Spotify
Music and podcast streaming service with free ad-supported and paid Premium tiers.
HN commenters like Spotify for music discovery and its large curated catalog,1234 and for convenient listening and syncing across devices.567 The most common complaint is that its apps have become buggier and less reliable,89101112 with songs and albums disappearing from playlists.13141516
Why people recommend it
Music discovery · 3
Several commenters value its recommendations and discovery features for finding new artists.
“The whole reason I use spotify is because I want their algorithm to figure out what music I like.”
“Several of my cult favorites were Spotify suggestions I never would have found otherwise.”
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“I use the discover weekly / radio / and other discovery features all the time, and still never had a problem.”
Works well · 3
Some users report no bugs or slowness, especially on Android and Linux.
“But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues.”
“I use android and I never experienced any bugs or slowness.”
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“I use it to listen to music and it works well for me”
Cross-device convenience · 3
Commenters pay for the convenience of access and sync across mobile, car and desktop.
“Spotify's strength (and what I pay for) is convenience.”
“I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app”
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“The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.”
Large catalog · 1
One commenter pays because it curates a massive collection with many ways to discover music.
“I pay for Spotify because they curate a massive collection and provide many ways to discover new experiences.”
Playlists and albums · 2
Some use it well with their own genre playlists and full-album listening.
“I make playlists of music I listen to frequently, separated by genre.”
“Spotify seems to work fine for this”
Caveats and dissent
Declining reliability · 3
Users report crashes, songs failing to play, and slowdowns in recent versions.
“I can barely convince spotify to play a full album anymore without it "failing to play a song", crashing, or play without audio underruns.”
“Desktop app gets laggier and buggier on every update.”
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“My kids called the app Stop-ify because it was so unreliable.”
Disappearing tracks · 3
Tracks and albums are removed from the catalog or from users' playlists.
“I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog.”
“I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly”
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“i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist”
Poor UI · 3
Commenters call the desktop and Windows 11 apps laggy and the UI bad, with in-app promotions.
“Spotify UI is pure garbage”
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“Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do well”
Worse recommendations · 3
Some find recent recommendations repetitive or low quality.
“Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO.”
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“switched to Qobuz due to AI, bad recs, and dislike for the company”
Company practices · 3
Some commenters object to how Spotify treats artists and to its leadership.
“spotify is a big f-u to most artists”
“Spotify is basically sucking the life out of the music industry”
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“Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership.”
API breakage · 2
API changes have broken third-party tools like librespot and DJ apps.
“Shame, because I used to like Spotify a lot and now I'm actively looking to move away from it.”
“Spotify stopped supporting certain hardware. They changed their API so other DJ apps I used no longer had access to the library.”
Often compared with
7 moved from Spotify to Apple Music
4 moved from Spotify to Navidrome
3 moved from Spotify to Qobuz
3 moved from Spotify to YouTube Premium
3 moved from Spotify to YouTube Music
2 moved from Spotify to TidalDeezer4 comments mention both
1 moved from Deezer to Spotify
1 moved from Spotify to Deezer
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Fastpotify 12 mentions
- The lost joy of music piracy 7 mentions
- 15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished 3 mentions
- Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI 3 mentions
- How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify 3 mentions
- Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS 2 mentions
Data: spotify.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 48
“Spotify is the typical BigCo spreading enshittification far and wide”
“I pay for Spotify because they curate a massive collection and provide many ways to discover new experiences.”
“Europeans that are very aware of this also avoid Spotify, even though it is EU.”
“I'm so frustrated with Spotify that I began vibing up my own alternative recommender”
“Loved Spotify when it was good.”
“I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this”
“a meaningful decline in the quality and reliability of several other major software/apps and services - notably Google maps, Spotify, codex”
“I use it all the time”
“Spotify (why does it need full disk access) ??”
“can use Spotify, including Spotify lossless”
“I use spotify for convenience and social sake, my friends use it and its been the best mobile/android auto/desktop sync app”
“From Deezer to Spotify many years ago”
“non deterministic ux state due to network calls (looking at you spotify)”
“I can barely convince spotify to play a full album anymore without it "failing to play a song", crashing, or play without audio underruns.”
“Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do well”
“old Siri knew I liked Spotify”
“I use it to listen to music and it works well for me”
“My kids called the app Stop-ify because it was so unreliable.”
“I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog.”
“their free version wasn't particularly horrendous the last time I tried.”
“But I use spotify on android and linux and I have no issues.”
“I use the discover weekly / radio / and other discovery features all the time, and still never had a problem.”
“It's objectively really bad at a lot things.”
“Shame, because I used to like Spotify a lot and now I'm actively looking to move away from it.”
“The integration for Spotify is still very good, compared to Amazon Music.”
“Spotify has gone downhill in that regard for sure.”
“I use android and I never experienced any bugs or slowness.”
“the Windows 11 app is such a joke”
“i hated how spotify would just remove tracks after id spend time making a playlist”
“so I've gone back to Spotify.”
“Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client.”
“Fuck Spotify and their rotten leadership.”
“I use Music, Spotify, Apple TV, Netflix and Prime”
“I'm a happy paid user of Spotify”
“I often wonder why Spotify needs 3,000 [1] developers working full time on a streaming app.”
“I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly”
“I've been a Spotify user for at least 15 years”
“I think discovery is alive and well - both with Spotify, but elsewhere too.”
“Spotify is fundamentally broken in a certain, unfixable way, IMO.”
“I never liked Spotify”
“Spotify on Android got an order of magnitude slower recently.”
“The whole reason I use spotify is because I want their algorithm to figure out what music I like.”
> Even today, while I use spotify on my work computer, it’s 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
“GitHub, Spotify, Google maps (just to name a few), have gotten noticeably shittier in recent times.”
“AI helped me escape from my Spotify kidnap.”
“Several of my cult favorites were Spotify suggestions I never would have found otherwise.”
“Desktop app gets laggier and buggier on every update.”
“Spotify's strength (and what I pay for) is convenience.”