So Spotify recently changed from a green heart and a block song button to and + and a - for liking and disliking. What is your opinion?
My personal preference would be to bring back the green heart and make a deep red broken heart.
And I know spotify is proprietary yada yada I don’t care for music streaming. So pls don’t let it be a part of the discussion.
To reference this is an old screenshot I found on the internet.
I pay for Spotify and do not like the pop ups for podcasts and now audiobooks. I really do not like how they ruined the shuffle button and now the ugly check mark instead of the heart. I am not fond of the ui at all and will start looking at other alternatives. Imo, Spotify has gone downhill. I miss the old time Spotify.
I HATE the shuffle button on Spotify. It used to be better. I have a Playlist that I used to listen to with the ‘enhanced’ shuffle. Spotify would add similar songs into the queue. It was nice. Now Spotify just plays the same 20 songs or so, over and over again. My Playlist has over 200 songs without even adding the variety into the queue. I’ve started actively removing songs because they are all I hear. This isn’t how listening to music should work.
Oh, I noticed that too. I have over 800 songs in my playlist and Spotify would play about 10 of them in a specific order even though shuffle was enabled. I found an app to fix that for me https://shuffle.virock.org
I also really dislike the pop-ups and “recommendations” that I have no interest in. It feels like I’m being advertised to when I’m specifically already paying, in part to remove ads.
That, along with their incessant and poorly communicated A/B UI testing, is making me more and more frustrated. Don’t get me wrong, the price for a Duo membership is excellent for the amount of music available, but I have started to build out my own collection that I can stream through Plex as a backup, since I expect their platform to only get worse over time
Yes! The shuffle button! Every time I want to shuffle/unshuffle a playlist, it seemingly has to toggle through the smart shuffle bullshit first, which disables the button and shows a loading icon (which can be 5+ seconds on a mobile connection) while it finds awful songs to inject into my playlist.
Oh how I wish there was a way to disable it
I switched to TIDAL. Same price, and they pay the artists better per stream.
My shuffle button is still a shuffle button, and the heart is still a heart. I also never get popups, but I also pay for it, so if you don’t maybe that’s why?
I pay for premium. Unfortunately, I get full screen pop ups Spotify refers to as “sponsered suggestions”. Ranging from a survey, podcasts, audiobooks, family plans, new artists they want me to like, etc.
To me, they are irritating and as a monthly subscriber, I should not have them. I am happy they do not plauge you. I consider you very lucky.
I dislike all the algorithms being pushed on Spotify. I just want to listen to albums and that’s it.
The radio function is nice in theory, but it tries too hard to guess what I want to listen to to the point where it felt like any radio I played ended up being variations of the same thing. It is just not a good way to discover new music in my experience.
These days I have cancelled my subscription in favour of actual radio. Fip.fr is brilliant.
I would really appreciate a configurable Radio playlist. Just a slider from “very similar” to “here be dragons” would do.
Actually, I noticed exactly what you’re describing too. There are like 3-4 clusters of artists that Spotify thinks I love, and that’s it. Unless I’m actively searching for something else.
This was old Slacker Radio. You could create a station with any number of artists and then tweak it to discover new artists or just listen to ones you know.
YouTube Music has this feature currently.
It’s alright, but I’ve left YT Music because of all the bullcrap algorithmic stuff they’re doing too.
I agree and it’s getting to the point where it’s almost unusable for me too.
Every “Spotify” playlist which is what they shove down your throat in every search consists of the same few dozen songs that it thinks I want to listen to. Well if I wanted to listen to the same EDM playlist I’ve already created for myself, I would Spotify. I have to search for specific albums to get any value from the service these days, but that’s difficult when it doesn’t really introduce me to any new music.
This is why I switch to Tidal + Plex. It allows you to just maintain a library and listen to albums while keeping the algorithm recommendations out of the way.
I know what you mean with the radio function I would also love if it would give me something similar to the song i was listening to not the stuff I usually listen to
I see the plus, but where is the minus button you mentioned?
Sorry it was a bad screenshot I changed it to a better one
For context the old one was that one
The button likes the song when clicked, it just fills in. You have to go to the menu to get to the minus button
My app only has the plus currently. I think it’s a dumb change. The type of change you make because you need to change something. Nobody that is competent enough to use a smart phone app would see any benefit from it being changed to a plus and as others have pointed out… it’s a music app, plus and minus are usually associated with volume.
I didn’t know Spotify changed this. I opened up the app, and sure enough it popped up with “the heart is now a plus.”
Yeah, I don’t like it. Just a random plus sign on the “now playing” screen isn’t obvious what it does. Yes, the app told me, but that only appears once.
I wonder if we can complain and get them to change it back.