I agree. Never cared much for the UI, and always found it too buggy to keep using. At my old job, we used it for office tunes, and it was often showing the wrong song that was playing, (so you never knew what you were listening to unless you used something like SoundHound), and going to previous or next tracks was inconsistent, so you might not get back to the last song ever again.

Pardon my ignorance but why is Google Play Music not worth mention here?

I actually used to have Google Play Music All Access, but the bugs would just drive me insane. I think the worst one was where it would play the censored version of a song, no matter if you chose the edited or explicit version. The only way to fix it was to delete your locally downloaded music, which I keep 60gb of my favorite tracks on my phone. I finally jumped to Spotify premium and I've haven't experienced any bugs. Plus, Spotify premium is half the price because I get a student discount. I think the only thing I miss is no ads on YouTube videos.

I recently switched from Google Music to Spotify because the Google music app was so bad. Buggy, slow, and just kinda hard to use. Spotify has its quirks, but it's a million times better.

The sad thing is, it didn't used to be this way. The first versions of Spotify (beta) were really performant. In fact, the same developer that wrote Open Transport Tycoon had a large part to play in the first Spotify desktop app. It was slick, simple and easy to use.

Now though... There's bloat every where, bugs everywhere, zero user feedback has been incorporated into the product. There are bugs that have been open for _years_ that still haven't been addressed.

From what I hear of the company culture, it's not surprising. International parties, organizational bloat, defunct acquisitions. What started as a really nice piece of tech quickly devolved into a hedonistic wannabe mainstream media company, and it shows.

I have absolutely no issues with the mobile or desktop versions of the app.

The mobile app is pretty decent, but it's not well designed. It's easy to get lost in the confusion mishmash of navigation elements. For example, if I'm playing a song, I tend to hit the hamburger menu in the upper-right corner to find the "add to playlist" function, when it's in the tiny "..." icon next to the pause button.

I'm reasonably happy with the desktop app, although it's still as terrible at organizing your collection of music as it's always been. For example, if you save a single song from an album, that album shows up in your "Albums" view, which makes no sense. And if you go to that album, it's actually a weird, special virtual album and not the real album (there's a "View full album" link to get to that one).

I was using the "Save" function for quite a while until I met the 10,000 song limit. Which is a ridiculously low limit for any lover of music, especially when album counts toward that limit — "saving" an album is actually just saving the individual tracks. You can't raise this limit; you're done, or you have to go back and unsave music.

The "Local files" function is also pretty obviously an afterthought. You can only play them to a device if your device is on the same network as your desktop machine; this also goes for syncing. To play your "local files" on a device, you have to mark them for offline play on the device while the desktop Spotify is running. How ridiculous is that?

A final gripe: After 10 years, Spotify still doesn't categorize classical music by composer and performer separately. Apple Music does this correctly.

For me the desktop app regularly seems to consume way too much RAM (memory leak?), and it regularly doesn't shut down properly or even crashes, and this is on two separate macs.

Could be that it's a MacOS Sierra issue, but considering the number of 'random weird shit' that happens when I have the app open (playback working fine but visually stuck on an ad, to name a recent issue), I'm inclined to think it's just a piece a shit.

On the one hand I am baffled by the terrible quality, but then I remember that even companies like Google aren't always much better. My Google Inbox app (on iPhone), for example, regularly gets 'stuck' on showing a badge icon of '1' even though I can't for the life of me produce the email that causes this. It's been this way for quite a while and I just don't get how it's possible that a big company like Google lets this happen. And again, I understand it's possible there's some weird edge case that causes this to happen for just me or very few other users, but considering that I run into a whole bunch of other weird issues using Google Inbox, I'm inclined to conclude, once again, that it's just a piece of shit.

Here's an example of something utterly ridiculous that they still haven't fixed several years after first reported to them: despite music having flags to classify it as "mature", you can't tell the client to filter out that music. They have the music flagged already, so it's not like they're being requested to tag all of the music in their archives.

Pandora, and pretty much every competitor in the field can.

Still it's arguably better than the alternatives out there. When I cast music to my TV Spotify has a nice interface. When I cast Google Music there is this icon dancing around all over the TV. I think their web interface is superior as well.

I like Apple Music more - more songs and it uploads your mp3s that are not matched and make them available everywhere.

Does it still replace your local music files with inferior copies from the cloud?

It is, and I pay for a subscription still. I wish there were a good alternative.

I'm still shocked that the spotify desktop app won't let you output to anything other than the default audio device. There's an open request with thousands of votes on their tracker that has been in "not right now" state for half a decade. I know people with multiple outputs aren't a majority, but c'mon, it's gotta be less work to add than pretty much every other "feature" they've added in that time...

I loved the music discovery aspect of Spotify but bad software pushed me away.

Even to me it sounds counterintuitive. Finding new music I love should have been worth more to me than a player with a lot of features. But my instinct was to let foobar2000 pull me back. Something about sophisticated control of playback and playlists turns out to be really important too. But power users are the minority, I'm sure.

I loved both LastFM and MusicIP (or MusicMatch as it was previously known) for their unique matching and recommendation ability. Both were neutered and gradually withered.

I still hope something out there will use my LastFM profile to offer something better than the laughably inaccurate recommendations that I get from every other service.

And adding playlists to your account without telling you. This was on a free account, but still, it felt like they had no integrity at all.