Spotify doesn’t care
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Two months ago, Spotify decided to remove one of its core feature on desktop, the bell that notifies you of new releases. I have contacted them to know why and here is their answer:
The long answer being “this change will allow us to shift our focus to email and push notifications”. This update has been commented by many users for good reasons:
- This feature was only available on Rdio and Spotify, the first one doesn’t exist anymore thus Spotify was the last streaming service offering notifications for new releases.
- You can still see the bell when launching Spotify during less than 1 second.
- The bell is still working on the Spotify Web Player:
TL;DR Spotify didn’t remove the bell, they hid it. The problem is that this kind of weird updates happens with a lot of features these days.
Messages
Let’s talk about Messages. This feature has been sucking for more than 6 months, update after update.
6 months ago a weird delay was introduced, my friends were receiving my messages 1 to 3 days after I had sent them. As a developer I had trouble understanding how this could happen but, 2 months later, the problem was fixed. Well, sort of.
Shortly after fixing the delay problem, Spotify decided to make the notifications stay even if you have already read them. I guess an engineer didn’t get the credit deserved to fix the delay notifications thus he or she wanted users to know that messages were working again!
More seriously, this is an issue that has existed for a very long time:
Having a notification that stays days in your dock (I’m using a Mac) sucks, and noticing that this bug has been here for a very long time sucks even more. But there is one last thing about messages, the one that creeps me out every time I use them:
This default message is like if there was a default message on iMessage “I’m writing you a message now” that you had to remove manually. Why are the title and the name of the artist written in the message as it is already in the big black box on top of it?
You can also see the nice addition of a #hashtag, showing you that a developer did not care that you want to share a song using Messages and not through Facebook or Twitter.
Lyrics
Lyrics are important in a music streaming service thus many companies offer them. Spotify? Not anymore.
It’s been a month that clicking on the lyrics has been showing a message “Hey, we have something awesome coming up, stay tuned!” Nowadays the Lyrics button has just been removed.
Here is a lesson Spotify: we don’t give a fuck about what’s happening behind your curtain, we just want a service that works. You knew your contract with Musixmatch was ending thus we could have expected you to handled it gracefully.
These kinds of problems have happened dozens of times to companies like Google and Apple and users have never known about it. Spotify, please do the same with your customers.
Conclusion
It looks like the community managers, engineers and executives at Spotify do not know each others. The answer you get on Twitter is not the one on their forum, the lyrics are coming back then they’re not, important features like messages are not tested properly.
Spotify keeps adding features like Running without announcing an app for the Apple Watch (would be useful when I actually do fitness) and Video while removing Lyrics.
One last example: Spotify makes a Discover Weekly playlist which is awesome, thus why cannot they create a New Releases For You playlist to replace the notifications bell?
This lack of cohesion between different parts of the product makes me angry and more than that, doubtful about a company that apparently doesn’t care about its users.
As all my friends are on Spotify and nobody else offers weekly playlists tailored for me, I do not plan to use something else to listen music. But the days were I was waiting for new features on Spotify are over and I now only fear to see that the application I use 10 hours every day has been updated.
