I have decided to leave Spotify after trying it for the last 8 months or so. Why? It wasn’t because of total dissatisfaction. Instead, a handful of irritants began to wear on me while using it.
What It Does Right
Before going into what I don’t like about Spotify, I do want to do go over two things that it does well. The first is volume levelling. This is something that is a bit annoying with Apple Music and their various apps (and no, “sound check” doesn’t work all that well). Spotify does a commendable job of ensuring that all songs in a playlist have similar volume levels.
I’ve only ever used it for playlists, so I can’t comment on how it might work or not work with an album. I know Apple’s “sound check” will mess up some albums, so I largely leave it off as a result. I’m still very much an album listener, not just a playlist shuffler.
The other thing I rather like is cross-device shuffle synchronization (at least when it works). It is nice that I can stop music on my desktop or an iPad, fire it up on my phone in the car, and take up where I left off. Mostly. The phone app doesn’t always get updated unless you remember to open it while still connected to wifi and before you get in the car.
The First Irritation: Bad Playlist Shuffling
My first, and probably biggest, complaint is with how it builds the playback order for shuffling. Frankly, it does an abysmal job of digging into the entire playlist. Instead, it seems to be biased toward playing the songs that are played most frequently.
But that means it seems to be working against itself: it assumes a song is preferred because it got played a lot. But it was the one deciding to play it. I’m convinced that if I shuffled one playlist long enough I’d end up hearing the same song over and over again (“oh, Geoff like this because he’s listened to it a lot, so I’ll play it again!”).
The supposed “random order” is also fixed for some period of time. This appears to hold even if I restart the app, but not always. I have some smaller playlists where, after the app reached the end, it played everything again in the exact same order. It isn’t clear what it takes to get it to rebuild the shuffle order with any certainty.
That’s not how I expect shuffle to work. I’m expecting that, once it’s played everything, it will build a new order and start to play that. It’s what I’ve experienced with the Music app on my Apple devices. And if I restart the app on a device, the next time I try that playlist, the shuffle order is different again.
The Second Irritation: When Sync Doesn’t Work
The Apple apps don’t seem to try to synchronize shuffling playlists across devices. The “bad”, if you will, is that you can’t take up where you left off on another device. But the “good” is that each device has its own playback order, so you aren’t re-listening to the same sequence of songs.
Spotify playback synchronization works, but only if all instances of the app are active and connected. This can be a problem on iOS and iPadOS, because not all apps get to work in the background, or work at all times in the background.
This leaves me, often, having to re-listen to the same sequence of songs in the car that I just listened to for however long in the office. I’d rather it not do that.
The Third Irritation: The Disappearing Content
Because there’s no option to buy content in Spotify, availability is at the mercy of whatever licence agreement Spotify has with the music distributor. It isn’t a widespread problem, but I have discovered songs on playlists that I could play previously grayed-out because they aren’t available in Canada anymore. On Apple Music, for anything I’ve bought off the store, I still have it, even if it disappears from sale on the store later.
Okay, I get it, they don’t get a licence with no time limit. But if I had a way to buy the song, and get my own irrevocable, perpetual, non-transferrable licence, that could be avoided. But there’s no way to do that as far as I know.
The Fourth Irritation: No Sync of Downloaded Content
If I add audio files to Spotify on one device, they are available on that device and nowhere else. If I do the same with Apple Music, as long as the file is under 5GB in size, it will sync to all my other devices.
So, if I rip a CD (because there’s no digital copy of the music) and add it to my Apple Music library, it’s on all my devices. If I do that on Spotify, they only appear on the device where I added them. It’s annoying.
It Was Interesting, But I’m Done
I’m glad I gave Spotify a shot, because it wasn’t all bad. And if I had to use it because I’ve moved away from the Apple universe, then I could live with it. But while I have something that works better for me, I’m sticking with that.
I am not saying people should avoid Spotify. How I use it, what I expect, will be different that what others do. For some, Spotify is a far superior service compared to Apple Music. But it isn’t working for me in a way that I would like.