Edit: By proprietary I mean - owned by Spotify.
It would be pointless for them to stay an passive background app. Might as well shutdown the company and cut the losses.
Plus internal tools will probably be a major thing too.
Spotify has gotten worse for me as well, I pay for Spotify + SiriusXM. Spotify should be much better, but it's not. I'm thinking of dropping it soon.
Why doesn't Spotify still not have a Pandora style radio station? I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?
Can you describe the criteria ?
Spotify does have this. They've had it forever. It automatically happens after listening to a song you like, or you can make a playlist and generate a radio off of it.
The recommendations are so far ahead of pandora it's like the difference between AIM chatbots and GPT-4. I use spotify but my boat friend uses pandora when we go out and I am astonished by how bad the matching on it is.
No one asked for, it benefits no one, and people proactively want the old version.
I’m sure they had countless meetings for this “feature” and how much human hours. There would have been a designer, and a researcher. There would have also been a data scientist lying with statistics about how this change moved the core business metrics.
That’s from my personal experience of working in FANG and people doing unscientific and statistically invalid analysis of noise.
Netflix claimed there was statistical justification for the change, but my most charitable interpretation is that their goals don't align with mine.
For better or for worse, Spotify has a lot of customized playlists. At some point, the “workout” playlist playlist stopped being a regular global playlist and started being one customized for individual users.
Their “keep playing more like this” functionality that takes over after the playlist ends is quite good, as is smart shuffle which will mix in tracks that “belong” in the playlist even.
Some songs will play artist uploaded music videos when you play their songs. Their “now playing” widget now shows a larger album art and background information about the band.
I don’t know what happened to the lyrics all of those years, but I’m guessing it was a licensing issue. A random add on is different from first party application support for all of your users, globally.
It’s possible you don’t use any of this and think it’s a waste of time. That’s fine. I think Spotify is seamlessly stitching in extra functionality in non-annoying ways, which I like.
There's also maintenance for all their platforms, which expands a bit every year. When I first started using Spotify smart speakers weren't a thing yet, and the number of OSes and streaming devices have only increased since. They have to maintain updates for various releases of macOS, Windows, iOS, iPadOS, Roku, etc. No doubt they encounter plenty of bugs that need addressing on those platforms...
They also have to have people negotiating rights for all the regions / countries they do business in, deal with fraud, and all that nonsense.
And they have to keep up social and advertising to compete with all the other streaming music and podcasting platforms. They have editorial needs - maintaining the artist pages and all the incoming new music, building playlists, etc.
Assuming Spotify offers this info in the appropriate languages by country, that's probably not an insubstantial number of people to ensure that you have pages for each artist translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, and on and on. Spotify is available in a lot of countries, if they actually offer the interface and content in half of the primary languages for those countries it's going to be a lot of work. (I doubt they attempt to translate lyrics across the board, that would be an extremely heavy lift...)
That's not to say that Spotify doesn't have some unnecessary staff, but there's probably a lot of behind-the-scenes work aside from accounting and such that people don't think about.
Again, sounds like I'm some secret corporate shill or something but I truly am just genuinely appreciative of the service.
Spotify is basically "audio" for hundreds of millions of people. Think about that: a single app that defines/owns one entire medium. Yet, they haven't been profitable, ever. That's the problem and should probably be fixed with regulation: to enable streaming, the music industry has made sure the streamers get a tiny slice of the value-add. Which leaves room for exactly one, barely surviving, pure audio streamer, and then a bunch of subsidized side-bets of the monsters (Apple, Amazon, Youtube).
OTOH, it drives me crazy that customers like myself have been begging them for many years to add basic features like remembering my spot in a playlist.
Can you elaborate? Seriously curious how that exactly would look like.
For example, I really enjoy curated playlists, and some of them are really long. I'd love the ability to work my way through a playlist but also be able to take a break and listen to something else. Or to go to the gym and listen to other music while I'm there. Or temporarily stop and listen to a new song a friend shared. None of these scenarios work very well currently.
Spotify already stores and syncs playlist name/ID/owner/etc. All I want is for them to add 2-3 bytes of sync'd data - just store the current sort field, sort direction, and a song index. It'd be totally fine if it didn't remember playlist state if you're on shuffle play.
Breaking libspotify, pointless UI redesigns, obvious, user-facing bugs that go unfixed for years. Removing features like play queue for long periods. There's metadata errors and even audio corruption in some albums that I actually reported to them years ago, never fixed.
As for new features, there may be more but the only one I noticed somewhat recently was the ability to view lyrics at least for some songs, and sometimes but not always synced to the music. But this was already an add-on for Spotify wayyy back in their original client, and then they axed add-on support! This feature was gone for years after that.
I'm legitimately curious at this point what people actually do at Spotify besides billing and accounting.