Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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.

Lol, tell me more about not posting on a thread devoted to the thing I am posting about

I was only joking, forks. The ui complaints are relevant, and you tied them nicely into larger problems I hadn't really considered.

oh, cool cool
I'M SO ANGRY

Spotify paid this guy $100 million of musicians' money to tell people to take vitamins and plant pigments instead of the COVID vaccines, because everyone's going to catch the 'vid anyway but zinc stops all viruses in their tracks.

and people who wear double masks against the new mutant strains are dumb bcz they “don’t know anything about vitamins and quercetin and saunas”

$100,000,000 worth of medical advice from Rogan and Jim Breuer. The experts thought this pandemic was going to be bad at the start, but it's all overblown and the doctors just won't admit that they got it wrong. Only 6% of the reported deaths are real. Nearly everyone who has died of it is obese anyway. Don't take a test, because then the government will know if you have it. Doctors should just give you zinc and steroids to make it go away if you tell them you have it, which you know for sure because you gave it to your wife (who has stage 4 cancer) and one of your daughters, and your other two chickenshit daughters moved out of the house wearing cowards' facemasks. You didn't tell anyone until three months later, though, because you didn't want any promoters to cancel your comedy club bookings. Also, people transition gender for sympathy bcz if "they were marginalized for being genuinely dumb people, if they transfer over and become another gender, then they get praised."

Joe Rogan continues: healthy people should not get vaccinated, and he got both of his kids infected with covid but they didn't die, so that just sucks for people who did die.

https://i.imgur.com/l78eLhq.jpgr

is there data that shows rogan has significantly boosted revenue and at least benefited non-shitheads? can spotify take a smaller cut of the revenue and pay less money to fewer shitheads and still run a sustainable business?

Is there not some Rogan is a fuckwit thread this shit can go into?

There is:

JOE ROGAN VS. CARLOS MENCIA... FITE!!!

Is there not some Rogan is a fuckwit thread this shit can go into?

It's a Spotify-exclusive programme, owned by Rogan (aiui) but funded by Spotify. People talk about Netflix programmes on the Netflix thread, NYT business practices on NYT theads, and other Spotify uploads on this thread. If Spotify spend $100,000,000 on promoting covid denialism and advocating against vaccines, seems that a Spotify thread is not a ridiculous place to discuss that?

otm

extremely otm, finally making me get off my ass to cancel premium and just stick with Apple Music.

100M move to triple the stock price while subscriber and ad revenues have not tripled. Solution is to give artists more revenue share as you pursue these stunts. Or dont give 100M to Joe Rogan.

is there data that shows rogan has significantly boosted revenue and at least benefited non-shitheads? can spotify take a smaller cut of the revenue and pay less money to fewer shitheads and still run a sustainable business?

Spotify (this morning) reported strong Q1 revenue growth, fueled by positive subscriber additions and strong ad sales, as well as lowered headwinds from foreign exchange rates.

The Swedish tech giant noted that increased subscriber growth and user engagement can be attributed in part to the better-than-expected performance of "The Joe Rogan Experience," a podcast it acquired exclusively for over $100 million.

By the numbers:

Revenue increased 16% year-over-year to €2.147 billion for the quarter ending on March 31, exceeding analyst expectations.

User growth: Spotify added 11 million monthly active users (DAUs), bringing its total active user based to 356 million globally.

Subscriber growth: The company added 4 million subscribers to its premium plan, bringing its paid subscriber count to over 158 million globally.