I think calling an artist's latest album nothing more than "just a playlist they put together with some artwork" is doing a disservice to the amount of work that goes into consciously composing and crafting an album, at least for many artists and genres of music. The same could be said for the skill that goes into making a good playlist, sure, but in general there's still a difference between someone curating existing music and someone writing new songs from scratch and figuring out how to arrange them.

Whilst it is simple, it's important to note that the curating of an album is an important creative output of a band/group/artist, the other being the actual tracks.

What I really want from Spotify (or any other music service) is the ability to have a playlist of albums, not a play list of tracks. Spotify has no concept of an album as a single entity, so I end up using the service in spite of this. This might be down to how I listen to music, but I'd guess that my album-centric view of music isn't particularly unique.

Something along those lines, but I'd like playlists of playlists. Easily compose whatever I want that way.

Um. Albums and playlists are fundamentally different. Albums are compositions by the artist. Playlists are collections by the user.

You can't sort playlists except manually, and clicking on your library gives you only a list of individual tracks and albums, completely ignoring playlists.

They have screwed this up in virtually every way possible.

Saving playlists assumes that you can actually find them again. I use one playlist per artist/composer, organized in per-genre folders, and it's a pain to maintain. First, because I end up with a ton of playlists, and secondly because I have to manually alphabetize their order. If I don't order them alphabetically I can't find them, since Spotify has no playlist search/filter. (For some reason the search box autocompletes other people's published playlists, but not your own.)

I agree with the parent, Spotify's playlist-oriented design is a major UI problem.

But who wants to scroll through hundreds of 'playlists' when you just want to know what albums you like. Coming from GMusic, this is one thing I miss...the separation of albums and playists.

I feel OPs pain, which is why I'm slowly working on a project that would make Spotify more useful for how I listen to music: better search, more detailed song / album / artist info...granted it'll just be a web app but it can be a real chore sometimes to use the mobile app for searching and browsing (see just about any Classical or Jazz for an example).

I save albums as playlists all the time, mainly if I want to download them. But the problem for me is that they are all just playlists, and Spotify is really dumb when it comes to playlists, i.e. I can't organize them in a sane manner or filter them (someone please tell me if I'm wrong about this), so then I just have a huge pile of playlists to scroll through. I don't think that treating albums as "just a playlist by the artist" is a powerful concept when you treat playlists so primitively to begin with.