I don't understand enterprises who take this stance, there is tons of room between "don't utilize AI for coding" and "exclusively utilize AI for coding."
Spotify has always been garbage software long before LLMs. PM/devs like to justify their constant a/b testing to gamify metrics to curry raises/promotions but for end users all we're dealt with is a constantly broken/changing UI.
My biggest peeve with Spotify UI is how hard it is to add something to your current playing queue, an action I would assume is quite common but you have to scroll down to hit several controls before you can do it.
Not to mention that, if there is a queue, clicking Play on an album will play only the first track and add the rest of the tracks to the bottom of the queue. Did the PM honestly think listeners wanted that?
The MBAs work in the interests of the C-suite. It's their stat-padding that's made Daniel Ek a billionnaire despite running losses for 99% of the time he's led the company.
The techcrunch article is my favorite piece on Spotify, and proves that LLMs will not save you from your own stupidity.
For years now the Spotify release team has been rotating their package signing key on every release. [0] This completely defeats the point of package signing, which is to assure you that the next release is coming from the same people as the last one. In Spotify's case this is impossible to ascertain, as one cannot easily distinguish a legit new signing key from Spotify, from a supply chain attack.
With all this extra "intelligence" and productivity you would think such long-standing trivialities and security flaws would have been addressed by now. Not so if the humans driving those agents don't understand basic concepts or recognize a problem even exists.
Instead, merely, "fuck the Linux users."
I cancelled my Spotify long ago when music started disappearing from my library. Pirated music does not disappear.
This appears to only work for songs, this action does not work for podcasts or playlists. Wow! What bad engineering culture, likely only caring about what's in the ticket and not the feature overall. I guess this is what happens to a product after spending a decade only hiring people who can do leetcode.
I mean Spotify sucks but Electron is a desktop framework, not what their iPhone app is built with, and you can queue by swiping right on their official app.
Wow, this only works for songs (and it's left) but not podcast episodes (my main use case). I had no idea you could do this! If I have to blame someone, I blame snapchat for making "unknown UX controls as something for users to discover" as the main pusher of the UI trend.
Rather than sending me marketing materials, I wish companies would send power users tips/tricks. Would definitely read those emails.
Keep doing. Hearing people complain about streaming software, when they could be playing their sounds locally with free software, makes my day every day.
I have been looking up DAP devices (digital audio players), anything you'd recommend that you know? Use to rock a Zune until the desktop software was unable to connect to it, loved that device.
I disagree, Spotify has been very stable and performant for the last decade I’ve been using it. That speaks to decent software development. UI/product shifts are sometimes eh, but the core library has everything you expect from it. Music discovery tools are decent. I’ve tried Apple Music & YouTube Music on and off over the years and they aren’t better.
Adding a song to the queue on my phone is two taps away (3 dots > add to queue) or just swipe right on the list item. On desktop it’s one of the top options when you right click. It’s really not that bad.
The chief complaint is that the home page changes frequently and is hard to navigate, which is fair, and also pretty typical for tech companies. But all I really need is library & search, which are front & center without that.
I recall it being crap back in 2009 when the mobile software was highly flakey: it would sync over 1Gb of my playlists but was really unreliable so every few days it would get corrupted and require to resync the data in its entirety. At the time this quickly added up to more than my broadband plan would allow and I was stuck without the music and without normal speed internet (it would revert to some super slow level)
I complained and they didn't seem to care as it stayed unstable and they kept advising to try again when my data cap was removed, it would fail again and then I cancelled my subscription.
I click three dots, add to queue is at the bottom of the list, need to scroll, then click add to queue.
Why do I have to do so many actions when adding an item (say a podcast) to my current playlist? Why can't there be a single button that says "add to queue," why hide an common workflow behind nested menus and actions?
Wouldn't adding songs to your current queue be an extremely common action by users? Or at least power users?
I think I might become one of those people that makes their own frontend music player for Jellyfin. Adding and modifying playlists are something I do often (wrote like 100s of collages on what.cd back in the day), but with Spotify these actions are so fucking painful.
It's fully caused by management mindset. There are companies that are investing hard on the AI trend, but the message is clear: all code pushed is your ultimate responsonsibility, and if it lacks quality or causes problems, you're on the hook for it; using AI hasn't changed that.
So if Spotify had a modicum of AI usage hygiene, plus accountability expectations for code quality, this would still mean a bad performance review for whoever introduced this issue (person or team; poor results and mistakes are never something that come from a single source)
Spotify is a terribly run company. Zero innovation. Bugs. Frustrating interface design. It’s awful and they deserve to lose at this point. I’m surprised anyone ever praised their management techniques.
I left Spotify years ago. Youtube is so much nicer in terms of content alone. But Youtube, with its insane backlog of video's not available elsewhere, is straight up a monopoly, so they too will start squeezing customers at some point. In anticipation of that I've been collecting flacs again. It's actually kind of a nice hobby.
I never used Spotify, get to use YouTube to find out about new artists, but what I get to play are plain old MP3, either bought directly as such, or taken from music albums that I still buy with some regularity, ideally directly from bands after attending their concert, if they happen to sell some afterwards.
YouTube’s commingling of playlists (and everything else) between music and videos made it completely unusable for me.
I am a YouTube Premium subscriber, but ended up subscribing to Apple Music to get a service that works the way I want, without screwing up other things I use.
YouTube has started screwing up as well. I was having a lot of issues with YouTube errors in Safari. Best I can tell it was due to uBlock Origin Lite. When I disabled content blockers on YouTube my error rate went down dramatically. If I’m paying for YouTube and shouldn’t see any ads, why does the site break itself when I have content blockers enabled? It seems the heavy handed measures to get free users to watch ads are also impacting Premium users. This feels wrong.
I found now was a good time to build that NAS I wanted to have a long time ago, and the first thing I installed on it was a Navidrome server so I could listen to my curated music everywhere.
Hopefully we're entering the era of people ditching megacorp craps and switching to personal cloud solutions.
I tried YouTube for music a year ago or so, as it was included when I tried out a paid YouTube plan to remove the ads. Apparently (at least at that point) not all videos are available in "YouTube Music", so you can't just play back any of the videos from YouTube while using YouTube Music via Carplay, instead you need to then use YouTube itself, which of course you can't use via Carplay.
After being disappointed again and again, I too moved back to collecting local files for my music instead, although bought rather than what.cd as I used in my early days. Tend to use Bandcamp mostly, they also waive their fee on purchases every first Friday of the month (https://isitbandcampfriday.com/), so collecting a bunch of things to buy and listen to each first friday of month has become a nice little ritual :)
I would love to cancel and move to something else. Recently tried Apple Music and I was appalled at how bad it was. The ui/ux of Spotify isn’t great, and has gotten worse over the years, but Apple Music’s was downright terrible. I stuck it out for a week and then deleted the app.
Yeah.. They seem to speed up their entshittification game. I recently wrote a short piece about how Spotify is forcefully updating the app, and how to prevent it. For example, if you plan tonuse spicetify or something similar: https://duckass.bearblog.dev/how-spotify-silently-updates-it...
Spotify is losing ground after their last subscription fees increase, as far as I see it.
> This subreddit is mainly for sharing Spotify playlists. We're not a support community, and we encourage users to use official support channels for most issues.
More thing for Spotify is that their users are, more or less, locked in. That stickyness is what allows companies to try this dumb shit; management will hardly feel the impact of their bad choices - cause they are standing on many years of foundations.
It's like when Homer Simpson was carried up the mountain by Sherpas and thought he owned the achievement.
I switched last year and discovered I wasn’t as locked in as I thought.
SongShift moves your library from one app to another super easily. In 20 minutes my whole collection, playlists and all, moved from Spotify to Apple. And it was free.
I encourage everyone who is dreading moving to a better app to try it… it’s pretty easy now.
I’m tempted to try Tidal myself because Apple Music’s recommendations aren’t that great.
I get that it looks bad to have vibe coding bugs creeping into your codebase for such a big company, but isn't it common sense that owning your misstakes taking accountability for them generates respect?
I tried tidal for the Lossless (dont care about the 24bit, i care about no EQ and compression added to music) but i went back to spotify for their recommendation model. Its a moat for me.
I don't think lossless gives you anything other than, well, lossless compression. EQ or dynamic range compression don't really have anything to do with it.
We had two broadcast TV channels where we lived when I was growing up in the 1970s. My Dad signed up for cable TV. It ran 24/7 instead of 6AM-to-midnight (yes, broadcast TV went off the air at midnight in many areas) and it had no commercials.
A few years after getting cable, they started running ads on it. Dad for furious. "No ads" was one of the things he was paying for, as he saw it.
Ironically, half the ads - at least in the beginning - were urging people to sign up for cable TV. But people couldn't see the ads unless they already had cable TV...
Spotify rolling this out without an announcement intentionally would be an incredible blunder. I'd cancel my membership immediately and I don't think I'd be alone in that decision.
For anyone looking for a spotify alternative, please join me in making a better, self-hosted spotify!
1.) Buy music when you can, and when you can't, pirate!
2.) Run Gonic(1)! (or whatever you want, I'm not in charge of what you do at the end of the day, but Gonic is a.) very light, and b.) a subsonic(2) server, so it's compatible with anything that supports that family of services)
2a.) How you run it is up to preference, I have a NAS that runs mine, you can also run it off something like Pikapods(3), a VPS (you know what a VPS is), or off your own desktop/laptop/raspberry pi, who cares.
3.) Download a subsonic compatible player, which is much more open to preferences, but I highly suggest Symfonium(4)
4.) Enjoy music streaming without ads, limits, or artists you don't like!
to be clear, i have no relation to any of these products, outside of supporting the development of gonic and donating to symfonium. if anyone is interested I can do a more in depth write up of how I personally manage my stuff, but it's not much more complicated than this, just with a TB+ of music in a folder.
Is there a reason to use Gonic instead of Navidrome? I've been using the latter for hosting my music collection for over a year now and really like it. Good riddance Spotify. [1]
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for more choices. But it seems like you have opinions on this topic and I'd like to hear them.
> Is there a reason to use Gonic instead of Navidrome?
Not really. Both are great! I moved to Gonic because it exposed full file paths which Navidrome didn't at the time, but it has since implemented that as well.
Gonic doesn't come with a front end so it's a bit lighter if that's something you care about.
I canceled my family subscription last month. We have Youtube Premium which I use to play music - Spotify was over 20/month and no longer made sense. We mostly used it to play music on our Google speakers for the kids. It's one of those products that used to make sense, but now just doesn't feel so critical. It's easy to replace and patch where I used it.
I was having ads played even with the most expensive Spotify subscription a few years ago because ... feel this:
The ads were CHOSEN BY THE END CLIENT, not Spotify itself as a legal entity.
Needless to say that I am no longer using Spotify for a few years now and I highly encourage a mass exodus from the platform.
After having, as a teenager, having been, unbeknownst to me, a bonafied in the flesh content marketing tool of Spotify, it was thrilling to cancel my subscription this year as I learned more about their advertising business and clients.
I gave up on Spotify as I started to listen to more podcasts which had their own ads inside them let alone Spotify's. Now I'm paying for Youtube (never thought I'd be doing that) and using the new(ish) jump ahead feature to skip in-video ad segments including in video podcasts. Problem largely solved?
Haven't used spotify in years, but they used to have programmed and live ads in podcasts, even for paying subscribers. That's one of the reasons I've gave up on them. Just insulting for consumers.
We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads.
Ad-free paid services were a brief aberration, essentially a bait-and-switch: "see how much nicer we are from the old-school competitors". Now that the competitors are gone, Netflix is doing ads, Amazon is doing ads... why wouldn't Spotify?
I hate it, but the reality is that we groan on online forums but don't actually leave.
It's very much easier to ignore ads in a newspaper. It's not so easy when you are forced to listen to them before the thing you paid for. It's not the same.
"But you don't leave" is an excuse the human-hating producers tell themselves. But it's normal for consumers to be protected from the petty misery of natural market forces by legislation. We have enacted many such controls.
maybe you did, but I did not. my attention is valuable to me and I do not pay people to waste it. i had tapes, CDs, mp3s, and paid spotify. this is a well-proven market.
I just migrated to Jellyfin and cancelled my Spotify subscription just last week (https://cobertos.com/blog/post/finally-cancelling-my-spotify). Paying off even more than I predicted. So sick of everything getting in the way of just listening to my music.
I once decided to try spotify, paid the fee. Listened to a podcast and ads came on. “Oh no those ads are embedded by the podcast themselves, we don’t control that.” Ok I don’t care what your back end financial models are, either I’m paying to remove ads or I’m not. Immediately canceled.
Seems like a bug. I had it happen (ads were playing and UI showed the premium upgrade nudges), then my Spotify refreshed and it went away again.
Annoying that it happened. Annoying that Reddit mods are aggressively removing the discussion. Annoying that HN comments here are immediately jumping to Spotify hate and the sky is falling.
Imagine if we all assumed every AWS outage meant that AWS was cancelled.
---
The responses in this thread are truly disappointing. Spotify can be bad and have vibecoding issues and we can still have a rational discussion rather than just jumping on the complaint bandwagon and panicking. I guess at least eventually real comments rose to the top.
Agree with this; I want to cancel my spotify subscription so badly. I already have Apple One, which includes Apple Music. But the recommendations and UX are so incredibly bad that I still pay for Spotify.
I was doing my yearly attempt at switching over to Apple Music and the 'similar music' radio had somehow saw fit to include Kendrick Lamar with my indie synth. Swapped back to spotify and immediately loved some of its similar suggestions.
My biggest gripe with Apple Music is shuffling. When I shuffle my entire library of thousands of songs, I'm hearing the same ~50 songs over and over UNTIL I add a new song to my library. Then suddenly I'm hearing songs I haven't heard in years. How does one screw up randomization that bad, and how has it not been fixed over the past several years?
Spotify sucks for artists because music isn't actually worth much and they don't like hearing that. A certain group of people, including some politicians, have concluded that it must mean that spotify is taking advantage of musicians despite spotify only reaching profitability in 2024.
I don’t know how their behavior differs but I live in a country with patchy mobile coverage and Spotify and Apple Music are night and day with how they cope with this. Spotify is far more robust and I assume prefetches more aggressively.
Oh yeah, it's just the latest thing in a long line of nasty. I cancelled my Spotify way back when they decided to fund the rise of fascism by giving money to imbecilic ham hock Joe Rogan.
they funnelled money and attention to joe rogan. I hate them - not as much as i hate microsoft or oracle - maybe about as much as adobe. but i'm using them because i have not found an acceptable alternative ... yet.
70% of their revenue goes straight into paying royalties, always, if the music labels don't pay their artists enough due to predatory contracts shouldn't some of the flak be focused there? Even more: they've always fleeced artists, even when physical media sales were the only market.
All streaming services are predatory scum. Piracy is the way, even though it is sometimes less convenient. I pay for Spotify because it is cheap and I'm lazy
If you want to support musicians buy their merch, go to concerts. If they are smalltime, find their patreon, or join their YouTube thing, or buy their music on Bandcamp, etc.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-deve...
I don't understand enterprises who take this stance, there is tons of room between "don't utilize AI for coding" and "exclusively utilize AI for coding."
My biggest peeve with Spotify UI is how hard it is to add something to your current playing queue, an action I would assume is quite common but you have to scroll down to hit several controls before you can do it.
Metrics, not for the purpose of making the software better, but to justify someone's existence in the company.
For years now the Spotify release team has been rotating their package signing key on every release. [0] This completely defeats the point of package signing, which is to assure you that the next release is coming from the same people as the last one. In Spotify's case this is impossible to ascertain, as one cannot easily distinguish a legit new signing key from Spotify, from a supply chain attack.
With all this extra "intelligence" and productivity you would think such long-standing trivialities and security flaws would have been addressed by now. Not so if the humans driving those agents don't understand basic concepts or recognize a problem even exists.
Instead, merely, "fuck the Linux users."
I cancelled my Spotify long ago when music started disappearing from my library. Pirated music does not disappear.
[0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/spotify#comment-1048914
The iPhone app is not Electron, it's a native app.
Rather than sending me marketing materials, I wish companies would send power users tips/tricks. Would definitely read those emails.
That rubbish that it's different per platform.
Really tempted to buy this device:
https://store.hiby.com/pages/hiby-digital-miku
Because the color scheme and buttons look cool, not really aware of the waifu but she has good taste.
Do agree about local sounds, streaming audio sounds so compressed and awful. Very inefficient compared to the audio quality of locally hosted music.
Adding a song to the queue on my phone is two taps away (3 dots > add to queue) or just swipe right on the list item. On desktop it’s one of the top options when you right click. It’s really not that bad.
The chief complaint is that the home page changes frequently and is hard to navigate, which is fair, and also pretty typical for tech companies. But all I really need is library & search, which are front & center without that.
Why do I have to do so many actions when adding an item (say a podcast) to my current playlist? Why can't there be a single button that says "add to queue," why hide an common workflow behind nested menus and actions?
Wouldn't adding songs to your current queue be an extremely common action by users? Or at least power users?
I think I might become one of those people that makes their own frontend music player for Jellyfin. Adding and modifying playlists are something I do often (wrote like 100s of collages on what.cd back in the day), but with Spotify these actions are so fucking painful.
I wonder how long it will take for AI to learn how we work with software on an individual level and adapt the UI to fit our usage patterns.
So if Spotify had a modicum of AI usage hygiene, plus accountability expectations for code quality, this would still mean a bad performance review for whoever introduced this issue (person or team; poor results and mistakes are never something that come from a single source)
It seems almost criminal to hire Ludvig Strigeus and then not let him write code.
I am a YouTube Premium subscriber, but ended up subscribing to Apple Music to get a service that works the way I want, without screwing up other things I use.
YouTube has started screwing up as well. I was having a lot of issues with YouTube errors in Safari. Best I can tell it was due to uBlock Origin Lite. When I disabled content blockers on YouTube my error rate went down dramatically. If I’m paying for YouTube and shouldn’t see any ads, why does the site break itself when I have content blockers enabled? It seems the heavy handed measures to get free users to watch ads are also impacting Premium users. This feels wrong.
I found now was a good time to build that NAS I wanted to have a long time ago, and the first thing I installed on it was a Navidrome server so I could listen to my curated music everywhere.
Hopefully we're entering the era of people ditching megacorp craps and switching to personal cloud solutions.
YouTube will be very hard to replace though.
After being disappointed again and again, I too moved back to collecting local files for my music instead, although bought rather than what.cd as I used in my early days. Tend to use Bandcamp mostly, they also waive their fee on purchases every first Friday of the month (https://isitbandcampfriday.com/), so collecting a bunch of things to buy and listen to each first friday of month has become a nice little ritual :)
That’s an ad. I’m not paying for ads.
Spotify is losing ground after their last subscription fees increase, as far as I see it.
This sounds like terribly bad form, won't buy them any goodwill down the line.
Literally the first line of the sub description.
It's like when Homer Simpson was carried up the mountain by Sherpas and thought he owned the achievement.
SongShift moves your library from one app to another super easily. In 20 minutes my whole collection, playlists and all, moved from Spotify to Apple. And it was free.
I encourage everyone who is dreading moving to a better app to try it… it’s pretty easy now.
I’m tempted to try Tidal myself because Apple Music’s recommendations aren’t that great.
Spotify can be switched for YT Music, or Apple Music, or Deezer without any issues.
You can also just buy albums on Qobuz instead.
You can, ultimately, resort to one of the best things the internet offered since its inception - piracy.
If anything, Spotify is one of the easiest services to replace. And I say this as a paying customer.
A few years after getting cable, they started running ads on it. Dad for furious. "No ads" was one of the things he was paying for, as he saw it.
Ironically, half the ads - at least in the beginning - were urging people to sign up for cable TV. But people couldn't see the ads unless they already had cable TV...
Spotify rolling this out without an announcement intentionally would be an incredible blunder. I'd cancel my membership immediately and I don't think I'd be alone in that decision.
1.) Buy music when you can, and when you can't, pirate!
2.) Run Gonic(1)! (or whatever you want, I'm not in charge of what you do at the end of the day, but Gonic is a.) very light, and b.) a subsonic(2) server, so it's compatible with anything that supports that family of services)
2a.) How you run it is up to preference, I have a NAS that runs mine, you can also run it off something like Pikapods(3), a VPS (you know what a VPS is), or off your own desktop/laptop/raspberry pi, who cares.
3.) Download a subsonic compatible player, which is much more open to preferences, but I highly suggest Symfonium(4)
4.) Enjoy music streaming without ads, limits, or artists you don't like!
(1) https://github.com/sentriz/gonic
(2) https://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp
(3) https://www.pikapods.com/
(4) https://symfonium.app/
to be clear, i have no relation to any of these products, outside of supporting the development of gonic and donating to symfonium. if anyone is interested I can do a more in depth write up of how I personally manage my stuff, but it's not much more complicated than this, just with a TB+ of music in a folder.
there, fixed it for you
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for more choices. But it seems like you have opinions on this topic and I'd like to hear them.
[1] See my blog post from a while back: https://lukecyca.com/2025/listen-to-music-like-its-2005.html
Not really. Both are great! I moved to Gonic because it exposed full file paths which Navidrome didn't at the time, but it has since implemented that as well.
Gonic doesn't come with a front end so it's a bit lighter if that's something you care about.
If I can’t put an RSS feed in my podcast player of choice - it ain’t a podcast
It’s so much better for just picking a song or musician or genre and having a never ending playlist
Ad-free paid services were a brief aberration, essentially a bait-and-switch: "see how much nicer we are from the old-school competitors". Now that the competitors are gone, Netflix is doing ads, Amazon is doing ads... why wouldn't Spotify?
I hate it, but the reality is that we groan on online forums but don't actually leave.
To be fair, ad-free options for each of these later emerged. I pay up for them.
Annoying that it happened. Annoying that Reddit mods are aggressively removing the discussion. Annoying that HN comments here are immediately jumping to Spotify hate and the sky is falling.
Imagine if we all assumed every AWS outage meant that AWS was cancelled.
---
The responses in this thread are truly disappointing. Spotify can be bad and have vibecoding issues and we can still have a rational discussion rather than just jumping on the complaint bandwagon and panicking. I guess at least eventually real comments rose to the top.
I was doing my yearly attempt at switching over to Apple Music and the 'similar music' radio had somehow saw fit to include Kendrick Lamar with my indie synth. Swapped back to spotify and immediately loved some of its similar suggestions.
If you want to support musicians buy their merch, go to concerts. If they are smalltime, find their patreon, or join their YouTube thing, or buy their music on Bandcamp, etc.