Almost everyone knows it. A program or application works great until someone decides that it “needs to move with the times”. The result of such an intervention is pasquil, both graphically and functionally. It hurts all the more if you use the mentioned application often and enjoy it. Like Spotify.
When I look back at the way I’ve listened to and discovered music in my life, it’s been quite an exciting ride that mirrors the rapid evolution of technology. Vinyls. Cassette tapes. FM radios. MTV and other music stations. Compact discs. MP3 in players and mobile phones. Napster and other exchange networks. Spotify and other streaming services. It wasn’t until the last mentioned method that I had the feeling that this was finally it. That I’m actually getting recommendations for the music I’m interested in and not the music the music industry wants to push, no matter how complicated my musical tastes are. And all this in a minimalist music player that accompanies me not only on my mobile phone, but also in the car, on the PC or on the TV.
But nothing lasts forever. When news started to emerge a month ago that Spotify was planning a massive redesign, I thought it wouldn’t be so bad. Unfortunately it is. Especially if you don’t know what exactly you want to listen to. The recommendation page looks like TikTok. You gradually scroll through samples with video clips, where the middle of the song gradually screams at you. According to Spotify, this aims to better connect you with artists and make it easier for you to choose.
I personally am rather disgusted. Probably because most of the music I listen to doesn’t have video clips, suddenly Spotify has forgotten its refined recommendations and is pushing something like midstream with a heavy dose of podcasts into my head. The “highlight” of the offer was a singer who, while singing the soulful text “na, na, na”, shook her assets in front of the lens. If I was 14 and not 40, maybe it would work for me.
The retro I don’t want
My negative feeling was compounded by the thought that I had already experienced this somewhere. As a bored teenager in the late 1990s, I spent a lot of time on the couch, flipping through multiple music stations on cable TV, hoping to come across something at least somewhat tolerable. Don’t laugh, FM radios were as stupid as they are today, a CD cost 500 crowns (with payouts of around 10 thousand CZK) and the internet either didn’t exist or had a speed of “one song per hour”.
The new Spotify reminds me of my teenage years, when I was constantly switching music TVs trying to find something at least somewhat tolerable.
That’s exactly how I feel about the new Spotify: I’m not getting what I want, but I’m trying to find what bothers me the least. But life is too short for that.
Tudy no
I finally calmed down. I finally found my refined Daily Mixes in the menu Search > For you. Fortunately, Release Radar and Discover Weekly are still working, thanks to which you can survive Mondays. And the PC application remains in the original Scandinavian minimalism for now.
But the idea of moving elsewhere remained in my head. I got the update I didn’t want, but not the ones I needed. These are such little things as, for example, the ability to add a song or album to the end of the playlist. Or the ability to play an artist’s albums in chronological order. There are a lot of such things and if you try to search on the Internet, you will find that it has been solved for the last 8 years without any result. At the head of these unfulfilled wishes is the constantly postponed streaming in higher quality.
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TikTok may launch an audio streaming service similar to Spotify
Instead, Spotify decided to force videos on us in addition to podcasts, which eat data, battery and are incredibly annoying. In short, Spotify is no longer the likable Swedish startup, but another corporate juggernaut that knows better what its customers want than they do.
His latest move may get a few underage users whose parents force them to uninstall TikTok because they were told on TV that it is dangerous. But whether it will make up for the possible outflow of paying customers is a question.
