:

Hi Ottis, help's here! Can you DM us screenshot or video of the issue you're experiencing, as well as the playlist URI? To get it, open the Spotify desktop app > click the three dots next to the content > Share > Copy Spotify URI /RA https://t.co/ldFdZRiNAt

— SpotifyCares (@SpotifyCares) April 15, 2021

Considering they face multiple competitors offering a more or less identical service at the same price, I’m surprised Spotify isn’t more focused on member satisfaction.

Oh - there's one improvement for geeks in this desktop update: a track's total number of plays now shows on its album view without you having to hover over that little graph.

It would be nice if it were accessible in playlist view too, but now I'm dreaming.

Has the ability to view a large-sized album cover on desktop completely vanished? Full screen mode doesn't do it anymore.

Hmm, I'm on PC desktop and full screen mode shows the large album art for me.

Sometimes cover art vanishes until you slightly adjust the column width of the tracklist column, then it leaps back into existence.

it might be requesting differently sized art from the spotify image server.

(i wrote an image server once. it did not like the front end guys drag-resizing their windows and causing 20 requests a second for slightly larger/smaller images)

What's the service that provides metadata and cover art for all these platforms? And can I beg them to use a better scan of Tracy Chapman's album cover? It looks like that copy that's been left out in the sun, and it's the same on every digital platform.

https://i.imgur.com/I8mT5JZ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/l5fGazR.jpg

i'm pretty sure it's the publisher who provides that, not a third party service

Gracenote is who I was thinking of, but it appears they just use whatever they're sent.

that generally comes from the labels, yes

when i was doing this we'd get all sorts but my favourite was the 'image file' that was actually the html source for the amazon website popup box for the cover in question.

sometimes they'd be 15,000 pixels wide, some of them were 250 square...

Yikes

Has the ability to view a large-sized album cover on desktop completely vanished? Full screen mode doesn't do it anymore.

Gone for me too. Now it shows a dimmed version of the bands publicity pic, album cover thumbnail in the lower left. Thumbs up for another pointless change no-one asked for.

"we are making better use of cover art and album images in the app." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Vote here if you believe that voting for user submitted ideas will make any difference: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Idea-Submissions/Desktop-Other-Option-to-maximize-album-cover-in-fullscreen/idi-p/5179217

extra ridiculous when the publicity/banner image references a different album from the one you are playing:

https://i.imgur.com/2NjnbOm.png

Update to the discussion above - Spotify says it has no plans to develop that "emotion-detecting" speech recognition tech (take that as you will).

no doubt realized that Sony beat them to the punch with their revolutionary Emotion Engine decades ago

The cover art thing is quite annoying. I listen to a lot of classical music and oftentimes the covers have text which is too small to read without a fullscreen version. What would be even better would be the ability to view a large cover even while not playing the album.

In further griping: I'm pretty sure I used to be able to add an album or playlist to my library directly from search results - hover over a cover, a heart appears, I click it. Now one must click each album before getting to that heart.

i don't love that the streams are always visible on the desktop app. i preferred the old way where you could look if you were curious but now it looks like a constantly updating scoreboard

I love Shuggie Otis's Strawberry Letter 23, honest I do, but does Spotify have to play it every time a playlist I'm listening to finishes?? Either that or Darondo's Didn't I?

you can switch that off in your preferences ("Autoplay similar songs when your music ends")

Spotify is also very fond of recommending Strawberry Letter 23 to me at every algorithmic opportunity.

it always plays those two songs alba mentions on my wife's account

And that same Darondo song as well! I know a lot of the people complaining about shuffle don't understand that "true random doesn't feel random", but it just can't be a coincidence that those two songs come up almost every time my nearly-10k-songs playlist is shuffled! There're a few other ones too--off the top of my head I see Khala My Friend by Amanaz a lot.

Yes, that too!

you can switch that off in your preferences ("Autoplay similar songs when your music ends")

much belated complaint outlined in greater detail, though I think everybody knows the deal here:

- My issue is with desktop for mac, mobile is mostly the same as it ever was
- Compression of individual tracks into "Discography" makes artist exploration clunky and difficult
- Removal of artists from playlists is massively unhelpful, makes sorting and exploring or clarifying artists within playlists a pain; the "custom order" option is not much use
- removing search from top level adds additional clicks for my most used command
- Moving tracks into and out of playlists and reordering playlists has gotten WAY buggier; placing a single song into the top of a playlist can take 20 to 30 seconds of flickering cursor
- Spotify simply will not play a track unless it is in a downloaded playlist
- on the plus side, the program isn't crashing nearly as often and the "everytime i use the search function, it inputs my text backward somehow" bug has gone away.

In general though I really hate the changes and am toying with exporting and jumping to apple music. It's a lot of terrible choices and unforced errors. I very much want to either go back to what it was (buggy or not) or leave.

removing search from top level adds additional clicks for my most used command

little known fact: the search bar autofocuses when you click 'search'.

other than that, sorry daniel ek is too busy to listen to your complaints now: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/apr/26/spotify-daniel-ek-joins-forces-with-arsenal-legends-in-bid-to-buy-club-henry-bergkamp-vieira-kroenkes

Good luck Gooners, hope they move all the player contracts onto the Spotify model so they get paid £0.000001 per appearance.

Spotify is also very fond of recommending Strawberry Letter 23 to me at every algorithmic opportunity.

― Dan I., Thursday, April 22, 2021 2:15 PM bookmarkflaglink

I get Richard Marx's "Hazard", but it used to be in my playlist all the time.

removing search from top level adds additional clicks for my most used command

Removing search bar is ridiculous but given that you'll be typing next anyway, the keyboard shortcut Cmd-L means it's not any slower once you know how.

little known fact: the search bar autofocuses when you click 'search'.

And oh - I didn't get what ledge was saying but when I think it through, this means that if you are doing it with a mouse, it's effectively no different to what it was before, right? Except it's moved over to the left a bit.

it's just unintuitive and unnecessary, like all those changes. they're user hostile.

I don't work on the UI, but the expanded discography view will be back shortly, and you can still sort by artist using the pop-up. There's no general bug I know of where only downloaded tracks will play, so you might contact @spotifycares to get some individual help on that.

thanks. it's all bad decisions man! the company is pretty clearly trying to incentivize not straying from the walled garden and it's unpleasant.

raising the price of family plan to no doubt give more money to the artists and not sustain an inflated stock price that allows for acquiring ex-royal podcasts and an arsenal stake.

Royalties are % of revenue, so 70% of any price-increase automatically goes to payments...

yes, i said 'no doubt' glenn

It's not a question of doubt, that's my point.

we are 70% certain

I...don't know what point you're making.

100% of these increased revenues will make it into the quarterly report, no matter how they are divided up and trickled down. there is a relationship between revenue growth and spotify's own growth story that will probably be used to justify their stock price.

perhaps the response is "revenue growth still benefits the artists, and we can't continue to grow revenue without enriching many assholes." but we can at least complain about it here along the way?

Yes, I think ILM's capacity for complaints will be unaffected.

I like it when glenn's like @SpotifyCares gone rogue.

spotify should increase prices. but it should also turn the 70% knob up as they do so. because ILM will spend it's money on more records. Spotify will spend it on more Joe Rogan growth milestones.

*its money. spotify should also pay glenn for participation in this thread.

the only pressure on that 70% knob seems to be the threat of users leaving over it. i agree forks should stop complaining about the UI fwiw.