Spotify Stinks
Spotify is a good idea. Too bad that the implementation is pretty horrible.
For starters, Spotify makes it very hard to find new music to listen to. I can search just fine, and Spotify even has a modest amount of the music I listen to. But why can’t I find any new music?
If I look at the “radio” tab, I see eighteen categories, none of which describe the music I like, and a slider to pick a range of decades of music. The big problem here is that the categories are horribly generic.
I listen to a lot of electronic subgenres, yet the only thing vaguely resembling my taste is “techno” — and I don’t listen to techno. After 30 minutes of listening to music in this strange techno category, I heard one single song I could maybe classify as techno. The rest was trance, goa trance (which, of course, isn’t the same as trance), drum and bass, synthpop and futurepop. I can’t think of any way to make Boards of Canada qualify as techno.
They need to take a long hard look at last.fm. There I can participate in social tagging and tag artists and groups with whatever genres I think they fit into. Looking at the EBM tag at last.fm I see a fairly accurate representation of actual EBM – though I don’t really know what Covenant is doing that high up on the list.
Another thing they need to borrow from last.fm: Where are all the other users? Why can’t I add friends? See what they listen to? Find other users with similar taste in music that way?
Spotify is a nice idea. But it feels too much like Web 1.1 with one-way communication from the music industry to a silent crowd of passive consumers, rather than the social activity you can get at last.fm with user taxonomy, forums, discussion and music comparisons letting you find new music.
If I want to find new music on Spotify the only way is to play the incredibly vague “techno” category and hope I stumble upon something I actually like.
This is me on last.fm. At a quick glance you can see what I’ve listened to recently, what my favorite music is, and if you’re a registered user, get a comparison to see how our music tastes match.
Get to work, Spotify! We’re not in the 1990s any longer.
Last-minute edit: One minute after posting this Spotify gave me opera song and instrumental chamber music… which is apparently techno.
Update: It does seem that they actually listen, and last.fm scrobbling support was recently added. It’s a small step forward, at least.
January 9th, 2009 at 17:17
I haven’t tried it, but apparently Jamendo’s another nice take on music distribution, and not Web 2.0 in the sense that you should communicate with every other fan out there, but Web 2.0 in that you should communicate with the artists themselves.
Good link for impressions on it (in swedish)
January 9th, 2009 at 18:56
I think Spotify works perfeclty well with last.fm. I don´t think Spotify main intent is to be a music recommandation service or a social community for musicfreaks. I think of it as songlibrary where last.fm, blogs, facebook, friends, music magazines, playlists on msn acts as “librarians”.
There is a wonderful greasemonkyscript that lets you click on any artist, song, album or band on last.fm and play it immediately in Spotify (if they have it) . I think there is a link to the script on the the spotify blog. I strongly recommend it.
January 10th, 2009 at 20:05
I love the simplicity, its like having ur own playlist in ur computer. No comments, invite friend links etc just one single playlist and a searchbar
January 10th, 2009 at 21:49
Well, there’s minimalistic, and then there’s simplistic. Minimalism is something I enjoy; Spotify is just plain simplistic and can’t do what I’ve come to expect from a modern application that aims at being minimalistic.
January 16th, 2009 at 11:10
maybe you should try to use the radio based on an artist with spotify… you start from an artist go to its page and launch the webradio from this artist.
Also… can you just figure out that not everybody (the majority) want to spend time on a music service exploring users profiles, manage friends… most of people want simple things… last.fm is not.
January 16th, 2009 at 11:43
If they don’t want to, they don’t have to. This is however functionality that is pretty much considered basic stuff for people used to the internet nowadays. And Spotify doesn’t have it.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:14
Don’t know if it’s too late to contribute to this but I totally agree with arizona. I’m a new user to Spotify and have found that it’s simplicity makes it really easy to use – it’s a simple process to find songs by artists that you want to know more about. From what I’ve seen, last.fm is a bit overwhelming with the amount of information on view. I have no interest in being part of a ‘music community’ – all I (and most of the people I’ve talked to about this) want is a media player style interface that gives me access to a large database of music, and Spotify does this very well.
July 23rd, 2009 at 03:23
I have just started using Spotify and i can practically find anything on there. They could of changed it recently but either way you should give it another try. (Im talking about the search function, because i do agree with the fact that the radio function is very outdated).
July 23rd, 2009 at 09:33
…and my music taste is different and I can find maybe 10% of what I search for — and then I’m lucky if I find a single remix instead of entire albums. The electronic subgenres are non-existant.