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Spotify in on itself is worth paying for BUT...
Their app for android sucks blue donkey balls and I'd happily pay more if I'd get to use a slightly less retarded cousin of this app.
The other but:
Spotify in on itself is not very bad right now and basically could and SHOULD continue as-is forever.
However, the economic system as it currently is requires it to continually come up with new crap that nobody needs nor wants (see also all Microsoft software that went from absolute shit thirty years ago to absolute slimey shit with lots of useless but pretty ding dong bells attached to it with a nice camera hidden inside to spy on the insides of your butthole) and it only a matter of time before...
Some exec gets hired there that promises to double their revenue, then implements some shit that will double their revenue once, gets this exec his bonus upon which he immediately quits to go to the next company to fuck over with a pineapple, leaving Spotify with a huge exodus of users, a dwindling service, and two years later it's dead.
I've seen this cycle with too many large companies, and it's the same story over and over. Be it Boeing, Disney, just about all large game companies, etc etc..
Spotify app sucks in the sense that they keep refining their UI to reduce the number of buttons on the bottom of the screen. When it first started they were five, then after a while there became four. I got used to where everything was, so of course with the recent update there now three so I have no freaking idea what is what.
Is there a term for this?
I really see this fucking our economy
Cory Doctorow calls it: Enshittification
It's pretty fitting I think.
Or "platform decay" if you need to talk to your grandma about it.
"Enshittification," an inevitable part of the cycle of capitalism...
Not really the right use I think. It was coined specifically to describe platforms' lifecycle of changing who they benefit. What's above is just constant churn in the attempt of infinite growth or just hanging onto market share trying to decide what people want (or tell them what they should want).
A paid subscription service like O365 or spotify isn't too similar to the advertising "business partners" of a social media platform like tiktok. Of course language is descriptive rather than prescriptive but I feel like overusing this term loses the perceptive observation (and the message Doctorow wants to promote) of how these businesses work. Microsoft adding new features and spotify changing things to either make their app management easier (they claimed that's why they got rid of android widget for a while) or promote their own stuff doesn't seem to fit.
Normal part of monopolization.
Well it's not "In on itself" anyway
Why would you pay for Spotify over Napster?
Like is there a reason to?
I have no idea what napster offers, does it have the same amount of music and family plans available?
Yes, it costs less and has higher quality audio
Napster still exists? Didn't know. But in any case, I have no problem with paying for a service when I have the resources to do so, and if the service is not trying to fuck me over.
Spotify app sucks, but at least so far they haven't tried to fuck me over. Once that changes (and it will) I'll happily torrent music, just like movies.
Napster is a paid legal site now
Their app for android sucks blue donkey balls and I'd happily pay more if I'd get to use a slightly less retarded cousin of this app.
Can you still not play a playlist in order on Android even with premium subscription. I cancelled my subscription when even viewing the playlist and tapping the first track started playback with shuffle turned on.
On android, have premium, use the app a good amount, never encountered the issue you are reporting.
When I first started with Premium, you could toggle shuffle mode on or off before hitting the play button. But then that went away and there was basically only a Shuffle button, so you had to do the sequence like here (from 2022)
https://www.drmare.com/spotify-music/play-spotify-album-in-order.html
but at first you didn't have to do this bit
Step 4. Open the "Now Playing" page and turn off the "Shuffle" button.
And I think at that time the forums were saying it was only the Android app where you had to do this (and I want to say that desktop/web app were indeed not putting me through these shenanigans at that time, was a probably 4-5 years ago, maybe more). And then when I further had to start doing that 4th step of disabling shuffle in the now playing screen I had just had enough and cancelled.
Other posts from 2023 seem to indicate this is now the standard UX on all platforms
https://www.audkit.com/spotify-music/spotify-play-album-in-order.html
https://integraudio.com/play-songs-order-without-premium/edit:
Here's a community thread going back to 2015 ("modo aleatorio" means "random mode") with commenters chiming in through late 2022.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Playing-albums-in-order/m-p/1262705
So I guess I may have my timelines a bit off, but I strongly remember the Play button originally having a little sub-button overlay you could tab to enable or disable shuffle before hitting the Play button proper.
You're not nuts I remember this mild annoyance
Thanks. I'm genuinely curious about the UX that @StorminNorman has now. Premium users deserve a better experience.
Not normin but I've never had a problem either. Here's the screen I get when I open a playlist, can toggle between shuffle, smart shuffle and normal to the left of the play button.
Does yours look different?
Thanks! Glad to see they are no longer being complete idiots about it. I haven't looked at it since cancelling, but yeah it was very different. They had completely removed the control to enable or disable shuffle from this view, if you hit the play button it was going to shuffle, period. If you hit a track to start playback (in shuffle mode) on that track you had to then go to the now playing view and disable shuffle.
What a strange choice to make. I don't remember that ever being on mine but I'm not using it all that much so might have just not noticed to be fair.
Same here. Was surprised to read this comment, went to the Android app, played a few playlists. Shuffle is off by default, first song on a list starts playing. Switch it on, go to another playlist, it is still off by default. Is it some a/b testing by Spotify I am lucky not to be part of? Would certainly cancel my sub if that was the case.
I mean, there were quite a few elements of the ux I was mad about, like promoting stuff I'd never want to listen on the front page just because Spotify paid a gazillion to creators, but shuffle is not it.
You can pay a playlist in order on Android only if you Premium I believe.
I could not without a stupidly bad UX which was reportedly limited to Android while desktop/web/iOS were sane about it. I had been giving Spotify a try after Google squashed Play Music for YouTube Music and I canceled Premium and went to Google with YouTube Premium specifically over this issue.
From what ive seen it's not souch that Spotify doesn't allow you to do that, it's just that their app is developed by some junior devs and managed by managers who have no idea about what a good app is. The result is, well, Spotify. It sucks, really, but at least gives me the bare necessities
Tidal app is good but slightly off (mainly with offline mode, but probably there's a way to do it once you get used to it. I just don't need offline mode that often).
Apart from that it's a solid player.
What did Boeing do?
Dreamliner and 737 MAX, the latest being more egregious since people died.
Hire a bunch of managers that made loads of decisions that made Boeing a lot of money short term (like exporting loads of complicated jobs on programming flight computers) to Indian companies that were cheap and rather incompetent. The results were predictable, all 737 maxes being grounded for years, Boeing went closer to bankruptcy than ever before and those managers were already long gone with their big bonuses.