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This is going to become more of a standard due to people vibecoding their own clients for every dumb thing.
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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It's all about profits and psying major labels even.more
Even the Spotify shuffle feature is built to maximize profits and to hell with the user experience.
I have almost 2 thousand songs on one playlist and Spotify plays the songs from minor artists (who don't get paid much) constantly, while songs from major artists (who get paid a lot more) are never played. I'm actually surprised to hear those songs when shuffle is turned off.
They've also recently added "Video Episodes for You" to my home screen with no way to turn it off. It takes up 1/3 of the screen with helpful titles like "Session 105, Hillory Duff", and "Reinvent Life from Rock Bottom and Become Unrecognizable." I have never watched a video or listened to a podcast on Spotify.
When it comes to enshittification Spotify's got it down.
Maybe someday one of the other music services will create something like Spotify Connect.
tidal.com
Lacks a few of Spotify's features, but the audio quality is great, and it's cheaper. Plus, fuck Spotify.
Qobuz is also good, apparently.
seconding Tidal.
but also feeling like buying more physical media going forward.
Yeah, I tend to buy vinyl for the artists that I'm really into.
I looked at a tital a year or so ago and it wouldn't work for me. Will look again, maybe they've improved it.
I came to the same conclusion., I need a "Spotify connect" type feature, and when I looked, tidal had just axed their equivalent.
Until a competitor allows me to play music on a headless Linux box and control it with my phone, I'm stuck with Spotify
I haven't tried to set it up, but It looks like Tidal Connect is alive again and there are several ways to use on Linux, including WINE. When my Spotify subscription runs out I'm going to give it a try.
Depends what you define as "Wouldn't work for me." Song library has improved a lot, if that's what you mean.
For me it was the opposite: Every "made for you" mix and playlist is fairly popular songs from artists that I like... But they are always the same few dozen songs, just shuffled in different order.
Video suggestions seem to appear if/after you listen to podcasts or audiobooks. I had them, my partner did not.
My "Made for You" has occasional popular artists but most of the songs are from people who are relatively unknown. The only way I listened to a podcast is if I clicked on one by accident.
I hate the home screen so much and that I can‘t customize it. It‘s basically just full of ads disguised as recommendations.
basically just full of ads disguised as recommendations
Sell ad-free subscription. Include advertising anyway but make up another name. PROFIT!
Turn off smart shuffle. It tries to guess the songs you actually like instead of randomly selecting out of 2000. Also if Spotify were biasing smaller artists (they aren't) that would be a good thing.
I was not referring to smart shuffle.
I think it's more about closing a backdoor to free product that was generally out of reach for most people a few years. Free API access for devs has been a thing forever for the most part, but the barriers are now lower for people to abuse it.
Yes about profits in the sense they don't want people getting free access to content, but I don't think this is designed to net them a bunch of money or anything.
Agreed. To me, this sounds like a continuation of the abolition of Web 2.0, the era where APIs were open and nobody was talking about how they'd pay for it.
Any FOSS / third party Spotify client I used already requires a premium account (I am fairly certain it's about playing ads), so I was under assumption developer API was the same.
Anyway, I just stopped using Spotify altogether. I'll support my local indie radio station instead.
Man, this kind of sucks.
I wrote a nifty script a few years ago that pulls the popularity metric of a song, converts that to a star rating, and writes that to a tag with Mutagen. At a glance I can see the hits. If I like the track, I'll "love" it (side stepping the need for a personal rating). It's a system that's been serving me well for a long time.
Locking down APIs does seem to be the trend. I'm not sure I'll look to adapt.
Giving money to Spotify is out of the question, but I may pay for Deezer or something.
Yes indeed. It's now failing. 😞
I think this will be a problem for Spotiflac
The 350GB I already downloaded should last me a while. Doesn't it already get the metadata from Deezer, and flacs from Tidal/Qobuz/Amazon, anyway? Not sure why Spotify needs to be involved.
I don't know either, but if it's not from Spotify the links don't work, so if they break the API the program won't work.
In the mobile version there is an extension that uses YT music for searching and pasting links instead, hope it can still work with that if Spotify fails.