I subscribed to spotify premium for a year and a half but recently cancelled my subscription and went to a competitor. I feel the UI/UX quality of the desktop version has degraded significantly and they are actually removing features as opposed to adding them.
Basic things like: drag-n-drop sharing with friends, my friends list was replaced with people suggested to follow, still no outbox for songs I sent, no back button on "radio" stations nor a way to see the radio playlist/history, new UI for albums/artists/songs is horrible, Ctrl+F to quickly filter items in current result set was removed for some reason, no fuzzy search capability, etc.
I'm not sure what userbase Spotify is targeting but it's one I am clearly no longer a member.
Actually, I believe the response is more like, "This feature is something we removed because our data showed not that many people using it. However, we've heard your complaints and are working on bringing it back."
Yup. Their execution, rollout of new disfeatures, and communication with the userbase (or utter lack thereof, no changelogs for the almost-daily updates was super annoying) is their primary downfall.
Except the "new this week" start page was terrible in that it showed top pop garbage and promoted artists, not a list tailored to your tastes. I've been a Spotify user for a while and I can only remember finding one or two albums of interest on that page.
What they really need to do is fix notifications so it actually shows new releases from artists you follow. Sometimes it lags behind by days or weeks and sometimes it doesn't even bother to notify you.
It's Google Play for now. Great desktop (when chrome is in --app mode) app, pretty abysmal android app. It's not without its faults either.
I did't mention the competitor because my primary complaint was to raise more awareness about the things Spotify could fix to bring me (and others) back as customers -- Not to drive business to someone else.
Sure, understood. I appreciate the heads up, though - I'm in a similar position, myself.
A bit of a tangent, but I'm also having some issues swallowing the "pay for a license" pill in a lot of respects, e.g. Spotify and Steam (of course, we all do it anyway), so if there's a chance to continue to do that but also own things, or otherwise move away from that ephemeral type of usage, then I'm interested, so always interested to learn more about alternative products.
I think Google Music's Android app is preferable to Spotify's. Spotify was really bad with skipping/popping in the middle of tracks, even when they claimed to have fixed that. And I was experiencing problems with hard crashes and restarts of my phone while running it.
Basic things like: drag-n-drop sharing with friends, my friends list was replaced with people suggested to follow, still no outbox for songs I sent, no back button on "radio" stations nor a way to see the radio playlist/history, new UI for albums/artists/songs is horrible, Ctrl+F to quickly filter items in current result set was removed for some reason, no fuzzy search capability, etc.
I'm not sure what userbase Spotify is targeting but it's one I am clearly no longer a member.