I worked for a startup in 2019 which was really pushing the "Spotify model" of team structure. Apparently it's all about self-organising teams and having no leadership. The fact the technology output of the Spotify model - the Spotify app - seemed to be kind of crap didn't seem to matter. I think the main output of the Spotify team structure was blog posts promoting the Spotify team structure.

Right now, if you have video clips in Spotify enabled, your lockscreen controls will display 'Artist' - 'Song' - 'Video Available', instead of 'Album Name'. If you disable video all together, it just leaves that area blank instead of displaying the album title.

This has been a thing / issue since 2025. It's pretty clear the video team probably put that in to bump video interactions, then the whole team got put on something else and now this problem is blackholed. The most bizarre to me is: even Spotify's top managers must use their own product when they helicopter to home, right? So they would see this too.

Where is a Jobsian anger for user experience when it is needed. Although in that respect even Apple is in the gutter these days.

Totally agree. They also have some stickiness going for them (at least for me). Now that I've organized my music in Spotify and have my habits in place that deal with the crummy UX, I've gotten numb to the poor UX.

Case in point, I make a daily playlist for running and that UX is frequently changing and often for the worse, but I deal with it because it's a habit that costs me a few seconds maybe a minute per day. The cost of switching to a new thing just feels daunting so I stay.

I also am guilty of enjoying the wrapped summaries at the end of the year :)

Spotify definitely has a better claim for "mainstream", but Epic's store/game-app takes the cake for me. Stunningly slow and bad.

> your product doesn't even need to be that good you just need to be first to market and not really piss anyone off.

The product is more than the tech stack

Yeah last I knew the Spotify desktop app loads many dependencies in triplicate or more because each pane is its own independent iframe universe, all so the engineering teams don’t need to talk to each other and they can A/B test incessantly. Inefficient madness.

> each UI element or portion of back-end having a separate dev team

Really takes shipping your org chart to another level

> Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch.

i use apple music. love it way more than spotify. i originally got it because their descriptions of albums and their playlists are done by actual music nerds. i use the website on linux since it’s my daily/work driver and their app on my phone and macbook when i use it. the apple music app was fine on windows before i switched to linux entirely. definitely leagues better than itunes was.

have the family plan and i never hear complaints from the family members who use it on android.

i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist and suddenly it would just be gone, like not greyed out, just gone. so irritating.

in terms recommendations, apple is a definitely far better than spotify, but it’s still nothing compared to music store nerds, college radio, or friends. recommendation algorithms from every platform are trash and just can’t compete with other people, at all. go to your local record store, look through the employee recommendations or just talk to them, most of them are working in a music store because they love music (its not for the money lol) and then buy the vinyl, you’ll thank yourself later.

Apple Music has native clients on macOS and Windows (the latter being a greenfield WinUI app rather than based on iTunes heritage). No native Linux app, but unlike Spotify they actually allow third party clients to exist and even furnish a library for devs to use, and so third party clients like Cider[0] exist on Linux. It also has a web app that can be installed as a PWA.

[0]: https://cider.sh

> It's a music player

Spotify doesn’t completely agree with that.

‘Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from creators all over the world.’

I left in the middle of their ‘we do Podcasts’ bs, where they were pushing Joe Rogan hard.

Yuck.

https://support.spotify.com/nz/article/what-is-spotify/

> Uses 1.5GB of RAM on my laptop atm.

That's crazy, I just checked on mine (macOS), it's only ~300MiB, about as much as Apple Mail which is native.

Still a bit much for what I need it for, but tolerable.

For the monthly price of Spotify, one could rent a VPS and host Navidrome on it. In case you already have spare capacity, then it might be (almost) free.

Quite annoying when, as we see in the tv show “the playlist” that traces back the story of Spotify, the founder put a huge emphasis on performance to differentiate them from the rest and create the best possible UX…

I canceled Spotify a few months ago have been using a free Amazon music trial. It's staggering how the Amazon interface is just worse in every single way.

Concurrent to this streaming evaluation, I inherited a Sonos system and by the gods is that app pitiful! You would think the premium sound solution that is supposed to "just work" would prioritize UI.

Have they replicated 1:1 Spotify's UX in Amazon music finally? I was a user 7 years ago and their Android app back then sucked, big time.

I mean, Amazon just sucks in general when it comes to design. I don't understand why Amazon videos (or whatever their purchased streaming app is) doesn't even queue up sequential movies automatically. It'll play the first Harry Potter movie, then skip to the third, fourth, and then the second, etc. It's not just HP , either.

I switched from Amazon music after many years to Spotify, as Amazon's App was just terrible. Never worked well offline in my watch or phone (Apple).

I only went to Spotify because my kids wanted it. The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.

apple music is good if you dont need it to be feature packed.

best value for money if you use youtube is youtube music app that you get from youtube premium.

It's always been terrible afaik. I don't know why they bother

Because as much as the app sucks the everything else is better than everyone else's music app, at least here in India where we have Apple Music as well. Recommendation, organisation, playlist - it feels like Apple Music is doing all that for a different species altogether. Now I already have said how bloated Spotify iOS app is and I still take it any day over Apple Music's native app. Hell, there are flows in Apple Music that has never gonna past a click at certain page whenever I've tried (that's quite a few in times in last few years). Esp. flows around which they try to play with iCloud and social aspects. Hell, I can't even decide what not to see on my Apple Music home screen. Sometimes I've to do few sipes to reach what I am looking for. Even with all the bloat Spotify never tires me like that.

I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it just works. I’ve never had any of the issues people are mentioning in this thread. The app isn’t slow or buggy for me, I’ve never had artists I listen to disappear from my playlists, and I can find pretty much every song I want to listen to. Most people I know use Spotify too, so sharing stuff is just a little more convenient.

I use Youtube also, I subscribe to Premium so that includes music and is ad-free. Never not found a song or artist I was looking for.

I listen to music mainly in the car or maybe as background when I'm cooking or doing other chores. I am not someone who has earbuds in all day or who does focused listening or spends time making playlists or seeking out new artists in my favorite genres. So the playlist management, discovery, etc. features and whether they work well are not really relevant to me. I care that its main functions are easy to use and work, and YouTube music does that.

They have a big library of music from tiny bands and it works well enough. As long as you ignore the music they try to push it just works.

Spotify Connect has no real equivalent

I have been on Spotify from almost the beginning, and see zero reasons to switch. The app never bothered me at all - I find the reactions in this thread startling.

Music discovery on Spotify used to be great, but I left 5+ years ago so I’m unsure now.

Why I stay:

1. family plan that I run. my parents and siblings all use it.

2. social. Sharing playlists matters to me, and everyone else uses spotify. This is also important in my romantic pursuits.

3. It has 10+ years of my listening history; the recommendations are decent, and my playlists go that far back.

4. whatever UI issues it has (and I can name a few off the top of my head), I don't find it difficult to use at all, and I'm used to its quirks.

For me it's mostly the big library and Spotify Jam

$25/month for 5 users "all you can eat" music library every month is incredibly hard to beat, even if self hosting terabytes of your own music library.

I really like qobuz for music, great apps for iOS, Android, and web.

Another reason why they are so popular is that they were first to market. They’ve been good enough that they have not lost first mover advantage that other first movers often lose (MySpace for example)

> What does spotify do that almost no one else does? Is it the music library or something else?

music is tough business to negotiate all the contracts and figure out a business model

Their Joe Rogan period was baffling. It reminded me of Apple and U2.

Apple’s boomer surprise when they discovered we don’t all like U2 was hilarious.

The problem with gangster music was a hack I believe. Spotify never admitted it but I have many friends that had that problem. I did not.

Because you keep using it. What incentive do they have to change?

I ran sound at a friend's wedding recently and unfortunately the music was all on Spotify. Every time I tried to play a specific song from a playlist, "Spotify can't play this item right now" and it would skip to the next one (or the one after that). I ended up having to yt-dlp all the timeline-specific songs.

They’re profitable and customers keep paying. Incentives->Outcomes.

The Music app on my macOS Sequoia 15.7.5 has an airplay button on the top right, to the left of the lyrics button.

Rights holders would never allow it. It would be too easy for their enterprise customer to underreport plays.

It's objectively really bad at a lot things. I've always had the feeling that the music is not even a primary feature of their product.

The last time I used it, I uninstalled once I realized that my kids could watch Logan Paul YouTube videos through the Spotify app. These masquerade as podcasts, but like a Trojan horse they are just vods of YouTube content. And at the time there was literally no way to disable this. No way to either turn off podcasts or specific content through parental controls or otherwise.

I just wanted to give my kids a way to listen to music while reading. I have since switched to our local community radio station.

WinAmp was smaller, faster, and more customizable thirty years ago.

The vast support for Tidal in these discussions is pretty baffling. The whole thing is just an abandoned Jack Dorsey side hustle. Basic things like gapless playback don't work. Playback on dodgy connections is spotty. I have my own fair share complaints of Spotify UX but it actually works as a music player anywhere and everywhere.

> it basically works fine for playing music

Until you want to play back a playlist in random order over airplay or bluetooth, then the decade old bug with thousands of replies on their forum confirming it surfaces, and it only loops the first 100 songs in the playlist.

The number of bugs in their service that have existed since inception is insane. It's a buggy mess, and the UI & UX is comically poor. Not to mention the resource usage, as someone else pointed out below its incredibly insane that they think it's ok for it to be such a massive resource hog.

The number of times I boarded an airplane to find my offline song list empty... I had to completely stop relying on it.