The second half of the 2000s was marked for me by searches for ridiculously cheap original iPhones on eBay, unsuccessful efforts to grow the hair Villa wore in the European Cup and succeed. long sessions in front of the computer I tag my songs.

Once the time for the first jokey MP3s had passed, an actual display had since been added where you could see not only “sk8er boy – – 192kbps.mp3” but also metadata about the album, genre, artist and even the cover. art. And this host spent hours writing and downloading album covers to have a pristine music library.

When I discovered Spotify, I stopped doing that and jumped on the quiet bandwagon from the very beginning.

Excellent interface

In the first place was Spotify a salvation for all. Artists stopped streaming their albums on street blankets or at shows with donkey names, we the customers found a way to get digital music without having to put numbers on how much it would cost us to buy songs from iTunes, and us OCD late teens stopped losing the summer Tagging MP3 files in the afternoon.

Its first big promise, back then, was to let us access almost any song we wanted. The second was that it offered us convenient synchronization with our mobile devices after the great rise of the smartphone.

The interface of Spotify’s early years was a much lighter iTunes with a social component, featuring visual indicators of each song’s popularity and all previously tagged music. It was cozy, comfortable and elegant, a pleasure. Ten euros a month was a lot of money for a late teenager like me, but I found it completely justified.

Spotify in 2012. Image: Spotify Community.

Then the mobile app came along the same way and I forgot that music had become a chore. Now it was just a pleasure.

Spotify’s interface definitely hit its peak in 2017, as in this screenshot. Elegant, modern, functional and simple. Image: Spotify Community.

I zigzagged between Apple Music and Spotify for a while to try out some new features launched by Apple, and I had an emerging feeling: something was starting to fail with the Swedish company’s apps.

First, the progressive interface is changing, but especially at the end of 2023, They have largely ruined the experience that Spotify previously offered. It is no longer an advanced, elegant and convenient iTunes. It is now a kind of audio market. It offers not only music but also podcasts.

I have nothing against podcasting (it goes without saying!) and I understand Spotify’s incentives to promote its use in its own app, but I already listen to them in another app and there’s no way to get rid of them once you access the app. It always offers some programs to listen to. He doesn’t care that he hasn’t clicked there once in years. The offer remained.

Moreover, I know that Spotify is not drinking, precisely because of my presence in podcasting. feeds contains the originals but uploads the episodes to its own servers. According to them, because they would offer unique features that require it.

Terrible interface

Years later, there is almost no trace left of these exclusive innovations, and the way they make me feel is completely far from my tastes. “Vicky Martín Berrocal alone with Marta Sánchez.” I think it’s great that they both have a podcast, but after all my years on the app I thought you might know me a little better. The benefit is lost.

Current Spotify interface. Image: Spotify Community.

The podcast thing is part of a bigger problem: The home screen can’t be customized. It should suit us, but we can’t say “don’t show me this anymore”. Additionally, it doesn’t recommend content based on the years we’ve been listening to music there, but rather the years we’ve been listening to music. to our position or the time of day or year we are here.

This brings me to my next point: playlists. Spotify is very good at what we like, but it often prioritizes (and hides) completely impersonal lists. I can assure you there is nothing in my past that would make anyone think I’m interested. ReggaetonOT music or summer commercial songs; but these are the ones most commonly found in the general playlists that Spotify offers me.

And so I found it becoming more and more difficult for me to do what had previously been routine: find music that I really liked and listen to it without any fanfare. One day, instead of opening Spotify, I caught myself opening YouTube to watch a Bob Dylan concert. This was the final signal for me to cancel my subscription.

He also contributed to this in a more progressive way. worship playlists. I don’t use them, they are very useful, but I think they destroyed the previous relevance of the albums. An album that at least the author takes seriously is a work of art that tells a story, and so even the order of the songs matters.

Playlist excesses are symptomatic of an era of fast music, produced like a churrero master drawing a baton from a repellent, created to be catchy and shareable in TikTok videos. Maintaining and accessing a collection of albums is becoming increasingly difficult. playlists They ate the whole area. Now that vertical videos are coming, I think they will continue to degrade music this way.

I’ve now returned to Apple Music for the convenience of bundling it with other company services. Apple Music has other problems that we can talk about on a sunny day, but at least it doesn’t give me the audio arcade feeling I get every time I open Spotify. My playlists, some of which the service creates for me, and albums, always albums.

With this and a quiet environment, I don’t need anything else to be happy.

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Featured image | Spotify Connect, Mockup Studio