Spotify Engineers Flood PMs With Product Feedback After Claude Discussions

This includes me as well. In my defense I’ve been airing these grievances (podcast publishing outages) as they happened, and they happened frequently and repeatedly the last month

@GergelyOrosz To all annoyed about shitty spotify updates I propose a simple solution: Switch to Apple Music. I switched over after being a-b tested about the shape and placement of the like button for weeks, haven't regretted for a second

I’m not a regular Spotify user, but I feel like I’ve heard complaints about it for years, even pre-AI. So while I understand AI is an easy scapegoat, I’m not convinced that’s the actual reason for the issues users are airing out.

I’ll also acknowledge that when a company is bragging about AI use while having a lot of bugs or issues or something, complaints are warranted. But again, not convinced AI is actually the root cause of them.

I have no problem being wrong, though. Just something I noticed.

@tanishqk @GergelyOrosz I'm still waiting for a shuffle or even "psudo"-shuffle that works. Crazy that a programming 101 exercise has plagued them for a decade.

@GergelyOrosz Point 2 is the whole thing. Engineers are the one user base that treats a product they pay for as a personal grudge — mention anything eng-adjacent and it instantly becomes "and also fix my shuffle." Basically free UX research delivered with maximum snark.

@GergelyOrosz Everything is so cluttered.

I am not a fan of their Podcasts product but a couple of publishers I read use their Open Access for their podcasts and hence I use it, but one have to tap a small button in the top at Library -> Podcasts to access it and it pisses me off every time.

@GergelyOrosz Left Spotify for Tidal a couple of years ago as it became increasingly apparent that you are the product. Tidal support was surprisingly responsive and powered by real humans in the few interactions I had with them.

@panPytlik @GergelyOrosz Apple Music is also a pretty terrible app. UX & design are awful, it’s slow, & buggy.

@GergelyOrosz Yes, though my grievances are more than mild.

@GergelyOrosz Engineers love to debug the product they pay for.

@GergelyOrosz still can't get spotify mobile and desktop to actually coordinate and play music from the correct device

@GergelyOrosz I left Spotify when they revamped Apple Music how long ago? I don’t miss it

@GergelyOrosz A goldmine of feedback.

I hope they see it this way.

@panPytlik @GergelyOrosz IMO the big tech companies all lost the thread long before AI. But AI is taking their slop to a whole new level.

@joshmanders @GergelyOrosz dumped spotify a long ass time ago - its included in the apple premium one thingy that i have for my family, set and forget

@GergelyOrosz any brag post from a company with a quiet consumer complaint backlog turns into an AMA whether they wanted one or not

@tanishqk @GergelyOrosz Wow, I cancelled my spotify sub 6 years ago, I can’t beleive this is still happening

It is the case of a monopoly business mistaking their user's lack of options with user's stickiness or delight.

Their competitors are 1. YT Music - which doesn't promote itself much as a music platform and lives in YT shadow 2. Amazon Music - meh 3. Apple Music - they don't care about Android users

@GergelyOrosz I think all of us in software are tired of the ultra CICD madness and decided to dogpile on this one as catharsis. Obviously nothing is improving despite the “blistering pace” of release. The system is broken and incentivizes the wrong thing

@GergelyOrosz All the music apps have roughly the same catalog, use roughly the same recommendation algorithms, and roughly the same feature set.

What makes us choose Spotify over the rest is not clear to me at all.