Spotify being nice? Absolutely not. There certainly is a hidden agenda behind this.
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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Probably ads. It’s always ads.
is spotify being desperate, or there is an ulterior motive?
YouTube Music allows this, maybe they're losing ad money to them on the people that weren't going to get premium anyway.
I dropped my Spotify account after last price hike.
me too. I pirate instead now.
Spotify is trash anyways.
Wait, free users of Spotify could not pick which track they listen to???
Well, on PC or tablet you always could, but on mobile it was always album random shuffle... and if you created an album of less than N songs, in mobile they added related tracks in the reproduction (radio-spotify like) so it remained not possible to control what you listen...
EDIT: I updated the verb tenses to the fact that now you can in the mobile app chose the song to play
This is why I never even gave Spotify a chance. It didn’t make sense to me.
No, you could tap shuffle on an album-by-album basis, or on a Playlist with like 10+ tracks or something.
Winamp with a cool custom skin and downloaded mp3s was better than Spotify imo.
I know it's cool to shit on spotify and streaming services on Lemmy, but personally I disagree. I loved Winamp and had tens of thousands of songs back in the day, downloaded on my zippy 56k dial up connection. But being able to search for and play virtually any song available instantly and share collaborative playlists, no matter where you are, is so much better.
Why would I decide what I like to listen to when am algorithm can do it for me?
I fully jumped on the Spotify bandwagon hoping the algorithm would decide what i listen to, I'd become stuck in a rut and hadn't really listened to anything new for a good 15 years.
Well... After letting it figure my music tastes out, every single automatically generated playlist on there starts off with crap I just immediately skip before devolving into the same 5-10 songs I listened to pre-Spotify. So i guess it knows my taste well? But it has turned out to be useless for this too!
Too late, already got sick of their shit and went back to downloading everything myself. I have to have two media player apps on my phone to account for podcasts and music but it's still better than using spotify. Probably a better way to do that too but haven't been bothered enough to look into it.
I still let spotify to discover me things from time to time... but regularly I download/obtain those that I like, I never abandoned my offline library, I am old enough to know that nothing online perdures...
cool, my "music" folder filled with mp3s could always do that
I'm so confused. Couldn't you always pick what track you wanted to play?
Currently, for free users, only PC or tablet allows to control what you listen (caveat occasional ads) but mobile constraints to a shuffle reproduction of albums, and if you dare to do a short album they spice it with additional related tracks, so you are never in control of what is likely to play...
EDIT: well, apparently I can do that also on my mobile app, I remember in the past some glitched occasions bit it seems is real now...
Nope. At some point spotify forced FREE users to shuffle play playlists. You couldn't pick which specific song you'll hear first. And with ads, obviously.
Damn, when I joined way back when, you could pick the track you wanted you just couldn't skip and had to hear ads. Being able to pick a track is the whole reason I moved away from Pandora.
I've recently moved away from Spotify and to Pandora, ironically.
Pandora premium let's you play whichever track you want, they are not longer exclusively stations, but their station algorithm is the reason I decided on them over other spotify alternatives
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I think it depends on whether you used the web interface or mobile app. Mobile app was more restrictive.
I love product updates as part of my technology feed....
I miss old technology feeds in the classic internet days. That actually posted and listed out cool stuff with technology
RSS is still going strong. I'm in the process of shifting my screen time from lemmy to RSS. Just articles, no comments. Makes me realize how addicted I've been to comment drama, I say as I post a comment.
You guys use spotify ?
Mostly for random song discovery considering my previously liked songs, I regularly download/obtain those songs I like for offline reproduction and preservation... online stuff has short lifes
It's probably the most popular music streaming service at the moment.
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Is this the onion? They add the basic feature of a media player where you can listen the title you clicked and not random stuff? If I understood correctly, this is not a feature, it's just a restriction being removed
The mobile application has always had this restriction for free users (as far as I know), but the desktop application has not.
I don't think it was always that way but it has been for years now.
Easier to let users play music for free when you don't pay the artists I guess
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