Just the thought of using YouTube as a PINO (podcast in name only) player makes me throw up a little.

If I can’t put an RSS feed in my podcast player of choice - it ain’t a podcast

Same here!

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.

Same, except moved to Qobuz. They have both streaming and you can buy downloads.

I tried YouTube for music a year ago or so, as it was included when I tried out a paid YouTube plan to remove the ads. Apparently (at least at that point) not all videos are available in "YouTube Music", so you can't just play back any of the videos from YouTube while using YouTube Music via Carplay, instead you need to then use YouTube itself, which of course you can't use via Carplay.

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 :)

We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads.

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.

I really don't understand the hate for Spotify. Been a paid member for a decade and Apple Music still sucks for me (particularly when internet is bad)

All streaming services are predatory scum. Piracy is the way, even though it is sometimes less convenient. I pay for Spotify because it is cheap and I'm lazy

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.

That can't be ... "Spotify engineers haven't coded since December"

Sometimes a bug is indistinguishable from AB testing

And you wouldn't cancel if they said you were gonna get ads upfront?

You're right, those tags are GREAT! Worth clicking through and having a look.

Spotify has always been garbage software long before LLMs. PM/devs like to justify their constant a/b testing to gamify metrics to curry raises/promotions but for end users all we're dealt with is a constantly broken/changing UI.

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.

> Spotify famously claimed their best devs were no longer writing any of their own code:

It seems almost criminal to hire Ludvig Strigeus and then not let him write code.

It's fully caused by management mindset. There are companies that are investing hard on the AI trend, but the message is clear: all code pushed is your ultimate responsonsibility, and if it lacks quality or causes problems, you're on the hook for it; using AI hasn't changed that.

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)

More thing for Spotify is that their users are, more or less, locked in. That stickyness is what allows companies to try this dumb shit; management will hardly feel the impact of their bad choices - cause they are standing on many years of foundations.

It's like when Homer Simpson was carried up the mountain by Sherpas and thought he owned the achievement.