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I think I've made all kinds of various rants and remarks online about Spotify's sporadic behaviour and disjointed user experience, but now I'm gonna make an earnest attempt to document all of them for some catharsis, and start the process looking for an alternative product, preferably one that is self-hosted.

Please note that this article is written from an end user perspective, there is enough anecdotal evidence online from musicians and music producers about how evil this company is or is becoming.

What the fuck is wrong with their "Smart shuffle"?

One of the most disappointing aspects of Spotify's smart shuffle feature which has no mechanism to disable it, I actually didn't realise how bad it was until I had a session a few nights back where I was listening to music from my Windows Media Player library, and the music selection genuinely felt randomised.

The problem with Spotify's smart shuffle is that it preferences music that you are less likely to skip, but my music preferences are based on mood, just because I don't want to hear a song right now of that genre, doesn't mean I won't want to listen to it in the future, so you end up in a situation where you may have a playlist with over 1500 songs but the same 10 or 20 tracks are often repeated making the list feel kinda bare and crusty, its also precalculated on a computer somewhere. - I know this because I will have instances where I am listening to a playlist on one device like in my car on the way to work, and I might have left the player opened overnight on my work computer, and the playlist on my work computer is 10 to 15 tracks behind what my car already played 30 minutes ago!

It also makes it hard to discover new music, trying the hot hits playlist from triple jay, I only want each song to play once, but a few get special treatment for some reason, and it effects my recommendation algorithm which is already garbage to begin with. - but it means those tracks that made it to the top 100 organically are less likely to be heard or get a chance to be played.

AI smart shuffle.

There's also a feature that's been added to Spotify recently which is the AI smart shuffle bullshit, where it will add random songs to perfectly curated playlists and ruin your mood.

I don't understand why the company would become so malicious and force this on its users, it's just as bad as me telling it I don't care for podcasts, soon it will start adding podcasts to my playlists just you watch, just give me the option to disable it. - so now if you accidentally uncheck shuffle you have to cycle through 3 times to ensure the AI smart shuffle is not selected. At the time that I had originally written this, there was a bug in one of the Spotify clients where once enabled it was on permanently, and the only way to disable it was to use an older client like the one installed on my smart phone.

The smart phone app,

Speaking of the smart phone app one gripe that I have with it, since it's now a unified player, when I'm listening to music on my desktop and I check my phone for whatever reason my natural incentive is to swipe away all the notifications one of which being the player widget which kills the music playback on my desktop, I know it can essentially act as a remote control in this mode but it's also kind of annoying.

Then there's about a million and one pop-ups every time I open it; I mostly use it at the gym but holy crap, it's so frustrating, pop-up crap about using AI in your playlists, some band is touring, some artist I don't listen to is making a new album, there is some crappy contest to enter, just crap I generally don't care about. - I wish there was a check box in settings to disable promotional items.

The Audiobooks on there are a waste of time and made me mad,

Spotify introduced a feature that now enables you to listen to audiobooks through its app, but for myself, after trying to figure out why the audiobooks were locked behind a paywall, I discovered my partner has access to them, as my partner is the account manager, but I thought I had a premium member account? but no, I'm a premium family member, it's too confusing, I'm more annoyed having wasted time with it.

Honest feedback, but the whole service is a little bit underwhelming, and it felt like a bit of a con, I took an interest in the service again after being recommended some audio books that I might actually listen too, but I needed to get "access with listening hours", from the account holder, My partner who has a bunch of hours she's not using, but in order to give me access she needs to buy more, why bother at that point? just go to audible lol.

I don't want to waste time purchasing audiobooks on Spotify when there's a possibility that they could change their mind, and they could become unlocked in the future.

I think the whole thing was intended to add an unwanted feature to an already bloated service so that they can charge you more for it, and then under deliver on it.

Similar to how Amazon prime video used to be great because it came with Amazon prime until they stuck ads in it, and now you can't use it without spending more money and you can't cancel it either without cancelling Amazon prime, so you just sit there and grown at it and hate it.

My suggested work around for this is, that if you have a family account, but you are not the account holder, and you wish to take advantage of the free audiobook hours provided to you in your family subscription, a work around would be to take the account holders account, at a time that is convenient for them, load the audiobook up that you wish to listen to, play it and route the audio output into a sound recording device, (for example run this process overnight while they are sleeping) this would give you a copy of the audiobook that you could play back at any time of your convenience.

Alternatively, use audible. - and yes, I'm not exactly a fan of audibles monopoly on the audiobook industry, and this would have been a great opportunity for Spotify to compete with them, but they really dropped the ball, I am also annoyed because it's behind a paywall but it keeps recommending books to me, like that space on the UI could be used for something else, like actually trying to recommend new music to listen to, that isn't 'paid to win' promoted.

Spotify needs to hire a single UX designer or fire all of its existing design staff,

Overall, the product just feels fractured and disjointed.

I had already written the conclusion to this article before I finished it, that being that I should move away from the platform entirely, but that did get me wondering about alternative Spotify clients similar to how YouTube has NewPipe which unfucks a lot of this stuff in its Official app and makes it usable on the go, so before I bow out from it I'm going to look at alternative Spotify clients (I've already found a few!). - and, A lot of them seem to be Linux based which is a bonus.

The Self-hosted solution

I think the path forward will be to invest in a self-hosted solution such as Navidrome, or perhaps I should give YouTube Music a try since I have to pay for their crap anyway because they keep shoving ads down my throat (that is, on the TV version which doesn't have a sufficient mechanism to install an ad-blocker on, and I haven't been able to obtain satisfactory results with Pi-hole).