Seems widespread, the spotify subreddit is actively removing discussion of the problem
You've reached the end!
Seems widespread, the spotify subreddit is actively removing discussion of the problem
If I can’t put an RSS feed in my podcast player of choice - it ain’t a podcast
Spotify is losing ground after their last subscription fees increase, as far as I see it.
I found now was a good time to build that NAS I wanted to have a long time ago, and the first thing I installed on it was a Navidrome server so I could listen to my curated music everywhere.
Hopefully we're entering the era of people ditching megacorp craps and switching to personal cloud solutions.
YouTube will be very hard to replace though.
After being disappointed again and again, I too moved back to collecting local files for my music instead, although bought rather than what.cd as I used in my early days. Tend to use Bandcamp mostly, they also waive their fee on purchases every first Friday of the month (https://isitbandcampfriday.com/), so collecting a bunch of things to buy and listen to each first friday of month has become a nice little ritual :)
Ad-free paid services were a brief aberration, essentially a bait-and-switch: "see how much nicer we are from the old-school competitors". Now that the competitors are gone, Netflix is doing ads, Amazon is doing ads... why wouldn't Spotify?
I hate it, but the reality is that we groan on online forums but don't actually leave.
To be fair, ad-free options for each of these later emerged. I pay up for them.
I was doing my yearly attempt at switching over to Apple Music and the 'similar music' radio had somehow saw fit to include Kendrick Lamar with my indie synth. Swapped back to spotify and immediately loved some of its similar suggestions.
If you want to support musicians buy their merch, go to concerts. If they are smalltime, find their patreon, or join their YouTube thing, or buy their music on Bandcamp, etc.
Annoying that it happened. Annoying that Reddit mods are aggressively removing the discussion. Annoying that HN comments here are immediately jumping to Spotify hate and the sky is falling.
Imagine if we all assumed every AWS outage meant that AWS was cancelled.
---
The responses in this thread are truly disappointing. Spotify can be bad and have vibecoding issues and we can still have a rational discussion rather than just jumping on the complaint bandwagon and panicking. I guess at least eventually real comments rose to the top.
Spotify rolling this out without an announcement intentionally would be an incredible blunder. I'd cancel my membership immediately and I don't think I'd be alone in that decision.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-deve...
I don't understand enterprises who take this stance, there is tons of room between "don't utilize AI for coding" and "exclusively utilize AI for coding."
My biggest peeve with Spotify UI is how hard it is to add something to your current playing queue, an action I would assume is quite common but you have to scroll down to hit several controls before you can do it.
Why do I have to do so many actions when adding an item (say a podcast) to my current playlist? Why can't there be a single button that says "add to queue," why hide an common workflow behind nested menus and actions?
Wouldn't adding songs to your current queue be an extremely common action by users? Or at least power users?
I think I might become one of those people that makes their own frontend music player for Jellyfin. Adding and modifying playlists are something I do often (wrote like 100s of collages on what.cd back in the day), but with Spotify these actions are so fucking painful.
I wonder how long it will take for AI to learn how we work with software on an individual level and adapt the UI to fit our usage patterns.
Really tempted to buy this device:
https://store.hiby.com/pages/hiby-digital-miku
Because the color scheme and buttons look cool, not really aware of the waifu but she has good taste.
Do agree about local sounds, streaming audio sounds so compressed and awful. Very inefficient compared to the audio quality of locally hosted music.
Rather than sending me marketing materials, I wish companies would send power users tips/tricks. Would definitely read those emails.
It seems almost criminal to hire Ludvig Strigeus and then not let him write code.
So if Spotify had a modicum of AI usage hygiene, plus accountability expectations for code quality, this would still mean a bad performance review for whoever introduced this issue (person or team; poor results and mistakes are never something that come from a single source)
This sounds like terribly bad form, won't buy them any goodwill down the line.
It's like when Homer Simpson was carried up the mountain by Sherpas and thought he owned the achievement.
SongShift moves your library from one app to another super easily. In 20 minutes my whole collection, playlists and all, moved from Spotify to Apple. And it was free.
I encourage everyone who is dreading moving to a better app to try it… it’s pretty easy now.
I’m tempted to try Tidal myself because Apple Music’s recommendations aren’t that great.
Spotify can be switched for YT Music, or Apple Music, or Deezer without any issues.
You can also just buy albums on Qobuz instead.
You can, ultimately, resort to one of the best things the internet offered since its inception - piracy.
If anything, Spotify is one of the easiest services to replace. And I say this as a paying customer.
Literally the first line of the sub description.
That’s an ad. I’m not paying for ads.
1.) Buy music when you can, and when you can't, pirate!
2.) Run Gonic(1)! (or whatever you want, I'm not in charge of what you do at the end of the day, but Gonic is a.) very light, and b.) a subsonic(2) server, so it's compatible with anything that supports that family of services)
2a.) How you run it is up to preference, I have a NAS that runs mine, you can also run it off something like Pikapods(3), a VPS (you know what a VPS is), or off your own desktop/laptop/raspberry pi, who cares.
3.) Download a subsonic compatible player, which is much more open to preferences, but I highly suggest Symfonium(4)
4.) Enjoy music streaming without ads, limits, or artists you don't like!
(1) https://github.com/sentriz/gonic
(2) https://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp
to be clear, i have no relation to any of these products, outside of supporting the development of gonic and donating to symfonium. if anyone is interested I can do a more in depth write up of how I personally manage my stuff, but it's not much more complicated than this, just with a TB+ of music in a folder.
noemit•5h ago