Goodbye, Slopify

I really don’t like this feature—I enjoyed their genre/mood oriented running playlists explicitly as a way to listen to stuff well outside of my usual listening while out on runs, but since they made them “made for you” they’re strictly worse. Relentless algorithmic sameness is everywhere and I’m sick of it.

Spotify is also funny for maintaining the existence of their feature suggestion community boards while just utterly stonewalling for years while thousands of paying users beg for stuff like…being able to hide a section of the home screen, or not have long-standing playlists magically change.

Similarly to making so many of the playlists "made for you", they've completely ruined the "radio" feature. You used to be able to select the radio option on a song, artist, or playlist and get a playlist of songs that seemed to be a good mix of musically similar and being liked by people who liked the selected starting point.

Starting at some point around 2 years ago (it seems they A-B tested this for a while because it went back and forth), the radio option became so highly customized to your user account that most songs it plays will be ones you've heard a billion times, even songs that aren't remotely similar in any way other than that you like them.

And the playlist radio option, which was the most powerful one for discovery, has been completely removed.

I used the radio option for years to discover new music, and I really loved it. Now I feel a twinge of sadness mixed with rage when my memories of the good days get me to open Spotify and I remember what it's become.

Cory Doctrow goes into the reasons behind the rise of playlists and the control it gives the platform over their users/artists. Worth a read.

https://craphound.com/category/internetcon/

It's funny how the Spotify moderators are gaslighting people. Users complaining about some bad feature and moderators ignoring the issue and responding to seemingly another question. I've noticed this phenomenon cropping up 4-5 years ago on Microsoft forums, now it's across the spectrum. I don't blame the people who are paid to do it, I understand they have to do this for a paycheck but it's such a shitty thing to do.

There was plenty of "AI music" in 2022, and "Discover Weekly" has been broken for almost a decade, IMO.

This is why so many playlists I look at all have the same songs in them! I have had to start marking songs that I like to not be recommended. Although I just looked at Spotify to figure out how I've done this in the past, and I can see no such option. So I don't know how I did this previously!?

So that is why I have been unable to discover new songs on spotify like before. Guess I will move over to yt music.

One thing I've seen recently: My daylist will be named the same, but have (usually very slightly) different songs between different platforms (e.g. Mac vs iPhone). Not the end of the world, but very strange.

My wife continues to mourn the loss of Grooveshark and brings it up at least once a year. It was pretty amazing.

Personally I've had loads of issues with YouTube music, largely in that it regularly makes a point of inserting various popular songs into playlists and radios of otherwise very niche genres (which they have nothing to do with) I strongly prefer to listen to. The more niche the genre, the higher the percentage of what follows is typically in line with it... for a while. Sooner or later everything gets infested with the same tripe I don't want to have to deal with listening to on my own time. It's not even good for discovery, as when I try to let a mix go off of a genre or artist that's new to me it isn't long at all before I spend more time skipping past the same nonsense than I do actually listening to music, new or old.

I work in a public-facing environment. I already hear every single one of these songs, none of which I liked to begin with, to a sickening extent over the radio. Leave me to my esoteric tastes and take the chart-toppers elsewhere.

This is an issue I've had across the board, though, be it Spotify, YT Music, heavily curated Pandora stations, or any other streaming service I've tried; nowadays I strongly prefer simply listening to my local library (which I've played to death, but at least it's to my own preferences) instead.

Show me a platform that stays in its damn lane where I can listen to what I want to, and I'll gladly hand over my cash; I'm not gonna do that to be made to listen to the same junk that scored me making that cash to begin with.

This drove me insane a little while ago. Every single "personalised" Spotify playlist that got shovelled my way had a bunch of songs on it from Olivia Rodrigo's latest album, regardless of whether they fit the playlist theme or not. I don't listen to Olivia Rodrigo, and consistently skip her songs when they come up because they just aren't my cup of tea, but Spotify continued to shoehorn them into every playlist I listened to.

Same thing with the AI DJ. There are some days where it just never misses, and I can listen for hours without skipping a single song. Other days, it feels like every other theme is "here's an artist we've been paid to advertise", and I end up getting tired of it pretty quickly.

> As an aside, accepting that I'm in the minority here speaking on behalf of them, I am not someone who would write a blog post announcing that I'm leaving some shitty platform. I'll just cancel my sub and move on. I don't need nor want to grandstand regardless of AI or just people's shit taste.

Without someone writing the post you wouldn't be here discussing it. I applaud the author for writing his short post on his own personal website. He's hardly "grandstanding". You're the only one who claims to be "speaking on behalf" of others.

The most hilarious startups are all called "get(name)"

I guess the hope is they won't end up in the toilet and they might, in the future, be able to buy a domain not prefixed by "get"

These days, it's -ai. All those SomethingAI names won't age well, and will be dated sooner than the proprietors think

Totally! I thought this would be from an app developer lamenting Shopify’s transition from REST to GraphQL…

It's mostly about domain names, real words are all gone long ago so people self-funding the early days chose the real words with modifiers.

I feel like -r is an old school internet thing. I wonder if anybody has data for trends over time.

My next startup will be called Rifyly

Names are hard. I'd say it says more about how little creativity we have in tech company business models

-alate, -ster, etc. :-)

Agreed. I just navigated to my home page on desktop and I see the following categories:

- A section with 8 of my recently played playlists

- A section of "Made for <my name>" with 6 Daily Mixes (which I generally like), Discover weekly (which I like now that it's tailored to me: I used to hate that it only contained pop/hip hop hits), Release Radar (love it), and the AI DJ (which I find very annoying)

- A section called Recently Played which looks like all legitimate things I've played

- "New Releases for You", which are all by artists I've listened to very recently

- "Jump back in", which has several playlists and artists I've listened to recently

- A sidebar of all of my playlists I've created or followed

Of the ~50 actionable items on the page, the only one I dislike is the AI DJ, but it by no means feels forced on me since it's just a single square.

https://i.imgur.com/RKsIgLR.jpeg

"I'm not seeing a problem so how is there a problem" is not the right critique in an era where the selection algorithm is so personalised.

Spotify is awful for me, I concur with the original article. YouTube Music is heading slowly the same way. At this rate I'll have to cast around for another phone that can take an SD card again.

The service I really miss is eMusic, they had little in the way of well known music so leaned into small label music and it was wonderful.

It's the HN effect, as well as selection bias. People here are highly technical and may notice things that regular people don't, or they do things in a very idiosyncratic way. I remember seeing comments here before about how some people have no cell phone, run only a very old school terminal based computer, etc, for example. They also seem to be annoyed at very specific things as you can see in the comments here, things that the average user wouldn't even think about. Ultimately, HN and other technical fora are not representative of the average user's experience.

I’m more curious of the claim that you don’t get podcasts pushed on you.

The last time I used Spotify (and the reason I left) podcast were constantly featured on the start page and it was impossible to remove them (and I have zero interest in podcast in my music application).

That's what I'm thinking as well. Spotify ain't great but it's fine. Some people are recommending Apple Music but Apple Music don't even have a client for Linux and their website is awful. OTOH, I can use Spotify even through my terminal.

You may indeed have a different experience, but you also may not notice these things as it happens slowly over time, like the proverbial boiling frog. If you're younger it's likely you haven't noticed the patterns. I've been around for a while and notice these patterns from miles away.

I recently unsubscribed because I definitely saw a lot of AI music. I do think Spotify has the best UI and user created playlists of all platforms though

100% agree. I still listen to this one from time to time:

https://suno.com/song/da6d4a83-1001-4694-8c28-648a6e8bad0a

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/mit-l...

It's just so good, IMHO.

I have put on "I Glued My Balls To My Butthole Again" on YouTube Music, unironically, several times. I don't actually hate AI music.

Yeah.. what the hell do they actually work on all day?

I have a very long list of features in my head, that seem incredibly obvious and simple to implement. Some of these features were present in other music library applications ~25 years ago (Winamp et al.).

For example, "following" an artist doesn't actually seem to do anything useful as far as I can tell. I've followed a million artists, but I often find out they released new albums and I had no idea. Even something as simple as a notification badge as I scroll through my followed artist list would do wonders for discovery.

And when I consider that the features they do have in their applications don't work all that well to begin with... One egregious example is saving music for offline listening on my phone. I can't tell you how many times I've boarded an airplane to find out the app just decided to purge it all.

Another super fun issue I ran into that actually cost Spotify money since I canceled my family subscription - There are no parental controls or any other method for blocking podcasts. And the podcasts now include videos! So I go through all the trouble of locking down youtube, etc on every device in my house and suddenly find my kid watching Logan Paul videos on Spotify!

They just feel like a company that has the velocity of a snail.

I just mentioned in another comment that I canceled my family subscription because of that video podcast nonsense with my own kids.

I've not heard of Qobuz before, thanks for the recommendation.

> no thanks, Podcasts are terrible. If I wanted to hear idiots laughing at each other I'd listen to the Radio DJs

When you inject personal opinions like this which are obviously at odds with millions of other people, it's difficult to take the rest of the comment seriously.

>no thanks, Podcasts are terrible. If I wanted to hear idiots laughing at each other I'd listen to the Radio DJs

I agree this format of podcast is terrible, but there are many podcasts that are more like one or a couple of people each giving a presentation and I enjoy them a lot.

Ukraine the Latest by The Telegraph and The History of Rome by Mike Duncan are ones I particularly enjoyed.

I actually really like podcasts but never wanted my music app forcing theirs above links to actual music, or inserting extra ads into episodes that I could listen to from other sources. Their rollout of podcasts made me make a point to never, ever listen to a podcast on Spotify.

> Bitwarden, one of my beloved apps, has done the same with a god-awful UI redesign.

+1. Given it's open source I'm tempted to revert to the older one, though it will probably stop working over time as other things change :(

> The "X person/people talking taking 2 hours to discuss something that could be discussed succinctly in 5 minutes" isn't a format I'm interested in.

Yeah same for me too. The only podcasts I can bear are monologues, when there's more than one people at least they're each talking to me not to each other. Things like Hardcore History, Anthropocene Reviewed, and most of 99% Invisible.

Terrible music? You know you choose what you listen to, right?

Public Service Announcement: there’s a healthy marketplace of refurbished and upgraded iPods from the 2004 era on eBay, the Classic 5.5 comes highly recommended with solid DAC from the factory but iPods mini with upgraded DAC, fresh battery, and large flash memory swaps for the old spinning disks are readily available.

I subscribe to Qobuz and buy a lot of lossless DRM free music and can recommend them as well, tho there was recently a big swath of the available music dropped due to licensing issues (hence the utility of downloading DRM free music). I also price shop against the digital albums and often a CD on eBay will be cheaper, I don’t mind missing out on the “24bit 192khz hifi” to save a few bucks.

On a lark, I refunded up my phone with my mp3 library I keep on my laptop and I built up so many years ago. I enjoyed it just fine for the nostalgia but I still don't understand where I'm going to discover new music without services like Spotify. I used go to shows and see new artists that way, but with kids that's not as much a valid proposition as it once was.

My criteria are:

- 500GB+

- Ability to sort by the albumartist tag (listen to heaps of compilations)

- Ability to export play log

- Functions like any other external storage device for transfer purposes

Anything out there? Last I checked (10 years ago) there was nothing that hit all these marks. I had a Sansa Clip with Rockbox and just dealt with the low storage capacity.

I’ve been strongly considering refurbing the 6th gen iPod Classic I have in the garage. The disk died years ago, and I imagine it would need a battery by now.

Now I’m wondering if anybody sells a USB-C adapter to iPod dock connector.

One of these days the parts are going to end up at my doorstep. Boredom and a couple of beers away.

Ever since Google Play Music was killed off, I've been putting off setting up a home server and accessing my entire collection like that. There's some Android program that allows one to do that, forget the name of it though. Think it has "fish" in the name

No discovery of new music?

I have an Android phone with a 500GB SD card and audio jack. I use an app called PowerAmp. Recently they introduced some optional subscription, but I ignored that, and so far my experience has been fantastic. I've been using that app as my audio player for years already.

I don't get it why people but Samsung S99 Pro Plus Maxi for €9999 when cheap phones for developing markets are objectively better, minus the camera, and cost like €300.

This sounds interesting, would you please consider elaborating so I could give it a go?

Spotify can't tell the difference.

You're not going to be forced to upload an Ableton project and video of you recording the instruments. AI music usually is heavily processed and arranged by a human anyway, it's not yet like pushing a button (if you want to get listens).

At most it's the 'artists' self-admission of copyright via stuff like Distrokid + some automated analysis for sample royalties.

So likewise AI at most will just be a checkbox they'll choose to ignore during that process just like people who repost other artists music.

I built this to satisfy the new music itch: https://audile.blankenship.io/

Every time you load the page it recommends a random album from Deezer’s catalog. The algorithm is pretty silly: loop Math.random() * MAX_ID until you find an album id that actually exists and return it.

The goal was to recreate that feeling you’d get going down to someone’s basement and thumbing through an old record collection.

Also 1001 Albums to Listen To Before You Die is a pretty decent collection of canonical albums from the record industry that’ll keep you busy for quite a while.

I use SoundCloud from time to time, my taste is really niche and it works great for that (but you need to find a relevant artist first).

I recently jumped off Qobuz exclusively because of their drunk recommendation algorithm, or lack thereof (it seems I'd often end up with whatever is on the front page). I wound up on Pandora: their whole value proposition was finding music you like, and music you might like. I haven't been on Spotify in a hot minute, so I can't make a comparison, but Pandora has been pretty good.