Spoiler: Spotify has always been terrible. The golden age of music streaming was Zune pass where you could stream and download 10 songs/mo.

And arguably Pandora always had a better radio algorithm than Spotify.

The first Spotify client, the one in Qt was actually really good. Things started going downhill slowly when they integrated Facebook then very fast when they threw everything through the window to rewrite everything in electron.

> Spotify has always been terrible.

It wasn't, really. At least not completely. I fully agree on the algorithm - I miss times of scrobbling to Last.fm, which was much better at this. (Spotify always supported scrobbling to Last.fm from their client, surprisingly).

Spotify used to be snappy and worked really well on Linux. I even used it for local libraries, as it was one of the few options that didn't crash on mine.

It was at the beautiful time when we realized web apps can have local storage, Google released that experiment called Chrome to "show public how modern browser can evolve and inspire other browser makers how to progress". We know it ended up in "extinguish the market with it", unfortunately.

But Spotify chose native app approach - they distributed it as packages. Deezer on the other hand, back then (I don't know now) had just native web app that could pull music locally. I think it was an extension of Chrome (?). It also worked perfectly fine on Linux, almost two decades ago.

We had a lot of decent options back then.