r/rs_x • u/PhoebusLamp • Feb 07 '25
Schizo Posting Spotify desperately needs to get rid of their bloat
It's insane how long it takes for me load a song to play, especially since they're instant that I should only ever play the same 20 songs on repeat anyways. Please get rid of videos, shorts, AI and other garbage that's not songs and actual cool info about when such and such artist overdosed. I know the app shouldn't be this slow because it didn't used to be this slow years ago.
My current belief is that unnecessary features are forced by middle management and implemented by an unskilled workforce and it's such a big user base that they're scared of fixing/removing things, but it's making their maintenance costs higher because now they have to front load a bunch of data every time you open the app, and that they're trying to save data costs by prodding you to listen to the songs that are already saved to cache memory.
I might have to go back to downloading mp3 files and carrying around a walkman. Does apple still make ipods?
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u/foolsgold343 Feb 07 '25
I might have to go back to downloading mp3 files
Some of us never left. 😎
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u/bretton-woods Feb 07 '25
Kudos to all the hard work that Brazilians have been doing over the years to upload all sorts of obscure albums.
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u/frankie2 Feb 07 '25
Double standard of the day: that's how Spotify also got started https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files-some-from-pirate-bay-170509/
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u/conceptsofaplan Feb 07 '25
If you run a low-fi experience, you can switch to Amazon Music. It’s also an aggressively unpleasant and half-baked experience, but it’s completely free of bloat in the way that a house without a roof would be.
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u/PhoebusLamp Feb 07 '25
I appreciate it but I haven't given amazon any money in ten years and I won't start now
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u/lorrieaux Feb 07 '25
Last year I rediscovered all my old media players from the late 90s - 2000s… I’ve been mostly using my 5th gen ipod again and it’s been great. Need to find time to figure out how to back up what’s on there, and then update my music library to present times.
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u/mickeyquicknumbers Feb 07 '25
One of the single most non-death-related moments of grief I have had as an adult was in 2017. I had something like 6,500 songs of intently curated music that had been steadily grown, managed, culled, etc. since 2005 when I really started investing time into compiling and organizing an iTunes library as a sophomore in HS.
This library went with me from laptop to laptop, and mp3 to mp3, as a real living anthology of my accumulated life taste. Eventually the entire thing moved to an iPhone. One random day I wake up, my phone has updated itself autonomously. all music on iTunes that was not purchased through the iTunes app was unceremoniously wiped, forever. I think it is one of two or three times my wife has ever seen me cry.
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u/throwaway10015982 ???? Feb 07 '25
i have this but it's 600gb worth of shit, some of it impossible to find online now
i have no idea how to back it up in a foolproof way
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u/bisexicanerd Socialist Sailor Feb 08 '25
lol something similar happened to me in mid-2018, had hundreds of songs on my SD card that I had downloaded over the course of two years, and one day they were all gone for no apparent reason, with the weird thing being my PDF books were not erased so I have no idea what the fuck happened, I was so angry
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u/CatherineFordes Feb 07 '25
i still have my 250gb mp3 collection
still find myself listening to streaming most of the time out of convenience
but so much of that collection isn't available online
very cozy
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u/truthbomn Feb 08 '25
If it was so important to you, why didn't you have a back up?
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u/bisexicanerd Socialist Sailor Feb 08 '25
as someone that had something similar happen, it quite literally never comes to mind until it's gone, since then I have like 3 backups of everything, one on a USB, one in an SD card and one in my computer
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u/frankie2 Feb 07 '25
Need to find time to figure out how to back up what’s on there
You can “Show hidden files and folders” to see them all, but they will all be garbage four-letter filenames. The tags will still be intact though so you can pull them into some other media manager to move and rename them back to a file structure that makes sense.
Or use something like https://www.copytrans.net/copytrans/ to automate the same
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u/clydethefrog Feb 07 '25
spotify in 2025 is an app to replace your own curated playlists with AI generated music, and people pay for this service
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Feb 07 '25
Why anyone still uses this shitty app is beyond me. Every time I hang out with someone who puts Spotify on it just plays the same 5 songs and they will be like “huh I feel like it’s playing the same songs all the time.” Yeah it is, bc it’s a shitty app. You shouldn’t have to “clear your cache” or whatever to hear 99.9999 of the rest of the music you would like to hear. There are plenty of other services that don’t do this
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u/Cosmic_Cinnamon Feb 08 '25
I’ll admit the app has gone downhill and the AI stuff is annoying. But usually I’ll make my own playlist and if I want to find similar music with the same energy I just use the suggested songs at the bottom and shuffle those. Or you can click to the radio of a single song and go from there. Plus searching up public playlists can be a way to mine new songs you like, if you listen the whole way through at work or something.
I’ll admit it’s more work to do it that way, but it still works. The mixes Spotify makes “for you” are best avoided.
Pandora is good for finding new artists but I haven’t used that in like a decade
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u/ShockoTraditional Feb 07 '25
I stick exclusively to self-created playlists and listening to albums from start to finish. But Spotify even manipulates plays on your own playlists: "shuffle" is not random AT ALL. Spotify claims that songs it knows you like will come up more often on shuffle, but it's clearly more than that. My guess is they want to manipulate artists' streams, both by artificially playing certain artists more, and artificially suppressing others. I finally got around this by organizing my biggest playlist (workout mix) by song title. I listen in alphabetical order without shuffle.
Madonna, Jay-Z, A Tribe Called Quest, and weirdly Caribou are four artists that came up with extreme frequency when I still used shuffle. None of these were songs I really liked or was playing on repeat outside of my workout mix sessions.
There's also a "feature" where you can have Spotify add "suggested songs" to your playlists. You activate this by clicking the shuffle button. One click: activate Shuffle with suggested songs. Another click: activate Shuffle without suggested songs. Another click: turn off Shuffle. I never, ever want Spotify's suggested songs in my playlist, but this feature self-activates every single time I try to turn Shuffle off or on. When my phone has no signal, this feature will not turn off at all once I've turned it on by clicking through the button options. I always forget about this until I have cell service again and start hearing random shit in my playlist. Insidious.
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u/DrunkenBuffaloJerky Feb 07 '25
What even is going on?
Why are these types of sites so increasingly dogshit?
I remember when Pandora was new, and it was awesome and only getting better as more and more music was added. Then.... ?
Same for every music focused streaming service. Why do they shit-up their algorithms? Why features no one cares about?
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u/throwaway10015982 ???? Feb 07 '25
Why are these types of sites so increasingly dogshit?
capitalism but unironically
read Ed Zitrons blog
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u/Iga5aa3aIga112atotmi Feb 07 '25
I never stopped using mp3s but I recently tried a free month of Spotify Premium and I couldn't believe how bad it is. I guess it's fine if you listen to whatever garbage the algorithm spits out but just listening to a bunch of tracks by a single artist you like is a 14 step process.
If you have an Android, you can get Spotube, which has Spotify's library with no ads and less bloat for free but it's still worse than mp3s.
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u/lyagusha Feb 07 '25
I've signed up for Spotify Premium a few times over the last year, but every time the process to listen to just one artist at a time is inscrutable and much too complicated. What happened to the organized Spotify of a few years ago?
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u/scruntbaby Feb 07 '25 edited Feb 07 '25
The constant UI switching up and their instrumental/focus playlists being slowly filled with soulless AI shit is one of the reasons I switched from Spotify, but tbh not much better over on Apple Music either. I considered going back to mp3 players but had a real bitch of a time fucking around with my old one (apparently I have the one iPod nano that makes it a real bitch to mod/jailbreak or whatever? They call it the iPod fat lol).
Something tells me though we're going to look back at this era of music streaming with wonderment cuz this sure as hell won't last forever. Being able to listen to basically whatever music you ever wanted legally at the touch of a button for like ~10 bucks a month is insane. It's a shame stakeholders/investors or whatever get greedy and fuck everything up for everyone.
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u/amphue Feb 07 '25
Cancel the subscription. Delete the app. Download the Apple Classical music app.
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u/TheGangsHeavy Feb 07 '25
This is sadly still not perfect on android. But it does organize everything nicely so I can just find the album on regular apple music
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u/Unacceptable0pinion Feb 07 '25
Bring back rdio
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u/Sophistical_Sage Feb 07 '25
Radio never left. You left radio because it sucks compared to newer options.
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u/best-of-them Feb 07 '25
Me looking in these comments noticing nobody else is using YouTube music 🫥
YTM has maybe the worst algorithm and UI known to man but at least I can uhhgggggghhhggggggggghhhhh at least I can read comments while listening to music man I don't know
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u/publicimagelsd Feb 07 '25
I love finding those beautiful lonely comments on videos like, "this was my husband's favorite song before he died from brain cancer and now I cry every time I hear it" or stories about meeting the artist, or the person's first time hearing it, or commenters wishing well for OP "it's been a while since you last posted, hope you're doing ok man"
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u/PhoebusLamp Feb 08 '25
Even if the comments on every song posted to youtube are all "like if you're watching in 2025" or whatever I still get mad when I click on a song and it's "topic" and won't allow comments.
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u/bIackberrying self-important Feb 07 '25
abandon streaming services, embrace mp3. PS you can put that money toward donations to/merchandise from the artists you like instead.
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u/Abraham442 Feb 07 '25
Idk I think it’s amazing that I can listen to any song ever, within seconds. Plus a gigantic collection of audiobooks. For like $15 a month. I will never complain about that. 10 years ago if you told me I could listen to absolutely any song or book and I was complaining it took 5 seconds instead of 1 second to access the song, I wouldn’t even understand myself
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u/PhoebusLamp Feb 07 '25
With all respect, I did use spotify more than ten years ago and it wasn't this bad
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u/expertleroy Feb 08 '25
any song ever? i constantly am looking for tunes that aren't on spotify. they certainly have a lot, but they're missing a lot too
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u/Phil_RS1337 Feb 07 '25
I left Spotify after 10 years and switched to YouTube music. Great algorithm
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u/Next_Ad_6005 Feb 07 '25
Get soulseek then use whatever mp3 player that comes on your device, make playlists, done
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u/leproesy Feb 07 '25
I stream uninterrupted dj sets from SoundCloud for free. Their paid service (no commercials) is reasonably priced.
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u/PhoebusLamp Feb 07 '25
So much has been removed from soundcloud that I haven't really tried to get back into it. My playlists being full of removed songs kinda broke my interest in the site
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u/SlinkySlinky987 Feb 07 '25
i switched to spotify from apple music in september and im going to lose my mind. stop recommending me polysecure as an audio book!!
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u/Chromosome_Cowboy Feb 07 '25
My favorite was when I had a spotty service so it wouldn’t download the UI instead of just having it built into the app. Was very stupid considering I had music downloaded for times when I’d be offline which defeated the whole purpose.
I ditched Spotify a few months ago in favor of Apple Music and haven’t looked back. Spotify is so cartoonishly awful to artists that I couldn’t ethically justify using it any longer.
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Feb 07 '25
[deleted]
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u/bIackberrying self-important Feb 07 '25
thanks - shot in the dark here: i'm looking into purchasing a dedicated mp3 player (but i want quality, not a nostalgia trip tchotchke) since i've grown sick of hooking up my computer to a boombox. do you know anything about these?
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u/Aesop_Rocky- Feb 07 '25
I’m pretty close to switching after getting “Sponsored” pop ups about new releases on a regular basis. Oh and they make it look like the pop ups from artists you actually follow, so you’re almost tricked into thinking this is music you’re interested in rather than some label paying Spotify to promote an artist. I pay you monthly for no ads, so get this shit off my homepage
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u/amateuraesthete Feb 07 '25
I have a 256gb iphone that I manually load music onto through soulseek—even going through the trouble to import the lyrics from genius. Takes significantly more work, i don't get a spotify wrapped, but (assuming they don't nuke itunes) i am in possession of all of my music
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u/commander_607 Feb 07 '25
Completely agree. I just don't feel like I have as much of a connection with my music anymore, no autonomy. Decided to switch back to MP3's played locally so I actually think about what I'm listening to. Your theory about reducing maintenance costs might be true seeing as the company just went profitable for a year for the first time.
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u/WordsworthsGhost Feb 08 '25
These companies higher massive teams of developers and think they need to keep making major changes. They can’t leave well enough alone because they can’t afford to
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u/prettygoblinrat How did I get here? Feb 08 '25
I thought that it was filled with functions that no one uses, and then my coworker mentioned that they use the AI DJ function??? Like I guess those people are out there??
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u/SadMouse410 Feb 08 '25
I just think it’s funny that everyone gets pushed the same music (or like, one of five different categories). So we all end up with the exact same taste profile but everyone feels like they found it organically.
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u/softerhater latina waif Feb 08 '25
Had to find this post to thank you for making me try apple music 🙏
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u/expertleroy Feb 07 '25
spotify has continually gotten worse. their discover weekly algorithm was changed a few years back and now really only recommends shit you've already heard. they got rid of "downvoting" tracks to augment the algorithm. they make "playlists for you" but you can't find them. their UI is garbage and bloated. it's gotten me working on a local music server. I had a local collection back in the day but then my drives failed and what.cd killed itself