{"slug": "spotify", "name": "Spotify", "category": "media", "category_name": "Media and creative", "description": "Music and podcast streaming service with free ad-supported and paid Premium tiers.", "recommenders": 15, "commenters": 75, "warners": 33, "score": -9.231, "rising": 8.36, "first": "2025-11-03", "latest": "2026-10-26", "why": "HN commenters like Spotify for music discovery and its large curated catalog, and for convenient listening and syncing across devices.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 15, "neutral": 27, "compare": 0, "warn": 36}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 1, 7, 2], "listed": true, "loved": ["Music discovery", "Works well"], "caveat": "Declining reliability", "short_quote": "But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues.", "icon": true, "domain": "spotify.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.spotify.com", "pricing": "freemium", "aliases": ["Spotify"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters like Spotify for music discovery and its large curated catalog,", "cites": [{"id": 802830048, "item_id": 50176878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176878", "by": "bob1029", "date": "2026-10-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I pay for Spotify because they curate a massive collection and provide many ways to discover new experiences.", "excerpt": "SaaS alone was never much of a moat. SaaS plus consulting is still very much alive. Perhaps more than ever before. My client's customers are not paying for the software. They are paying for a complete solution that results in compliant operations. I don't pay for Spotify because I need a way to listen to music. If it was just about music playback I'd use foobar and get into torrents again. I pay for Spotify because t", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "SaaS Is Dead"}, {"id": 781560912, "item_id": 48847557, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847557", "by": "Retr0id", "date": "2026-07-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The whole reason I use spotify is because I want their algorithm to figure out what music I like.", "excerpt": "I feel this way too except for the music one. The whole reason I use spotify is because I want their algorithm to figure out what music I like.", "context": "", "use_case": "music recommendations", "switched_from": "", "story": "A new way to reflect on how you use Claude"}, {"id": 758196337, "item_id": 47387271, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387271", "by": "Esophagus4", "date": "2026-03-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Several of my cult favorites were Spotify suggestions I never would have found otherwise.", "excerpt": "Does anyone have suggestions for good recommendation engines for new music discovery? Since I\u2019ve switched from Spotify to Apple Music, Apple\u2019s recommendations are lousy and I miss discovering new artists and songs. Several of my cult favorites were Spotify suggestions I never would have found otherwise. Are there any good recommendation engines, or people mostly just use Spotify for that? I\u2019d be sad if I had to switc", "context": "", "use_case": "music discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ"}, {"id": 780377200, "item_id": 48773575, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773575", "by": "embedding-shape", "date": "2026-07-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "> Even today, while I use spotify on my work computer, it\u2019s basically the same albums every day (around a dozen). Playing CDs would be probably better than switching to the UX disaster that is Spotify Why don't you switch to CDs then? Something is telling me this isn't quite the full story. I'm sure lots of people who don't really need to use Spotify use Spotify all the time, if you really do listen to just a few alb", "context": "", "use_case": "music discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "CarPlay Is Additive"}]}, {"text": " and for convenient listening and syncing across devices.", "cites": [{"id": 750606816, "item_id": 46912926, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912926", "by": "0xE1337DAD", "date": "2026-02-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Spotify's strength (and what I pay for) is convenience.", "excerpt": "I really don't think spotify gas much to worry about. Pirating music has been a thing since long before Spotify hit the stage. Spotify's strength (and what I pay for) is convenience. Even if I had a personal library with all the music annas-archive pulled down, I still think I'd keep paying for Spotify as long as it remains easily accessible on all my devices.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Anna's Archive Loses .PM Domain, Adds Greenland (.GL) Backup"}, {"id": 798920016, "item_id": 49932501, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49932501", "by": "swozey", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app", "excerpt": "I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app but it's well known for not having literally the best albums/songs/eps/whatever that they can't monetize or license for whatever reason so you might want to expand your app to look at spotify for recs but factor in that even someone huge like mac miller has a ton of music not on spotify that a r", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl"}, {"id": 792559952, "item_id": 49534997, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49534997", "by": "jcul", "date": "2026-09-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues.", "excerpt": "Wow, I'm usually the first to complain about buggy software and bad UX. But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues. Everything works really well? I can manage playlists, play on one device, control on another etc.", "context": "Android and Linux user", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaint is that its apps have become buggier and less reliable,", "cites": [{"id": 797457296, "item_id": 49841081, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841081", "by": "bschwindHN", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I can barely convince spotify to play a full album anymore without it \"failing to play a song\", crashing, or play without audio underruns.", "excerpt": "So are we just letting go and having clankers write everything now while we have other clankers \"explain\" it to us? Just collectively, \"fuck it\" ? The software I use day to day is just getting worse and worse, and I can only guess that AI is accelerating that problem. Like I can barely convince spotify to play a full album anymore without it \"failing to play a song\", crashing, or play without audio underruns. We're s", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) \u2013 An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design"}, {"id": 794334896, "item_id": 49645931, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645931", "by": "jeffrallen", "date": "2026-09-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "My kids called the app Stop-ify because it was so unreliable.", "excerpt": "Too late. My kids called the app Stop-ify because it was so unreliable. Switched to Apple music and won't go back. On Android!", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"}, {"id": 752940736, "item_id": 47058796, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47058796", "by": "0xCE0", "date": "2026-02-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Desktop app gets laggier and buggier on every update.", "excerpt": "And it shows. Desktop app gets laggier and buggier on every update. And recently like 1 of every 10 consecutive songs just doesn't play. When clicking on the song, it feels like the app tries to redirect original song link (the \"app\" is a website) to some other link and it doesn't find it. As an example, Madonna - Frozen (from 1998 Ray of Light album) just doesn't play, just tried. I have been paying Spotify customer", "context": "paying customer since 2008", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Spotify says its best developers haven't written code since Dec, thanks to AI"}, {"id": 774892209, "item_id": 48430763, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48430763", "by": "aleqs", "date": "2026-06-06", "stance": "warn", "quote": "GitHub, Spotify, Google maps (just to name a few), have gotten noticeably shittier in recent times.", "excerpt": "> should expect maybe 5x faster cycle in major software apps To what end and what would that even look like though? Enshittifying everything at maximum speed? The apps/platforms I use regularly - GitHub, Spotify, Google maps (just to name a few), have gotten noticeably shittier in recent times.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world"}, {"id": 782741120, "item_id": 48921320, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921320", "by": "sn9", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify on Android got an order of magnitude slower recently.", "excerpt": "I think gstatic.com was down yesterday or something because a ton of websites just stopped working. Spotify on Android got an order of magnitude slower recently. These are just the examples that come to mind that I've dealt with from the last 48 hours.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?"}]}, {"text": " with songs and albums disappearing from playlists.", "cites": [{"id": 794276192, "item_id": 49642262, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49642262", "by": "mococa", "date": "2026-09-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog.", "excerpt": "Besides youtube premium (because kid) and apple one (because icloud) I have no more subscriptions. I love music and used to have Spotify, but I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog. Now I buy online or rip my CDs, it\u2019s much better and works offline.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021"}, {"id": 783029312, "item_id": 48939332, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48939332", "by": "mrguyorama", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly", "excerpt": "I have subscribed to Spotify since before 2012. I enjoyed finding new music and the convenience of listening to anything, whenever. My consumption habits are not very amenable to buying CDs, because I have no idea ahead of time which songs will \"Hit\" for me. I generally don't like \"Artists\" or \"Genres\" and I enjoy listening to wildly different music from day to day. However, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlist", "context": "subscriber since before 2012", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "CD Sales Growth Outpaced Vinyl in the First Half of 2026"}, {"id": 792338625, "item_id": 49521164, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521164", "by": "toofy", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist", "excerpt": "> Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. i use apple music. love it way more than spotify. i originally got it because their descriptions of albums and their playlists are done by actual music nerds. i use the website on linux since it\u2019s my daily/work driver and their app on my phone and macbook when i use it. the apple music ap", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 767757018, "item_id": 47984813, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47984813", "by": "gverrilla", "date": "2026-05-02", "stance": "warn", "quote": "AI helped me escape from my Spotify kidnap.", "excerpt": "AI helped me escape from my Spotify kidnap. The stack I use now: Docker, Lidarr, slskd, Tubifarry, Prowlarr, qBittorrent, Blissful and Soulmate. And Strawberry for playlists/playback. Shoutout to MusicBrainz. Very happy to be rebuilding my music library. And this time no song will ever become unavailable out of the blue again. I'm never going to repeat the mistake of migrating to streaming.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Music discovery", "summary": "Several commenters value its recommendations and discovery features for finding new artists.", "quotes": [{"id": 781560912, "item_id": 48847557, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847557", "by": "Retr0id", "date": "2026-07-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The whole reason I use spotify is because I want their algorithm to figure out what music I like.", "excerpt": "I feel this way too except for the music one. The whole reason I use spotify is because I want their algorithm to figure out what music I like.", "context": "", "use_case": "music recommendations", "switched_from": "", "story": "A new way to reflect on how you use Claude"}, {"id": 758196337, "item_id": 47387271, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387271", "by": "Esophagus4", "date": "2026-03-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Several of my cult favorites were Spotify suggestions I never would have found otherwise.", "excerpt": "Does anyone have suggestions for good recommendation engines for new music discovery? Since I\u2019ve switched from Spotify to Apple Music, Apple\u2019s recommendations are lousy and I miss discovering new artists and songs. Several of my cult favorites were Spotify suggestions I never would have found otherwise. Are there any good recommendation engines, or people mostly just use Spotify for that? I\u2019d be sad if I had to switc", "context": "", "use_case": "music discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ"}, {"id": 792538928, "item_id": 49533683, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533683", "by": "suslik", "date": "2026-09-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use the discover weekly / radio / and other discovery features all the time, and still never had a problem.", "excerpt": "I use the discover weekly / radio / and other discovery features all the time, and still never had a problem. I mostly use apple hardware + osx and ios, however, so perhaps mileage varies on other platforms. It worked fine in Firefox on Linux when I tried, but I didn't push it too hard - usually when I'm at work, I just listen via the phone.", "context": "", "use_case": "music discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}]}, {"label": "Works well", "summary": "Some users report no bugs or slowness, especially on Android and Linux.", "quotes": [{"id": 792559952, "item_id": 49534997, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49534997", "by": "jcul", "date": "2026-09-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues.", "excerpt": "Wow, I'm usually the first to complain about buggy software and bad UX. But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues. Everything works really well? I can manage playlists, play on one device, control on another etc.", "context": "Android and Linux user", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792342624, "item_id": 49521414, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521414", "by": "laurentiurad", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use android and I never experienced any bugs or slowness.", "excerpt": "I share the same experience. I use android and I never experienced any bugs or slowness. The Garmin app is also really good.", "context": "Android user", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 794454320, "item_id": 49653395, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653395", "by": "pavelstoev", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use it to listen to music and it works well for me", "excerpt": "What are we talking about here - Spotify or Shopify ? If Shopify - and you are concerned about their engineering teams, please consider that Shopify's revenue grew from roughly $205 million in 2015 to $11.56 billion in 2025, reflecting an explosive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 45% across the past decade. Market validates ! I have nothing to add about Spotify - I use it to listen to music and it works we", "context": "", "use_case": "listening to music", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"}]}, {"label": "Cross-device convenience", "summary": "Commenters pay for the convenience of access and sync across mobile, car and desktop.", "quotes": [{"id": 750606816, "item_id": 46912926, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912926", "by": "0xE1337DAD", "date": "2026-02-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Spotify's strength (and what I pay for) is convenience.", "excerpt": "I really don't think spotify gas much to worry about. Pirating music has been a thing since long before Spotify hit the stage. Spotify's strength (and what I pay for) is convenience. Even if I had a personal library with all the music annas-archive pulled down, I still think I'd keep paying for Spotify as long as it remains easily accessible on all my devices.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Anna's Archive Loses .PM Domain, Adds Greenland (.GL) Backup"}, {"id": 798920016, "item_id": 49932501, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49932501", "by": "swozey", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app", "excerpt": "I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app but it's well known for not having literally the best albums/songs/eps/whatever that they can't monetize or license for whatever reason so you might want to expand your app to look at spotify for recs but factor in that even someone huge like mac miller has a ton of music not on spotify that a r", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl"}, {"id": 792363137, "item_id": 49522696, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49522696", "by": "unfocused", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.", "excerpt": "I switched from Amazon music after many years to Spotify, as Amazon's App was just terrible. Never worked well offline in my watch or phone (Apple). I only went to Spotify because my kids wanted it. The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "Amazon Music", "story": "Fastpotify"}]}, {"label": "Large catalog", "summary": "One commenter pays because it curates a massive collection with many ways to discover music.", "quotes": [{"id": 802830048, "item_id": 50176878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176878", "by": "bob1029", "date": "2026-10-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I pay for Spotify because they curate a massive collection and provide many ways to discover new experiences.", "excerpt": "SaaS alone was never much of a moat. SaaS plus consulting is still very much alive. Perhaps more than ever before. My client's customers are not paying for the software. They are paying for a complete solution that results in compliant operations. I don't pay for Spotify because I need a way to listen to music. If it was just about music playback I'd use foobar and get into torrents again. I pay for Spotify because t", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "SaaS Is Dead"}]}, {"label": "Playlists and albums", "summary": "Some use it well with their own genre playlists and full-album listening.", "quotes": [{"id": 777620800, "item_id": 48601300, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48601300", "by": "redwall_hp", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I make playlists of music I listen to frequently, separated by genre.", "excerpt": "That's how I use Spotify. I make playlists of music I listen to frequently, separated by genre. If I want to play a whole album, I click through for one of those favorites or search for it. Mostly I find music via YouTube and then search for what I specifically want to add, or I look for user-curated playlists. I've been doing that since Spotify launched in the US, and I'm mystified by people somehow using it differe", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Spotify Killed the Thrill of the Hunt"}, {"id": 782907392, "item_id": 48931712, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48931712", "by": "embedding-shape", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Spotify seems to work fine for this", "excerpt": "> I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn\u2019t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I've mostly been using my own playlists + radio to play music in Spotify and discover music. Recently though, I've started navigating and listening more by the label, and also listening through full a", "context": "", "use_case": "album listening and discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "The lost joy of music piracy"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Declining reliability", "summary": "Users report crashes, songs failing to play, and slowdowns in recent versions.", "quotes": [{"id": 797457296, "item_id": 49841081, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841081", "by": "bschwindHN", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I can barely convince spotify to play a full album anymore without it \"failing to play a song\", crashing, or play without audio underruns.", "excerpt": "So are we just letting go and having clankers write everything now while we have other clankers \"explain\" it to us? Just collectively, \"fuck it\" ? The software I use day to day is just getting worse and worse, and I can only guess that AI is accelerating that problem. Like I can barely convince spotify to play a full album anymore without it \"failing to play a song\", crashing, or play without audio underruns. We're s", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) \u2013 An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design"}, {"id": 752940736, "item_id": 47058796, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47058796", "by": "0xCE0", "date": "2026-02-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Desktop app gets laggier and buggier on every update.", "excerpt": "And it shows. Desktop app gets laggier and buggier on every update. And recently like 1 of every 10 consecutive songs just doesn't play. When clicking on the song, it feels like the app tries to redirect original song link (the \"app\" is a website) to some other link and it doesn't find it. As an example, Madonna - Frozen (from 1998 Ray of Light album) just doesn't play, just tried. I have been paying Spotify customer", "context": "paying customer since 2008", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Spotify says its best developers haven't written code since Dec, thanks to AI"}, {"id": 794334896, "item_id": 49645931, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645931", "by": "jeffrallen", "date": "2026-09-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "My kids called the app Stop-ify because it was so unreliable.", "excerpt": "Too late. My kids called the app Stop-ify because it was so unreliable. Switched to Apple music and won't go back. On Android!", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"}]}, {"label": "Disappearing tracks", "summary": "Tracks and albums are removed from the catalog or from users' playlists.", "quotes": [{"id": 794276192, "item_id": 49642262, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49642262", "by": "mococa", "date": "2026-09-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog.", "excerpt": "Besides youtube premium (because kid) and apple one (because icloud) I have no more subscriptions. I love music and used to have Spotify, but I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog. Now I buy online or rip my CDs, it\u2019s much better and works offline.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021"}, {"id": 783029312, "item_id": 48939332, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48939332", "by": "mrguyorama", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly", "excerpt": "I have subscribed to Spotify since before 2012. I enjoyed finding new music and the convenience of listening to anything, whenever. My consumption habits are not very amenable to buying CDs, because I have no idea ahead of time which songs will \"Hit\" for me. I generally don't like \"Artists\" or \"Genres\" and I enjoy listening to wildly different music from day to day. However, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlist", "context": "subscriber since before 2012", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "CD Sales Growth Outpaced Vinyl in the First Half of 2026"}, {"id": 792338625, "item_id": 49521164, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521164", "by": "toofy", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist", "excerpt": "> Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. i use apple music. love it way more than spotify. i originally got it because their descriptions of albums and their playlists are done by actual music nerds. i use the website on linux since it\u2019s my daily/work driver and their app on my phone and macbook when i use it. the apple music ap", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}]}, {"label": "Poor UI", "summary": "Commenters call the desktop and Windows 11 apps laggy and the UI bad, with in-app promotions.", "quotes": [{"id": 792340032, "item_id": 49521252, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521252", "by": "angelofthe0dd", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the Windows 11 app is such a joke", "excerpt": "I use the Spotify browser UI on my PC because the Windows 11 app is such a joke. However, the browser UI makes my screen go completely black for a second every single time. That's my #1 reason for wanting to try this. Spotify's playlist algorithm is a joke at best, but that's another issue altogether.", "context": "Windows 11 user", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 743101088, "item_id": 46443818, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46443818", "by": "skydhash", "date": "2025-12-31", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify UI is pure garbage", "excerpt": "I have spotify (The duo plan is cheap where I\u2019m at and my SO wanted to use it work). But I do maintain my own collection, mostly because Spotify UI is pure garbage. My collection is store on an old mac mini (with debian). It\u2019s directly linked to an home theater setup via optical. I have MPD on it that I control with Rigelian on my phone. But I often just ssh and use MoC to play music. I also have gonic (subsonic serv", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How to go back to listening to MP3s?"}, {"id": 796702016, "item_id": 49793876, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49793876", "by": "davnicwil", "date": "2026-09-21", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do well", "excerpt": "> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists. To be honest it is worse than this. Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do well which is just play the music I already know I want to play, whic", "context": "long-time paying subscriber", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Attention is all you have"}]}, {"label": "Worse recommendations", "summary": "Some find recent recommendations repetitive or low quality.", "quotes": [{"id": 792351600, "item_id": 49521975, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521975", "by": "the_sleaze_", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify has gone downhill in that regard for sure.", "excerpt": "Spotify has gone downhill in that regard for sure. It floods my pages with \"created for you\" which is just the same 4-5 artists played in the last few weeks ago kludged together into a playlist. Alongside some of the worst music you could imagine (Payola? Idk..) Any recommendations anyone has for music discovery I'm all ears. I recently moved away from a town that had a 10/10 radio station and I'm really feeling the ", "context": "", "use_case": "music discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 782923760, "item_id": 48932735, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932735", "by": "parasti", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO.", "excerpt": "Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO. I use it and have a subscription, but I dread opening their app and looking at the starting screen that shows the same artists I listened to twenty years ago in pointless blurbs like \"presave this (you can't listen to it)\", \"jump back in (you literally already listened to it)\", \"your favorite artists (not according to you but according to us)\". There i", "context": "paying subscriber", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "The lost joy of music piracy"}, {"id": 767671345, "item_id": 47979459, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47979459", "by": "frakt0x90", "date": "2026-05-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "switched to Qobuz due to AI, bad recs, and dislike for the company", "excerpt": "Too late for me. I was on Spotify since 2013 and switched to Qobuz due to AI, bad recs, and dislike for the company. Qobuz puts much more effort into manual curation so I still find awesome weird music and have encountered 0 AI. Mainly due to not relying on recommendation algos anymore. I'm sure there is still AI in there. Only issue I've encountered is an annoying playback bug when switching from wifi to data.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI"}]}, {"label": "Company practices", "summary": "Some commenters object to how Spotify treats artists and to its leadership.", "quotes": [{"id": 779168961, "item_id": 48698060, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698060", "by": "axegon_", "date": "2026-06-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "spotify is a big f-u to most artists", "excerpt": "It's a bit more subtle than that, I'm afraid. In many instances lately, physically owning a product no longer means that you own it: the fact that BMW tried to introduce subscriptions for heated seats, VW blocking out Graphene users from connecting their phones to their cars, Insta360 asking you to install their app to use their camera, which does not need to be connected to a cloud service to function, bambu labs tr", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "If You Can't Hold It, You Don't Own It"}, {"id": 744292419, "item_id": 46518276, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46518276", "by": "dazzawazza", "date": "2026-01-06", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify is basically sucking the life out of the music industry", "excerpt": "Nice. I self host using Navidrome, FreeBSD and Wireguard. I have a decent Fibre connection to my house and a static IP so it's \"free\" to serve. I primary do it because Spotify is basically sucking the life out of the music industry and I love heavy metal.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "How Spotify Made Me Self Host"}, {"id": 792288786, "item_id": 49518049, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518049", "by": "cmehdy", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership.", "excerpt": "Tidal is the last streaming service I use, split between that and a jellyfin+arrs setup coupled with buying music from artists directly. Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership. Was amongst the early adopters (2009). I'm sure they won't care for the loss, and I won't miss th when they're gone.", "context": "early Spotify adopter", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}]}, {"label": "API breakage", "summary": "API changes have broken third-party tools like librespot and DJ apps.", "quotes": [{"id": 792378561, "item_id": 49523660, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49523660", "by": "laddershoe", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Shame, because I used to like Spotify a lot and now I'm actively looking to move away from it.", "excerpt": "You're right, they can't prevent that, but they can change their APIs in breaking ways enough to make librespot unreliable, to the point it's just not worth it. I assume that for a long time, Spotify was content to ignore projects like librespot... they didn't help those projects, but didn't harm them either, and generally to keep things stable enough that a project based on librespot basically stayed working, which ", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 732899328, "item_id": 45806208, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806208", "by": "whycome", "date": "2025-11-03", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify stopped supporting certain hardware. They changed their API so other DJ apps I used no longer had access to the library.", "excerpt": "> but even better is the feeling that you're free from the capricious whims of any corporate policy change Not even just policy changes per se. Spotify stopped supporting certain hardware. They changed their API so other DJ apps I used no longer had access to the library. It\u2019s just annoying when you\u2019re trying to establish workflows and things change for no good reason.", "context": "DJ", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Maintaining a Music Library, Ten Years On"}]}], "who": [{"by": "Hobadee", "context": "Windows user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49945919", "date": "2026-10-03"}, {"by": "HenryBemis", "context": "European", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49850143", "date": "2026-09-25"}, {"by": "jcul", "context": "Android and Linux user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49534997", "date": "2026-09-02"}, {"by": "laurentiurad", "context": "Android user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521414", "date": "2026-09-01"}, {"by": "lysace", "context": "built a music startup", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520546", "date": "2026-09-01"}, {"by": "ssl-3", "context": "subscriber who also used to own CDs", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48700992", "date": "2026-06-27"}, {"by": "jurli", "context": "replaced most app subscriptions with self-built tools", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492046", "date": "2026-01-04"}, {"by": "BLKNSLVR", "context": "Spotify user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45805931", "date": "2025-11-03"}], "tags": ["for music discovery", "for cross-device listening", "for Android users", "free ad-supported tier", "lossless audio"], "use_cases": ["music streaming", "music discovery", "music recommendations", "music", "discovering foreign bands", "listening to albums"], "compared": [{"slug": "apple-music", "name": "Apple Music", "co": 12, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 7}, {"slug": "navidrome", "name": "Navidrome", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 4}, {"slug": "qobuz", "name": "Qobuz", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 3}, {"slug": "youtube-premium", "name": "YouTube Premium", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 3}, {"slug": "youtube-music", "name": "YouTube Music", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 3}, {"slug": "tidal", "name": "Tidal", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 2}, {"slug": "deezer", "name": "Deezer", "co": 4, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 1}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49517448", "title": "Fastpotify", "mentions": 12}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930454", "title": "The lost joy of music piracy", "mentions": 7}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49959280", "title": "15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976856", "title": "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488696", "title": "How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937631", "title": "Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS", "mentions": 2}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2025-12": {"warn": 1}, "2026-01": {"warn": 3, "neutral": 5}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 3, "warn": 2}, "2026-06": {"warn": 3, "neutral": 4, "recommend": 1}, "2026-07": {"warn": 8, "recommend": 2, "neutral": 2}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {"warn": 11, "recommend": 7, "neutral": 3}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 4, "warn": 5, "recommend": 2}}, "quotes": [{"id": 804021906, "item_id": 50251369, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50251369", "by": "bel_marinaio", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify is the typical BigCo spreading enshittification far and wide", "excerpt": "Beeper.com is promising. It rolls a lot of the big messaging apps into one. You can add 5 or 6 accounts under the free plan. I had a Tidal subscription for over a year. I love that they pay the artists way more. Unfortunately Tidal looks similar Spotify, but is somehow janky and less polished. Sharing music was a hassle. I had to go search my friends shares by typing the artist and song into tidal because most of the", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "10 Alternatives to your everyday aps"}, {"id": 802830048, "item_id": 50176878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176878", "by": "bob1029", "date": "2026-10-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I pay for Spotify because they curate a massive collection and provide many ways to discover new experiences.", "excerpt": "SaaS alone was never much of a moat. SaaS plus consulting is still very much alive. Perhaps more than ever before. My client's customers are not paying for the software. They are paying for a complete solution that results in compliant operations. I don't pay for Spotify because I need a way to listen to music. If it was just about music playback I'd use foobar and get into torrents again. I pay for Spotify because t", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "SaaS Is Dead"}, {"id": 800670224, "item_id": 50041889, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50041889", "by": "Pfeil", "date": "2026-10-11", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Europeans that are very aware of this also avoid Spotify, even though it is EU.", "excerpt": "Why not? HN is not critical infrastructure. We do not depend on it even if we use it. We are also not anti-american, we just see that capitalism reached a fkd up state where it supports anti-democratic and specifically fascism patterns. Europeans that are very aware of this also avoid Spotify, even though it is EU. Using EU services is a good heuristic, though, simply because the issues are usually within the big pla", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "European Alternatives"}, {"id": 800163568, "item_id": 50010223, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50010223", "by": "switchbak", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I'm so frustrated with Spotify that I began vibing up my own alternative recommender", "excerpt": "I'm so frustrated with Spotify that I began vibing up my own alternative recommender - I'll check back in with Pandora, I used to love that service. I just presumed it went the way of grooveshark.", "context": "", "use_case": "music recommendations", "switched_from": "", "story": "15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished"}, {"id": 800069472, "item_id": 50004342, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004342", "by": "k__", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Loved Spotify when it was good.", "excerpt": "Loved Spotify when it was good. I found so many bands east Europe, all written in Cyrillic, so I couldn't have searched for them easily. Before that I used Soulseek for Japanese bands.", "context": "", "use_case": "discovering foreign bands", "switched_from": "", "story": "15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished"}, {"id": 800048992, "item_id": 50003062, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50003062", "by": "devonsolomon", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn\u2019t built for this", "excerpt": "For me it was: A Lesson in Crime (Album) - Tokyo Police Club. Specifically the song \u2018Cheer it On\u2019. (For anyone that saw my comment on a similar thread, I found it!). And also a South African indie band called The Bang, who never did much, but had such a good MySpace release of an album called Shiny. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 Comment from the other thread: > The thing I miss most, and the thing we\u2019ll never get back was the cultural buy-", "context": "", "use_case": "listening to albums", "switched_from": "", "story": "15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished"}, {"id": 799938804, "item_id": 49996175, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49996175", "by": "aleqs", "date": "2026-10-07", "stance": "warn", "quote": "a meaningful decline in the quality and reliability of several other major software/apps and services - notably Google maps, Spotify, codex", "excerpt": "GitHub is now one of the least reliable services in my stack, I'm in the process of moving everything off and keeping it for public/open projects for discoverability/discussion purposes only. I've also noticed a meaningful decline in the quality and reliability of several other major software/apps and services - notably Google maps, Spotify, codex. (Is this because of AI?) Codex, especially, is a strange one - initia", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Incident with Git Operations, Pull Requests and Actions \u2013 Resolved"}, {"id": 799134704, "item_id": 49945919, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49945919", "by": "Hobadee", "date": "2026-10-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use it all the time", "excerpt": "> had? Still does, at least on Windows. I use it all the time - I have a playlist with a mix of Spotify music, and music from my server.", "context": "Windows user", "use_case": "playlists mixing streamed and local music", "switched_from": "", "story": "Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS"}, {"id": 799008946, "item_id": 49938059, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49938059", "by": "moecables", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify (why does it need full disk access) ??", "excerpt": "IMHO, it's good to add more specific controls for this. After reading this, I went and checked my list of app with full disk access: - Ghostty (fine, it's my terminal) - Alfred (fine, I use it for searching everywhere) Then I have a few turned off: - Spotify (why does it need full disk access) ?? - Gemini (nope, don't need it to know everything about my computer)", "context": "macOS user", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS"}, {"id": 798955376, "item_id": 49934711, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49934711", "by": "sneak", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "can use Spotify, including Spotify lossless", "excerpt": "I recently bought an Android-based MP3 player that can use Spotify, including Spotify lossless, and has a microSD slot. The benefits here are pretty substantial. It has a really nice headphone amp inside of it for driving larger headphones at the right volume (and a switch in software for low/medium/high headphone gain, separate from volume). Also I don't have to take up expensive space inside my iPhone for Spotify d", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming on MP3 player", "switched_from": "", "story": "Sudo \u2013 A dedicated music player designed around listening to music"}, {"id": 798920016, "item_id": 49932501, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49932501", "by": "swozey", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app", "excerpt": "I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app but it's well known for not having literally the best albums/songs/eps/whatever that they can't monetize or license for whatever reason so you might want to expand your app to look at spotify for recs but factor in that even someone huge like mac miller has a ton of music not on spotify that a r", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why media fans want to escape algorithms with CDs, DVDs and vinyl"}, {"id": 797602288, "item_id": 49850143, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49850143", "by": "HenryBemis", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "From Deezer to Spotify many years ago", "excerpt": "From Deezer to Spotify many years ago From Opera to Firefox many many years ago From Winzip to WinRar many many years ago From Gemini to ChatGPT a couple of years ago I wish there was an alternative to Carbonite (unlimited storage, my encryption) that doesn't hide the VAT until the checkout so they don't trick on the pricing (for us Europeans)", "context": "European", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "Deezer", "story": "Ask HN: What vendor you'd switch out if a better option was available?"}, {"id": 797570305, "item_id": 49848144, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49848144", "by": "bs7280", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "warn", "quote": "non deterministic ux state due to network calls (looking at you spotify)", "excerpt": "Theres a distinction between built more rigorously and tested more rigorously. By many definitions, agent created apps are built more rigorously. They write more unit tests, attempt to handle more edge cases, write more lines of code, create features faster. For certain things, I do think agent created tools tend to be better. But - I have found that every single model available is lacking in creating a great UX, eve", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Search \u2013 A small, fast WebKit browser for macOS"}, {"id": 797457296, "item_id": 49841081, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841081", "by": "bschwindHN", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I can barely convince spotify to play a full album anymore without it \"failing to play a song\", crashing, or play without audio underruns.", "excerpt": "So are we just letting go and having clankers write everything now while we have other clankers \"explain\" it to us? Just collectively, \"fuck it\" ? The software I use day to day is just getting worse and worse, and I can only guess that AI is accelerating that problem. Like I can barely convince spotify to play a full album anymore without it \"failing to play a song\", crashing, or play without audio underruns. We're s", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) \u2013 An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design"}, {"id": 796702016, "item_id": 49793876, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49793876", "by": "davnicwil", "date": "2026-09-21", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do well", "excerpt": "> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists. To be honest it is worse than this. Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do well which is just play the music I already know I want to play, whic", "context": "long-time paying subscriber", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Attention is all you have"}, {"id": 795336321, "item_id": 49708520, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708520", "by": "pants2", "date": "2026-09-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "old Siri knew I liked Spotify", "excerpt": "In my experience the new Siri is marginally worse for everything that I used to use Siri for. It's much slower to respond. It asks for obnoxious classifications. It doesn't know that when I say \"call Mike\" I mean the Mike I call every day vs the other Mike in my contact I have never called in my life. It defaults back to Apple products for everything, old Siri knew I liked Spotify but now if I ask it to play a song i", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27"}, {"id": 794454320, "item_id": 49653395, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653395", "by": "pavelstoev", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use it to listen to music and it works well for me", "excerpt": "What are we talking about here - Spotify or Shopify ? If Shopify - and you are concerned about their engineering teams, please consider that Shopify's revenue grew from roughly $205 million in 2015 to $11.56 billion in 2025, reflecting an explosive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 45% across the past decade. Market validates ! I have nothing to add about Spotify - I use it to listen to music and it works we", "context": "", "use_case": "listening to music", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"}, {"id": 794334896, "item_id": 49645931, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645931", "by": "jeffrallen", "date": "2026-09-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "My kids called the app Stop-ify because it was so unreliable.", "excerpt": "Too late. My kids called the app Stop-ify because it was so unreliable. Switched to Apple music and won't go back. On Android!", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"}, {"id": 794276192, "item_id": 49642262, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49642262", "by": "mococa", "date": "2026-09-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog.", "excerpt": "Besides youtube premium (because kid) and apple one (because icloud) I have no more subscriptions. I love music and used to have Spotify, but I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog. Now I buy online or rip my CDs, it\u2019s much better and works offline.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021"}, {"id": 793343536, "item_id": 49583971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583971", "by": "asimovDev", "date": "2026-09-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "their free version wasn't particularly horrendous the last time I tried.", "excerpt": "their free version wasn't particularly horrendous the last time I tried. I clicked play on a playlist and got an ad every maybe 3-5 songs and the ads were usually around 30 seconds. although my main issue is that they only had the same 2-3 ads to play for me throughout the weeks I used the free version so that got annoying. as someone on the internet once said, it's good that no-one at Spotify realised that people wo", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%"}, {"id": 792559952, "item_id": 49534997, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49534997", "by": "jcul", "date": "2026-09-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues.", "excerpt": "Wow, I'm usually the first to complain about buggy software and bad UX. But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues. Everything works really well? I can manage playlists, play on one device, control on another etc.", "context": "Android and Linux user", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792538928, "item_id": 49533683, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533683", "by": "suslik", "date": "2026-09-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use the discover weekly / radio / and other discovery features all the time, and still never had a problem.", "excerpt": "I use the discover weekly / radio / and other discovery features all the time, and still never had a problem. I mostly use apple hardware + osx and ios, however, so perhaps mileage varies on other platforms. It worked fine in Firefox on Linux when I tried, but I didn't push it too hard - usually when I'm at work, I just listen via the phone.", "context": "", "use_case": "music discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792436544, "item_id": 49527284, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49527284", "by": "beart", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It's objectively really bad at a lot things.", "excerpt": "It's objectively really bad at a lot things. I've always had the feeling that the music is not even a primary feature of their product. The last time I used it, I uninstalled once I realized that my kids could watch Logan Paul YouTube videos through the Spotify app. These masquerade as podcasts, but like a Trojan horse they are just vods of YouTube content. And at the time there was literally no way to disable this. ", "context": "parent with kids", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792378561, "item_id": 49523660, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49523660", "by": "laddershoe", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Shame, because I used to like Spotify a lot and now I'm actively looking to move away from it.", "excerpt": "You're right, they can't prevent that, but they can change their APIs in breaking ways enough to make librespot unreliable, to the point it's just not worth it. I assume that for a long time, Spotify was content to ignore projects like librespot... they didn't help those projects, but didn't harm them either, and generally to keep things stable enough that a project based on librespot basically stayed working, which ", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792363137, "item_id": 49522696, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49522696", "by": "unfocused", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.", "excerpt": "I switched from Amazon music after many years to Spotify, as Amazon's App was just terrible. Never worked well offline in my watch or phone (Apple). I only went to Spotify because my kids wanted it. The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "Amazon Music", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792351600, "item_id": 49521975, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521975", "by": "the_sleaze_", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify has gone downhill in that regard for sure.", "excerpt": "Spotify has gone downhill in that regard for sure. It floods my pages with \"created for you\" which is just the same 4-5 artists played in the last few weeks ago kludged together into a playlist. Alongside some of the worst music you could imagine (Payola? Idk..) Any recommendations anyone has for music discovery I'm all ears. I recently moved away from a town that had a 10/10 radio station and I'm really feeling the ", "context": "", "use_case": "music discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792342624, "item_id": 49521414, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521414", "by": "laurentiurad", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use android and I never experienced any bugs or slowness.", "excerpt": "I share the same experience. I use android and I never experienced any bugs or slowness. The Garmin app is also really good.", "context": "Android user", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792340032, "item_id": 49521252, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521252", "by": "angelofthe0dd", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the Windows 11 app is such a joke", "excerpt": "I use the Spotify browser UI on my PC because the Windows 11 app is such a joke. However, the browser UI makes my screen go completely black for a second every single time. That's my #1 reason for wanting to try this. Spotify's playlist algorithm is a joke at best, but that's another issue altogether.", "context": "Windows 11 user", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792338625, "item_id": 49521164, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521164", "by": "toofy", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist", "excerpt": "> Is there any music streaming service with fast native cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android) clients? Because I'd switch. i use apple music. love it way more than spotify. i originally got it because their descriptions of albums and their playlists are done by actual music nerds. i use the website on linux since it\u2019s my daily/work driver and their app on my phone and macbook when i use it. the apple music ap", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792330545, "item_id": 49520659, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520659", "by": "samcrawford", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "so I've gone back to Spotify.", "excerpt": "I switched from Spotify to Amazon Music about 9 months ago, and cancelled Spotify Premium as a result (due to price, not bugs). Amazon Music is so much worse. 1. If you have no connectivity, the app will frequently get stuck in the offline state, playing the spinner indefinitely, even after connectivity has returned. I had similar issues on Spotify, but Amazon Music is so much worse. 2. I had Amazon Music eat my enti", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "Amazon Music", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792328736, "item_id": 49520546, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520546", "by": "lysace", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client.", "excerpt": "You're remembering correctly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203654 What's funny about having to rely on unauthorized clones to provide a fast native UX was that Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client. Few Apps ever had that wow factor the first time I used it, it was so much lighter and more responsive than anything else of the day. I remember b", "context": "built a music startup", "use_case": "music streaming client", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 792288786, "item_id": 49518049, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518049", "by": "cmehdy", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership.", "excerpt": "Tidal is the last streaming service I use, split between that and a jellyfin+arrs setup coupled with buying music from artists directly. Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership. Was amongst the early adopters (2009). I'm sure they won't care for the loss, and I won't miss th when they're gone.", "context": "early Spotify adopter", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fastpotify"}, {"id": 791558516, "item_id": 49472407, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49472407", "by": "coldtea", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use Music, Spotify, Apple TV, Netflix and Prime", "excerpt": ">.. so that I can never switch to anything ever due to vendor lock-in, What exactly prevents you? I use macOS, but have used Windows and still also use Linux, and can jump at a moment's notice if I wish. While keeping iPhone, or ditching that too for Android. I'd lose the App Store bought apps, but I don't use that many of those, and the non-cross-platform apps would be an issue if I jumped away from any other OS too", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2"}, {"id": 789721760, "item_id": 49357610, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357610", "by": "frabcus", "date": "2026-08-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm a happy paid user of Spotify", "excerpt": "Yep - some emotional core of my being (not rational) hates ML recommendations. I'm a happy paid user of Spotify and just ignore the recommendations (I'm not looking at a screen), and I use YouTube heavily with a browser plugin that hides recommendations (which kills the end of video loop). I get recommendations from people, and use the products for curation, bookmarking and subscriptions. They're good. Whereas Instag", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco"}, {"id": 785872515, "item_id": 49117032, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49117032", "by": "zeroq", "date": "2026-07-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I often wonder why Spotify needs 3,000 [1] developers working full time on a streaming app.", "excerpt": "A textbook definition of \"feature creep\". I have absolutely no idea if CodePen is feeling pressure from their shareholders or want to cook before the IPO, but I often wonder why Spotify needs 3,000 [1] developers working full time on a streaming app. 4 weeks ago there was a thread about Spotify making over 4,000 production releases a day (or 10 in 10 minutes in another comment in that thread). WinAmp has been dead fo", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "CodePen 2.0"}, {"id": 783029312, "item_id": 48939332, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48939332", "by": "mrguyorama", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly", "excerpt": "I have subscribed to Spotify since before 2012. I enjoyed finding new music and the convenience of listening to anything, whenever. My consumption habits are not very amenable to buying CDs, because I have no idea ahead of time which songs will \"Hit\" for me. I generally don't like \"Artists\" or \"Genres\" and I enjoy listening to wildly different music from day to day. However, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlist", "context": "subscriber since before 2012", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "CD Sales Growth Outpaced Vinyl in the First Half of 2026"}, {"id": 782972992, "item_id": 48935812, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935812", "by": "driverdan", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've been a Spotify user for at least 15 years", "excerpt": "It works well until it doesn't. I've been a Spotify user for at least 15 years (wild to say that). I've discovered a ton of bands I've become a long term fan of. But also their algorithmic playlists have gotten worse and worse. They overfit user data. They all recommend the same singles over and over and over. I've found they also don't make sense, recommending music that doesn't even belong in the playlist. I've swi", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming and discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "The lost joy of music piracy"}, {"id": 782948083, "item_id": 48934255, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48934255", "by": "grvdrm", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I think discovery is alive and well - both with Spotify, but elsewhere too.", "excerpt": "I wasn't familiar with either Oink or What.CD - fascinating to read about them. I spent tons of time on Napster and LimeWire roughly between late 1990s and 2005 when I graduated from college. A few things stood out as related topics: 1. I attended UMass-Amherst - a school not unfamiliar with and perhaps even popular for jam band culture. There was, at one point, a tool distributed that allowed any particular user to ", "context": "", "use_case": "music discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "The lost joy of music piracy"}, {"id": 782923760, "item_id": 48932735, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932735", "by": "parasti", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO.", "excerpt": "Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO. I use it and have a subscription, but I dread opening their app and looking at the starting screen that shows the same artists I listened to twenty years ago in pointless blurbs like \"presave this (you can't listen to it)\", \"jump back in (you literally already listened to it)\", \"your favorite artists (not according to you but according to us)\". There i", "context": "paying subscriber", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "The lost joy of music piracy"}, {"id": 782918193, "item_id": 48932387, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932387", "by": "jrowen", "date": "2026-07-16", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I never liked Spotify", "excerpt": "I used ourTunes in the dorms, people just sharing their entire iTunes with the network. I've always been more of a solo digger, but I never liked Spotify. I have specific dance/electronic tastes so I browse and purchase music on sites like bandcamp or beatport, though actually these days it's strictly junodownload. I do wonder though how much of what you describe, or some form of it, is still happening in dorm rooms.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "The lost joy of music piracy"}, {"id": 782741120, "item_id": 48921320, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921320", "by": "sn9", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Spotify on Android got an order of magnitude slower recently.", "excerpt": "I think gstatic.com was down yesterday or something because a ton of websites just stopped working. Spotify on Android got an order of magnitude slower recently. These are just the examples that come to mind that I've dealt with from the last 48 hours.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?"}, {"id": 781560912, "item_id": 48847557, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847557", "by": "Retr0id", "date": "2026-07-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The whole reason I use spotify is because I want their algorithm to figure out what music I like.", "excerpt": "I feel this way too except for the music one. The whole reason I use spotify is because I want their algorithm to figure out what music I like.", "context": "", "use_case": "music recommendations", "switched_from": "", "story": "A new way to reflect on how you use Claude"}, {"id": 780377200, "item_id": 48773575, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773575", "by": "embedding-shape", "date": "2026-07-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "> Even today, while I use spotify on my work computer, it\u2019s basically the same albums every day (around a dozen). Playing CDs would be probably better than switching to the UX disaster that is Spotify Why don't you switch to CDs then? Something is telling me this isn't quite the full story. I'm sure lots of people who don't really need to use Spotify use Spotify all the time, if you really do listen to just a few alb", "context": "", "use_case": "music discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "CarPlay Is Additive"}, {"id": 774892209, "item_id": 48430763, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48430763", "by": "aleqs", "date": "2026-06-06", "stance": "warn", "quote": "GitHub, Spotify, Google maps (just to name a few), have gotten noticeably shittier in recent times.", "excerpt": "> should expect maybe 5x faster cycle in major software apps To what end and what would that even look like though? Enshittifying everything at maximum speed? The apps/platforms I use regularly - GitHub, Spotify, Google maps (just to name a few), have gotten noticeably shittier in recent times.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world"}, {"id": 767757018, "item_id": 47984813, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47984813", "by": "gverrilla", "date": "2026-05-02", "stance": "warn", "quote": "AI helped me escape from my Spotify kidnap.", "excerpt": "AI helped me escape from my Spotify kidnap. The stack I use now: Docker, Lidarr, slskd, Tubifarry, Prowlarr, qBittorrent, Blissful and Soulmate. And Strawberry for playlists/playback. Shoutout to MusicBrainz. Very happy to be rebuilding my music library. And this time no song will ever become unavailable out of the blue again. I'm never going to repeat the mistake of migrating to streaming.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI"}, {"id": 758196337, "item_id": 47387271, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387271", "by": "Esophagus4", "date": "2026-03-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Several of my cult favorites were Spotify suggestions I never would have found otherwise.", "excerpt": "Does anyone have suggestions for good recommendation engines for new music discovery? Since I\u2019ve switched from Spotify to Apple Music, Apple\u2019s recommendations are lousy and I miss discovering new artists and songs. Several of my cult favorites were Spotify suggestions I never would have found otherwise. Are there any good recommendation engines, or people mostly just use Spotify for that? I\u2019d be sad if I had to switc", "context": "", "use_case": "music discovery", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ"}, {"id": 752940736, "item_id": 47058796, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47058796", "by": "0xCE0", "date": "2026-02-18", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Desktop app gets laggier and buggier on every update.", "excerpt": "And it shows. Desktop app gets laggier and buggier on every update. And recently like 1 of every 10 consecutive songs just doesn't play. When clicking on the song, it feels like the app tries to redirect original song link (the \"app\" is a website) to some other link and it doesn't find it. As an example, Madonna - Frozen (from 1998 Ray of Light album) just doesn't play, just tried. I have been paying Spotify customer", "context": "paying customer since 2008", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Spotify says its best developers haven't written code since Dec, thanks to AI"}, {"id": 750606816, "item_id": 46912926, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912926", "by": "0xE1337DAD", "date": "2026-02-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Spotify's strength (and what I pay for) is convenience.", "excerpt": "I really don't think spotify gas much to worry about. Pirating music has been a thing since long before Spotify hit the stage. Spotify's strength (and what I pay for) is convenience. Even if I had a personal library with all the music annas-archive pulled down, I still think I'd keep paying for Spotify as long as it remains easily accessible on all my devices.", "context": "", "use_case": "music streaming", "switched_from": "", "story": "Anna's Archive Loses .PM Domain, Adds Greenland (.GL) Backup"}]}