Spotify Rant

1/12/2024 (updated 1/19/2024)

Been a lil unhappy with spotify as of late, so here's general some frustrations.

The plus

...or, removing the liked song label.
Spotify has something called "liked songs". If you like a song, you click the heart icon next to it, and it gets added into your liked songs. Simple. It'll also show a green heart if you liked a song, so its easy to identify which songs you like.
Recently, Spotify dropped the heart for a checkmark. Now, instead of showing a heart if you liked the song, it'll show a checkmark if you have a song in your playlists anywhere.
This sucks. Songs in my playlists and songs I like are two different things to me.
For example, I love C418's album 148. The final song on the album is 841, and while it fits in when listening to the entire album, I would never listen to it on its own. Thus, I don't have it liked.
But you couldn't tell that. I have album 148 in a playlist with some other C418 albums, so now everything has that lil checkmark:
The album on Spotify. Every song has a checkmark.
The song 841 is cropped out due to the window size, but you get what I mean.
It's also hard to tell why a song has a checkmark. You have to shift through your playlists if you want it gone:
The "add a playlist" menu that appears when you click on the checkmark. There is no indication to where the song was added.

Music discovery

...or, removing features (again).

Playlist radios

A radio based on your playlist. It was nifty.
But then Spotify started to have it based on your listening history (or it was always like that, tbh I don't really remember). You had to skip ahead regularly if you wanted to find some fresh songs.
It was then removed for some reason.

Enhance

Enhance is a toggle on your playlist. With it on, it'll add a fresh song every 5 songs or so. You can even give feedback, with plus and minus buttons.
It'll also disable search and sorting, which is a pain! So I never used it. And I can't anymore, as it was removed.

Similar playlists

This was my main way to discover songs after radios died. But then Spotify removed it as well.

What now?

So there's Discover Weekly and Release Radar. They're fine great.
Also the AI DJ. It's like a radio, but text-to-speech and way more limiting. I don't like it. I just want music :^) Also, I don't know what's AI about it? I guess Spotify's algorithm is already kinda an AI...

The algorithm

...or, I feel as if I've hit rock bottom.
I listen to chiptune. Nothing deep; came across it on Spotify and still just listen to it on Spotify.
Anyway, I have been in a drought of songs as of late, and I feel that I'm in that dreaded echo chamber. I like the songs I have, but the algorithm feels stupid and just isn't really picking any new songs that I like. Sorry if this sounds annoyingly vague.

Conclusion

Idk. I've been looking into Apple Music, but it's really whatever. Worse comes to worse, I'll make a Spotify plugin for Obsidian or somethin