Top 5 Complaints Users Have About Spotify
Using NLP to understand thousands of reviews
In the music streaming world, labeling Spotify as one of the greats would be an understatement. Not only did their inception revolutionize the music industry, they absolutely dominate in market share (31%) with a whopping 188 million subscribers worldwide. As a consumer and a Spotify premium stan myself, it’s not hard to see why their little green app is many consumers’s go-to place for music. A seamless interface, a killer music recommendation algorithm, and a graphical equalizer are just a few features that convert their subscribers into die hard fans, and make competitors like Apple Music look like the shaky openers to an electrifying Spotify Global Tour.
Yet no app is safe in the cut-throat, 24/7 global world of technology reach, and even the mightiest of corporate music giants have flop eras. Using a 2022 dataset of Spotify reviews (from January-June), we ran through over 60 thousand lines of unique user feedback (in a matter of minutes 👀 ) from consumers who had lots to say about everyone’s favorite music app. We can go on and on (and so can they,) but here are the Top 5 Complaints Users Have About the Spotify App.
Playing Random Music (2720 Reviews)
Picture this: you’re on aux with your friends jamming out to the essentials, Drake, 21 Savage, Megan thee Stallion; the works. Then suddenly disaster strikes, and your guilty pleasure Hamilton playlist comes on. You didn’t queue that! But it’s too late, now all your friends know you’re a “Hamil-Fan” and you curse the Spotify app as Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson duke it out during “Cabinet Battle #1.” This is just an example (that totally didn’t happen to me) of vibe-switching glitches that 2720 users experienced while using the Spotify app.
The App Keeps Crashing (2160 Reviews)
Forget involuntary song switching, nothing kills the vibe faster than sitting in awkward silence because Spotify keeps crashing. What good is a music app that freaks out when you start to play… music? Maybe it just can’t handle another round of All Too Well (10 Minute Version)(Taylor’s Version)(From the Vault) for the thirteenth time in a row… But when you’re in your feels, you’re in your feels, and you deserve an app that will play the entirety of Taylor Swift’s discography without interruption, gosh darn it!
Paying the Big Bucks for Premium — and the App Still Doesn’t Work (544 Reviews)
It’s like pouring money down the drain… specifically $9.99/month. 544 users complained that even though they shell out the extra money for the elite, premium version of the Spotify, their app still glitches, crashes and lags (oh my!). Not exactly what it means to get enough bang for your buck.
Updates Make the Glitches Worse (971 Reviews)
We see the effort, Spotify, but sometimes those updates just make things worse! A little under a thousand users reported more glitches and app crashes after updating their Spotify app. It’s like Miley said; it’s always gonna be an uphill battle, and sometimes, we are gonna have to lose. 😞
“Just Fix It.” (1318 Reviews)
Why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick? Taking a Kevin Malone approach to feedback, 1318 reviewers advised Spotify to “just fix it” (or some variation of that incredibly helpful advice.)
Don’t Let the Haters Get You Down, Spotify — Plenty of Users Still Love You ❤️ (3,323 Reviews)
Haters gonna hate, but that won’t stop thousands of users from leaving glowing reviews to drown out the negative nellies, and since I wrote this whole article while listening to my custom-made “Discover Weekly” Playlist (and discovered the catchy masterpiece that is “Dynamite” by BTS, thank you Spotify) I feel personally obligated to share the love. There are so many positive reviews we could talk about, but I think user 338 put it best: “I don’t live without Spotify.” Me neither user 388. What would we do without them 💚
How We Did This
We ran through thousands of lines of feedback… in a matter of minutes? Yep, you heard that right! It’s no secret — we used the Resultid app. 🤭 Here’s how.
Once you login to Resultid using a Google account, you are granted access to two narratives. Since we were dying to know how users felt about our favorite music app, we first selected the Sentiment Analysis narrative. We uploaded our data and selected the column of reviews to analyze. Within seconds we generated the result below. 🪄
To our surprise, it turns out that 54.54% of reviewers were not satisfied with their Spotify experience. In their words, the app is “complete garbage”. But WHY would they say these things? 🥺
We downloaded the analyzed CSV file and uploaded it to the Theme Discovery narrative to find out.
Desperate to understand the themes behind the negative reviews, we filtered by the lowest sentiment score as assigned by the previous narrative. Within seconds, we were able to understand exactly what users disliked about their app experience and what could be done to improve it.
Interested in running your own analysis through Resultid? Join our beta list to sign up!
