Unfortunately the longer time passes, Rogan is pro and against and in between on everything. He's been much more receptive to right leaning perspectives and more critical to extreme left, but also much less critical to the extreme right and much less tolerant of left leaning. Its been incredibly disappointing that he has gotten so out of touch with the style and approach that gained him his podcast prestige.
Sure, though his position hasn't changed much on trans. I've always agreed with him that people who switch genders shouldn't be treated equally when it comes to contact sports like UFC. He's just been more distasteful about discussing it over time IMO.
If I had to sum up how Rogan has changed, he reminds me of many older men who just start to become aholes to everyone and everything, and believe that everything always deserves criticism while rarely deserving to be taken seriously. Though age is a factor, I think his FU money and success has completely gotten to his head.
I was a fan for years from about episode 50, but rarely listen/watch now. His exclusivity is not a factor keeping me subscribed if I consider leaving Spotify in the future.
> he reminds me of many older men who just start to become aholes to everyone and everything
This smacks of ageism AND sexism, all at once! Congratulations, you've violated your own morality code. And you were SO close to the -ism hat trick, had you only referred to him as an "older white man" ;)
It took a while for gay marriage to become broadly accepted. Trans is fighting the same battle now. He's a very typical older cismale and this population segment is, by and large, just not going to "get it" yet.
I don't think it's just confined to white older men, rather old men generally as I stated. Not an absolute either, as I stated "many" and not "all". I'm not going to pretend that the majority of progressive minds are concentrated in the older populace, because constantly I find life experience to demonstrate otherwise.
I'm not sure what there is to "get" about trans. I think everyone deserves to be treated with decency and respect, while also believing there is plenty to discuss about the moral and ethical aspects of hormone treatment (particularly during childhood), genderless bathrooms, etc.
> I'm not sure what there is to "get" about trans.
There are questions that are easy to answer that you have touched on such as bathrooms (just make them all solo and genderless), and decency/respect (give it to everyone, obviously).
There are also FAR more difficult questions to answer such as, how to treat the gender separation in sports and where trans fits in there “fairly”? What to do if there is post-surgery regret? Why can a person consent to a drastic and permanent gender/sex change operation (the effects of some hormones at certain ages is irreversible) while being unable to consent to sex itself? (this is not an appeal to pedophilia as much as it is one of non-hypocrisy).
> He's been much more receptive to right leaning perspectives and more critical to extreme left, but also much less critical to the extreme right and much less tolerant of left leaning.
So your argument is basically "this person is somewhere else on the political spectrum than I am, therefore he must be cancelled from Spotify"?
So, I didn't say anything about cancelling Rogan from Spotify. I think Spotify overspent on him but I could care less that they did.
And my argument is that Rogan used to lean left in his own views, but was tolerant overall for the majority of the bell curve. Now, Rogan has shifted rightward personally, but has abandoned giving due time and thought to much of the left side of the bell curve. He's more narrow minded and quick to criticize what were previously ideas and arguments that deserved to be taken seriously (and still do).
Not the GP, but yes, definitely. If a store or brand has collaborations with the wrong people etc., that's definitely a reason to not shop there. I don't find Joe Rogan terrible enough to cancel my spotify subscription, but if they started collaborating with say Alex Jones, I'd find another streaming service in a heartbeat.
Yes, which is one reason I dislike Rogan. However, Spotify and Jones aren't in direct business (making money off their business deal together). I'm fine with Spotify and Rogan doing business.
It's not that I go around worrying about what's said in every song and podcast on Spotify, it's rather whether I agree with Spotify's business practices or not. I wish Spotify told Rogan to stop having conspiracy theorists on his show (unless they are critically exposed), but I don't consider Alex Jones as being a part of Spotify's business model because he is a guest in one of their pods.
I don/t think the supermarket is a good example, but if a branch company made a product that i see as harmless, i would stop buying from all the other branch. Kinda hard to do grocery shopping without Nestlé and Lactalis, but i somehow manage.
There's a bit of difference between "my grocery store sells seaweed snacks and I don't like them" and "this company gave $100M to someone problematic".
hahahaha this BS again. God forbid someone has an opinion different from you or, even more indirectly, hosts someone with an opinion different from you.
> God forbid someone has an opinion different from you...
My opinion is that Rogan is problematic.
You needn't share it, but you appear to endorse my right to hold that opinion, while simultaneously telling me to "get the fuck out"? I'm somewhat confused.
Out of pure curiosity, what's wrong with him? I don't feel his vibe so I never got into listening to him, but I was under impression he's popular and quite liked.
Yes, he has one of the most popular podcasts in the world. But if you are involved in particular political flavors, you might deem him as "problematic" because he hosts guests who you also deem so, even though objectively speaking, his guests are generally very diverse and his own political opinions are pretty mainstream.
It's like people's feelings on Ben Shapiro. If you are center or right, he seems like a smart young feller. If you are sufficiently left, you can't stand him and he seems detestable.
I find this particularly problematic when he's having "provocative" folks on; it gives them an enormous platform, and one that allows them to get Rogan to nod along where another interviewer might push back on readily debunkable things. We've substantial research indicating deplatforming folks like Alex Jones is effective at reducing the impact of their misinformation. (https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-bans-...)
It's really ironic that you are backing up your claims for "substantial research" with links to Vice. The first one is literally just a hitpiece on Elon Musk. The second one's reasoning, built upon a lot of anecdotes, basically goes like this: Reddit banned deepfakes, and subsequently there were no more deepfakes on Reddit, so that's proof that it worked! I can't see it anymore in my bubble so it must be gone!
The first is an example of where Rogan doesn't push subjects and takes an overly credulous line of interviewing. A more recent example is him spreading the "antifa is starting fires" bullshit, which he later had to walk back.
Going as far as boycotting Rogan because he's not being critical enough of his guests seems pretty dumb to me. It's a mainstream podcast, and he has high profile guests. No wonder he's not going to grill them.
As to the paper, I think you can poke a lot of holes in it. For example, AFAICT they found that hate speech went down, measured via the frequency of words commonly used within these subreddits. Certainly much of the decline is then attributable to the subreddit's subculture getting killed, and taking with it their slang words. It might just be that other words are in fashion now. And it's not a given that this even generalizes from deplatforming subreddits to deplatforming individuals.
So I still think it's a stretch to call it substantial research, but without getting hung up in any more details, I think the fundamental effectiveness issue with deplatforming is that by taking away the platform, you don't change people's opinions. You just won't see them talk about it anymore, and that's you as in you, the one who banned them, and no one else. They'll still be out there. It's just that now, you're sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalala (this is also mentioned in the paper). See the democrats losing to Trump in 2016 even though basically the whole mainstream media demonized him and his supporters.
It might reduce the impact of THEIR misinformation, but... I know a guy who loved Alex Jones (sigh) and he's now just reposting stuff by the likes of "The HighWire with Del Bigtree" instead, who is (unfortunately?) a LOT more convincing (has misinformation... evolved?)
We can barely agree on 2+2=4 sort of stuff; it should be quite clear that "so and so is problematic" is a matter of opinion likely to be disputed by some.
I wouldn't, but realistically all supermarkets sell so many products that you are bound to find something you object to, if only in the book or newspaper stand.
What if they were promoting a company that funds misleading nutrition research to fool people into thinking sugar is less harmful, leading to countless early deaths and diabetes?
What about a company that's the largest plastic polluter in the world, that also lobbies to kill regulation to reduce plastic pollution? It's hard to know the full extent of the harm microplastics cause the ecosystem, but it's unlikely to be small.
How far do you have to drive to find a supermarket that doesn't sell Coca-Cola? Or is that not worth the same level of condemnation as interviewing the wrong person?
> How far do you have to drive to find a supermarket that doesn't sell Coca-Cola?
Sounds like you've identified the key difference on your own?
Spotify can be avoided. Groceries largely cannot.
(There's also a difference in revenue model. You can't subscribe to Spotify without part of that money going to Rogan. You can skip Coca-Cola products at the grocery store and ensure the companies you don't like see $0 from you.)
> You can't subscribe to Spotify without part of that money going to Rogan.
Can't you? Rogan's compensation isn't based on Spotify's total profits, and if you don't listen to him, you won't be contributing to his audience size either, and Spotify will be able to see that in their metrics. If tomorrow Spotify gains 100 million new users, that then never listen to a single Rogan episode, how would that increase Rogan's compensation?
Are you genuinely unable to see the difference between the two revenue models? I'm really not all that interested in absurd hypotheticals.
If I buy a Coke at my grocery store, Coke's getting some of that money. If I buy a Pepsi, Coke gets none of that. I can boycott specific companies while still buying groceries, and again, opting out of food is an issue.
If Rogan were an optional premium paid add-on channel on Spotify, the two would be far more comparable.
And if you shop at a grocery store, your money goes to pay their expenses. One of those expenses if stocking Coca-Cola. See how easy it is to make it seem like you contribute to something if you join all capital flows into one big pool?
You have to explain how Rogan would get more money if you subscribe to Spotify, than if you didn't subscribe.
How far do you have to drive to find a supermarket that doesn't sell Coca-Cola? Or is that not worth the same level of condemnation as interviewing the wrong person?
Everybody gets to choose what they are and are not willing to support with their money. Some things I am willing to compromise to avoid; other things I am not. Extremely strange to me how many of you want to perform these weird mental gymnastics to suggest that people should be ashamed of not handing their money over to people or causes they disagree with.
You sound like you've never heard of boycotting. Yes, that what you described is how boycotting works. It's a very common thing. It ranges from civil rights activists boycotting segregated buses to religious conservatives boycotting stores that sell birth control/plan B to people using lyft instead of uber because of all the issues at uber. One of my friends refused to buy milk from Oberweis, a dairy company in the Chicago area, because they discriminated against polish immigrants like his grandparents way back when, so his family had decided to boycott them forever. This is not some sort of new concept.
Except that there is nothing wrong with Joe Rogan. Not liking someone (or one of their guests) is a really terrible and irrational reason to not use an entire platform.
Feeling that a platform invests in or promotes dangerous or harmful content is a totally valid reason to want to use that platform less, or to stop giving them money. Really super strange that you don’t immediately see that.
Please show me where Rogan promotes "dangerous or harmful content". Also show how mere information can be harmful. Reading "Mein Kampf" won't turn me into a Nazi, but it might make me understand Nazism better.
Spotify can argue that they allow it per user request and they do have control over their public API. And they exercise their option to block unwanted services to use their API. Shitty, but theoretically legal.
The service in question from OP is not using Spotify's API so no license applied. It sounds like they're automating/scraping, which in the US at least, was just ruled legal.[1] Of course, that puts scraper and scrapee into a leapfrog contest.
As OP points out, the best defense against customers leaving is to actually listen to them and please them. In this area, while Spotify might have a giant catalog, they are blatantly tormenting users by removing obvious, simple, features demanded by the thousands of votes on their forum.
When this came up on Reddit the other day, someone mentioned that most of the data is limited to the last two years, with playlists created before that not appearing. Something to keep an eye open for.
No surprise there. It is very common for startups or small to mid-sized companies to start a blog as a companion for their product, with articles of the schema "Very broad description of some common problem/need, followed by very specific guides - often times even step-by-step - on how to use their product to deal with said problem/need."
It widens the spectrum of keywords that they can be found with a lot and thereby increases traffic to their main page and product.
I've run into these so often. I'll be searching for a solution to a problem and I notice a "tutorial" but it on the site of a product that's name implies it is related to "fixing" the problem. And yep, as soon as I start reading the tutorial I can see they are going to say to use their product and explain how to use it. It gets rather annoying seeing these when I know there are free solutions.
There are some problems like this that I’ve ended up solving with a scrolling capture screenshot (ShareX on Windows) and the first fitting google result for an OCR service.
Man I have been using ShareX for quite a while and didn't even realize they had that scrolling capture feature. I just keep finding their tool more and more useful.
I like your approach to getting your playlists out. I just used https://exportify.net/ and it gave me all my playlists in a CSV format with lots of information on each track such as things like genre. I feel like maybe this option may be a bit more useful to you if you want that kind of extra information.
I have been looking to move away from Spotify for a while now due to their lacklustre support for iOS devices. Is there a good comparison between Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Prime Music somewhere, especially in terms of their coverage?
No. The Spotify app on the Apple Watch is a remote control for managing other devices and cannot stream songs independently. It’s insanely frustrating.
Apple made an Apple Music app for the watch with support for offline playback. Spotify did not.
I believe for a year or so the Watch OS has supported the APIs Spotify would need to do offline playback, but they have not yet used them for whatever reason.
This was a controversial topic actually, Spotify openly accused Apple for not providing the access to Apple Watch SDKs when Apple Music was first launched. The APIs are made available after a while I think, but Spotify is still mad.
Other 3rd party apps can sync content for offline playback (eg. Overcast for podcasts) so I don't think there's any technical reason Spotify are not supporting it.
Does Overcast still support sync/offline playback from Apple Watch? I know it's been a bumpy feature that Marco has had trouble supporting due to API limitations and lack of demand/usage.
What's lackluster about Spotify on iOS? I use Spotify on my iPad, my Android phone, and my Windows desktop and they all work pretty well.
> especially in terms of their coverage?
If you are a typical user with typical tastes, they are all more or less the same. If there's something in particular you want - like lossless compression or being able to upload your own music or Grateful Dead concerts - mention it and people may be able to guide you better.
You've mentioned the big three services, but you might want to also consider Google/YouTube Music, Pandora, Deezer, and Tidal and I'm sure there are more.
Spotify for Apple Watch is still basically a remote for Spotify on iOS, presumably due to some contracts between Spotify and Samsung.
So although Spotify could technically implement a standalone Apple Watch App since at least WatchOS 6 (released over a year ago now), they haven’t, which means you always need to carry your Phone with you. Their support Forum is full of complaints about this, with no proper reaction or explanation from their side.
The Apple TV app also does not work properly, requiring to re-login often and can‘t be controlled properly by iPhone.
It's fine on iPad + iPhone, but their Apple Watch app was still pretty much useless last I checked (for example no way to sync songs for offline use) and they also don't seem to support the new HomePod that was just announced.
Really annoying bug where it acts as a remote control for my laptop, setting the volume on my iPhone to max. Then, the next time I use headphones on my iPhone, my eardrums get blasted out.
Spotify still doesn’t support AirPlay 2 streaming in their iOS app, so playback is susceptible to networking blips as I walk around the house into dead spots or change APs. If they supported AirPlay 2, effectively the entire song would get prebuffered and playback would never skip or stutter—even when playing to multiple AirPlay destinations.
I just cancelled my Spotify (maddening playlist/album "play" button, queue management, music-start issues on iPad) and I have Youtube Music (via Premium), which I don't like because they mix "subscribed" music content on the Youtube "Subscriptions" feed.
And, a year ago, when I was subscribed to 1300 artists on Youtube Music, it killed my Youtube subscriptions feed graph -- meaning, it took more than 60 seconds for it to refresh when first starting up or switching back to Subscriptions to see if any new content was available.
Soundiiz is an interesting way to evaluate music services, in terms of which services allow/support "transfers" of artists, albums, playlists.
Apple Music doesn't really allow for it.
I was able to transfer my Spotify albums to Youtube Music, which lets me "follow" artists via [albums in library] without subscribing.
I did like Spotify because it was supported on Roku & Alexa, but I can also live with streaming stations there if I needed.
Pandora might be interesting, have to try it and may have to try transferring music to it.
Slacker LiveXLive seems to have a lot of apps on platforms...
My favorite new problem is that they support an older version of iOS than the corresponding version of WatchOS. So, when I installed a new Spotify update, it has now removed the Spotify "Complication" from my Apple Watch.
With iOS 12.0, you can only install WatchOS 5.0 on your Apple Watch. You have to upgrade iOS to install a newer WatchOS.
Spotify iOS app requires iOS 12.0, but the Watch Complication requires WatchOS 5.2. I have no choice to install an older version of the Complication, and I cannot install an older version of the Spotify app, so I simply no longer have the Spotify Complication on my watch.
The only way for me to resolve this problem is to update to a newer version of iOS. And because Apple only "signs" certain versions of iOS, I'm forced to "upgrade" all the way to iOS 14. This will mean losing access to iOS apps that are no longer supported by the developer, including ones I enjoy and don't want to lose access to.
I mean, all Spotify had to do was align their app requirements and it wouldn't be a problem. I've never had this issue with any other iOS app thus far.
Well, for what it's worth I've been using YouTube Music for over a year and it's coverage has never disappointed me - even for little-known songs (though that's relative). Just my experience and observation.
I've been wanting to write about my experiences with the streaming services that I've tried (Spotify, Deezer, AM, YTM, Tidal...) so I guess this seems like a good opportunity. This was a bit long for just a comment so I'm sharing a pastebin.
Cheers for your write up. I noticed a typo near the bottom - "songshit" instead of "songshift" (I assume it's a typo!). Another interesting thing to compare might be the API each service offers, it's easy for most of them - none.
Yeah but they still linked it in the article "If you wish to migrate out of Spotify, you can move to the following music services...And if you’re still deciding which music provider to choose, take a look at our comparison of the best streaming platforms in 2020." The last sentence is linked to that article that says Spotify is their #1 choice.
You can get a pretty good csv dump of your play music profile through Google's general data export tool. Their migration to YouTube music is a good opportunity to see what else is out there. I'm leaning towards prime music, since they're a buck cheaper if you have prime (who doesn't?)
I have used https://soundiiz.com/ a month ago to transfer all my music lists from Google to Spotify (yeah, the irony...) after many years of having music subscription with them. I just cannot stand the quality drop (and build-for-cheap-tv normalization levels) of sound on Youtube Music.
I haven't studied the fine print on this service, but I wonder about the (high?) value of knowing a person's music tastes in this level of detail. I have hundreds of playlists on spotify, and I bet you can state a lot of things about me by knowing what music I like.
Last.fm allows you to track your whole listening history (and you can export it or play with their API). I agree it could be interesting to infer something valuable from what a person likes (musically), but I don't know if there's much to read between the lines other than "if user likes artist X probably will like artist Y". You may infer my location (from local artists listened), and from that paired with timestamps you could tell some of my habits (work, school, commuting). Personal taste can hint an age group and gender as well, but it wouldn't be precise at all. Perhaps mood? I don't see much value on that info, compared to what you can gather from navigation history, messages or other services.
Just a tought I've had but what if it will actually reveal more insights about their recommendation and curation algorithms than about your music taste?
This data would be more interesting over time. What new artists have been added to the playlists and have any new songs from already known artists been missed...
I'm one of those speak with my wallet kind of people. So when I seen news of this yesterday I wrote into their support saying I was not pleased with it.
Their response was some random canned response about how you can still export your data. I'm not a fan of lock in, and I'm even less thrilled about not actually responding to my actual questions and instead giving me some canned BS.
I responded back telling them thanks for not even reading my question and responding with a canned response, then asked for instructions on how to delete my account. I haven't heard back. For what it's worth I wasn't rude in any of this, I was straight and to the point, but I was not rude. Now they seem to be simply ignoring me.
I'm definitely not spending my money with this service any more. I used to feel a tiny bit sad for them competing with Apple and their whole complaint against Apple and payment stuff. But after seeing this shitty set of responses from them I just no longer care, it feels like they've brought at least some of this on themselves.
As a sidenote, I'm sort of fed up with customer support in general these days. Snippeted answers are great when they make sense. I.e. a user is asking a simple question, you can take the approach of some personalization sprinkled with snippets to make your life easier and your messaging more consistent. But when you have an unhappy, or upset customer, the last thing you should do is throw in some canned response that doesn't even address their concerns.
It's a little surprising to me that you'd expect better customer support from a service with >248 million[1] monthly active users.
Having worked for/with departments like this, they have to heavily optimise for their response rate, and use as many macros to respond as possible, which's probably your case as I'd assume that many customers contacted them with the same question.
By all means, always speak with your wallet, but if you genuinely expect huge corporations to answer each request with a custom response, you will probably be disappointed often.
Most of the time I initiate contact with Amazon customer service, I seem to get a custom response. When pushy, I have gotten excellent custom responses.
I expect Amazon does far more revenue/customer, though.
Not just more revenue per customer, but also the more issues they solve for you the more you'll be able to pay. If Spotify fixes your problem you won't go "now I'll use you more and pay 2x". For Amazon that's a real opportunity.
Your mileage may vary - I've got plenty of Amazon support staff blatantly telling me I've got no consumer rights (both national and EU) "because Amazon rules", no matter how high you try to escalate it.
My local Amazon website customer service was also pretty good every time I had a need for it. On the other hand, the English customer support of Amazon.jp is just straight up terrible. Wanted to send back a damaged product which I had bought as new and which wasn't damaged during transportation. Sent an e-mail, asking for specific information regarding that return. Got reply lacking such information, asked again, different person answering, still unsatisfying answer...rinse and repeat. In the end, I had sent seven e-mails and got a reply from a different customer service representative every single time whose answers contradicted each other too even. Went with the reply that made the most sense and seemed the most right in the end and eventually got it returned (despite some wrong information still) and my money back.
Another thing regarding wrong information on their product pages: Reporting wrong product names/descriptions and providing sources via the website was pointless and they never fixed it. After the whole ordeal with the return, I took the opportunity to tell them directly. Was told to provide a source (URL to some official website for instance) since they need it to confirm that there is something wrong there. Gave them all the URLs which included product titles, product pictures etc but they replied that they can't "use" (whatever that means) the URL (despite saying I should link it) and I'm supposed to screenshot it, upload it and then provide a link to the upload (or send it directly I guess). Of course, after everything above and now this, I was already beyond fed up and just stopped bothering since I'm certainly not gonna do their work for them. That, in addition to a website that is just getting worse and worse and worse stopped me from buying there. No point in having a bad buying experience and also knowing that, if you ever have an issue, support is gonna be an experience that will make you want to flip any tables you see for at least a few hours.
I don’t necessarily disagree that Spotify’s response was unsurprising, but is the number of Spotify users relevant? Logically, the number of support staff ought to scale with the number of customers. It’s not about size, it’s about where Spotify has decided to invest.
I absolutely agree that it should scale with the numbers of customers. However, from my experience working for companies that have customer support, that was definitely not the case.
Did I expect different than what I got? No, I didn't. I honestly expected exactly what I got.
Before I even emailed I had already made the decision to move, but I figured I should at least give them the opportunity to respond, and at the very minimum on my part give them feedback as to why I'm leaving.
Scale should never be an excuse for poor customer service. Customer service is part and parcel of offering a service to customers. A failure to offer good customer service is a failure of your service, period.
...I mean, video rental stores and libraries have had the ability to pull that data for a long time. Many companies, even small ones, offer loyalty programs, which would also mean they have a list of your purchases available.
Exactly, companies just see people who need support as pure cost, since they can't make money off someone who already paid for the service, they treat you like garbage.
I think the internet age has changed this. The pure cost to offer customer service is insane for the costs users are paying. If you want good customer service you're going to have to pay for it, but the market has shown that's not going to be a option, because not enough people are willing to pay for it.
Great customer service used to be a differentiator, but for many services, cost is way more important, and customers are willing to pay.
But if there was a profitable model where they offer great customer service wouldn't they? Or at least a competitor would come in who did. I don't believe spotify is making millions or billions in pure profit. Their competitors are able to position their products as loss leaders.
I agree some companies could do much better, Google is a massive example, but you still have to remember the scale. Read somewhere, If 0.1% of your users require customer service per day, and it takes 10 minutes per user, you'd need ~21k people working 8/hours to handle it each day.
> But if there was a profitable model where they offer great customer service wouldn't they? Or at least a competitor would come in who did.
They wouldn't offer great customer service, they'll offer what they feel they can get away with. And there were competitors but they were pushed out (remember RDIO?, good times).
Yeah. Companies tend to think "why get some of the profits when I can cut corners and get all of the profits". Especially when the corners aren't mandated by law (and even sometimes when the cut corners are mandated by law).
Because Spotify had an ad-supported free service based on selling data and paying the bare minimum it could get away with to artists, while RDIO had a subscription-only service for a long time focused on music recommendations from friends. Spotify squeezed RDIO with its free tier and monetized its user data. After a fruitless trip into online radio, RDIO were bought out by Pandora.
> you'd need ~21k people working 8/hours to handle it each day.
That's Google's problem with their business model, not the customers'.
The customer, who has by definition purchased rights to the service in question (whether with the currency of their attention, their information, or their money), deserves the attention of a human - with the ability to fix problems that arise - when they have a problem with that service that the company's self-service or automated help can not solve.
A customer doesn't have a right to the attention of a human, at least in the US. It's your choice as a consumer to use googles services or not. Well almost, some you can't get away from which kinda makes more sense towards legislation.
I know of many people wishing to use or own a business like spotify. The barrier to entry is very high. Agreements with record companies being the biggest hurdle.
Without competitors, giving you any customer service is unnecessary if demand for the product is high.
Ok, let's use your numbers. 0.1% of days is one service call every 3 years on average, seems reasonable but 10 min may be a bit low. So lets double it.
20 min of a fully loaded 50k employee is about 8 dollars to the company. Or about 2% of a $10 subscription. And that's when I've been pretty generous.
Margins may be so tight this isn't possible, sure; but it isn't obvious. Also note is is hugely higher level of service that what is currently offered, surely there is an in between that is affordable?
Or did I miss something with this back-of-envelope?
Spotify is not making billions in pure profit... their 2020 forecast was between 150 to 250 million euro in profit... which means if they had to spend $2 euro per customer per year on customer service, they suddenly have less than zero profit.
Moreover, the obvious response when you see the poor company is in such distress from too many customers, is to do them a favor and stop being their darn pesky ol' service-wanting customer.
I don't agree. All my questions to Western Digital are answered quickly and personally. Not that I am trying to promote them, but that is my most recent customer service experience.
As another example, 5 years ago, Amazon had excellent and prompt customer service, rivaled by pretty much no one. Although it has gotten worse recently.
You shouldn't be surprised that support people are essentially human firewalls, and getting any sort of policy decision or assistance, especially technical, beyond their knowledge base is impossible. Even Apple support is at least an hour of talking with someone who'll read the knowledge base back to you before being escalated into "I did my homework now look at my syslog" territory.
And as always, on these types of calls, one should never take a "no" from someone who doesn't have the authority to say "yes". Of course, this has to be balanced with how much the question/problem at hand matters to you.
Same here. I'm canceling my Spotify subscription right now and am moving to iTunes (back again). Spotify doesn't seem to support the newly announced home pods as well, which was another reason to quit my subscription, but mainly the somewhat enforced lock in from Spotify concerned me as well.
Apple announced a third-party SDK[0] for HomePod at the event last month, iirc the onus is on Spotify to actually implement support at this point. I'm assuming they couldn't iron something out in time for this event's announcement.
I don't think the person (if any) played to run the support bot is nearly as emotionally invested as you are. Voting with your wallet means redirecting your funds, not trying to argue with bots.
I didn't argue with the support people. I stated my concerns for what they were doing as feedback. I was going to leave it at that, but it turns out that two things are important here that continued the conversation:
1. Their response was awful
2. They require you contact support to delete your account... which, is yet another anti-consumer policy.
> Spotify for Linux is a labor of love from our engineers that wanted to listen to Spotify on their Linux development machines. They work on it in their spare time and it is currently not a platform that we actively support
So for all we know they could drop support if an employee or two leave the company.
At least the TOKEN command was perfect for me, thank you! Instead of passing ID and SECRET, I wrote the values from the Spotify Developer Dashboard to a file like so:
$ touch .spotify_credentials && chmod 600 .spotify_credentials
then edited .spotify_credentials with client_id:client_secret, then
$ curl --basic --user "$(cat .spotify_credentials)" -X POST -d grant_type=client_credentials https://accounts.spotify.com/api/token
which was successful
I'm a user / minor contributor. It could use some polishing, but it gets the job done (JSON or TSV output). I wonder if it could sidestep Spotify restrictions by not providing an explicit interface for uploading playlists to competing services -- just providing the download portion?
What do you mean ? Being able to transfer from one service to the same service is still practical. It allow you to transfer playlist from one account to the other.
We still support migrating to Spotify. We want people to be able to migrate FROM and TO any music service. They get to decide what platform they want to be on.
And yes, you can import your songs between accounts on the same platform.
You can even do a Spotify "Liked Songs" to the same account of Spotify as playlist, and then you can finally share the Liked Songs as a playlist to your friends :)
If this sounds interesting feel free to ping me at twitter @bartosz
Spotify is so much better than apple music, and this is probably minimal compared to what apple music does to convert/retain users from Spotify.
Think of all the barriers apple music has created (apple watch app for a long time was the only one that supported offline, apple music is preinstalled, when you hit play and no apps are currently playing it will go to apple music, probably much more).
My main thought though is that Spotify is much better anyway, why give people the ability to export their curated playlists and use somewhere else. They’ve built that service that helped you discover all those songs — if you created all those playlists from scratch with no help from Spotify’s algorithm (discover/recommendations) good for you but I doubt that’s most people.
The fact that it may have better features or that other services also have lock-in does not in any way excuse this behavior from Spotify. It's anti-user and they should stop.
Personally, I want to have a text backup of all my playlists.
If my Spotify disappeared into the aether tomorrow, it would be a lot of pain. Not completely awful -- I follow a lot of my favorite bands on Youtube, and I buy physical releases occasionally too, but my connection to every artist that I can't name off the top of my head will have been lost.
I've been a spotify customer for years and I plan to continue that, but I also am not planning on letting my playlists go silently into the night.
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I guess I'm lucky that this particular problem is not one that bothers me much.
My playlists tend to be
a) quite short ~30 songs I listen on repeat until the mood changes and / or work requires a different rhythm and
b) are not that many. Only around 10 in active use at any time. I tend to delete older lists to not clutter "my library"
This leads me to the conclusion that a one time (GDPR) data dump would be sufficient to migrate the data over time.
Since Music is quite fungible, the one benefit Spotify offers over other services is their recommendation engine which is arguably better than the competition.
This is actually part of the problem I have. I only really have a few artists I may listen to on a more frequent basis, but other than that I am usually just using random playlists from Spotify that fit my mood rather than spending time making my own.
However I have been having a couple issues. Everything was working fine, but then I started using Spotify at the gym almost daily for workout music. The music genres I like to listen to while working out are vastly different from what I listen to at home. To further compound this problem I often listen to podcasts in the car and don't listen to Spotify much at home. So a good chunk of my usage of Spotify is listening to music at the gym. As such my recommendations are complete garbage. I don't care to be suggested music related to gym music as I just pull up random playlists anyway. But what I do want is suggestions for what to listen to when I am at home. Problem is that Spotify has no incognito mode or any way to tell it to "ignore this from recommendations".
That was actually one of the biggest draws for me was using stuff like "Discover Weekly" and the "Made for you" stuff. But now it is essentially useless for me. Now I have been trying to transition to Plexamp as I already use Plex. My problem is that now I have zero suggestions of what new songs to acquire and I feel stuck.
So the other day Spotify decided to block API access to SongShift [1], which used their API to transfer playlists to other services. By doing that, they removed a method which was valid under GDPR article 20 subsection 2 to transfer personal data directly from one controller to another. FreeYouMusic is using another process without cooperation or consent from Spotify, and doesn't include all personal data.
I've been exchanging emails with Spotify to demand that they re-enable the API or allow for some other method to transfer my personal data directly to another controller. So far they've just sent me boilerplate back telling me about their GDPR article 20 subsection 1 process. You can read the full conversation here [2].
I fully intend to file a complaint with the Dutch civil court if they don't allow me to exercise my rights under the law. It would be good to have some precedent here. As they've already shown it to be technically feasible (a requirement of the law), and enabling the process is literally a boolean away, I think such a complaint would have a high chance of success.
Additionally, in my opinion their GDPR article 20 subsection 1 process is currently also in violation, because they take up to 30 days (counting 2 now) before emailing you the ZIP with your personal data. This is arguably "undue delay" (which is prohibited under the GDPR). If it comes to a case, removing this delay will certainly be part of the demands.
Such transfer actually made perfect sense until recently because they didn't allow to change username. It was brought up on their forums numerous times[1][2] over the years and they only introduced editable profile name in March this year. Until then they advised to create a new account and ask their support by email(sic!) to have your playlists copied.
I’m just waiting for an open source solution. All these closed source payment requires apps kinda scare me with the permissions they need -
Like you just know they’re hacked together scripts that are likely storing and transmitting your tokens in plain text.
270 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadIf I had to sum up how Rogan has changed, he reminds me of many older men who just start to become aholes to everyone and everything, and believe that everything always deserves criticism while rarely deserving to be taken seriously. Though age is a factor, I think his FU money and success has completely gotten to his head.
I was a fan for years from about episode 50, but rarely listen/watch now. His exclusivity is not a factor keeping me subscribed if I consider leaving Spotify in the future.
This smacks of ageism AND sexism, all at once! Congratulations, you've violated your own morality code. And you were SO close to the -ism hat trick, had you only referred to him as an "older white man" ;)
It took a while for gay marriage to become broadly accepted. Trans is fighting the same battle now. He's a very typical older cismale and this population segment is, by and large, just not going to "get it" yet.
I'm not sure what there is to "get" about trans. I think everyone deserves to be treated with decency and respect, while also believing there is plenty to discuss about the moral and ethical aspects of hormone treatment (particularly during childhood), genderless bathrooms, etc.
There are questions that are easy to answer that you have touched on such as bathrooms (just make them all solo and genderless), and decency/respect (give it to everyone, obviously).
There are also FAR more difficult questions to answer such as, how to treat the gender separation in sports and where trans fits in there “fairly”? What to do if there is post-surgery regret? Why can a person consent to a drastic and permanent gender/sex change operation (the effects of some hormones at certain ages is irreversible) while being unable to consent to sex itself? (this is not an appeal to pedophilia as much as it is one of non-hypocrisy).
So your argument is basically "this person is somewhere else on the political spectrum than I am, therefore he must be cancelled from Spotify"?
And my argument is that Rogan used to lean left in his own views, but was tolerant overall for the majority of the bell curve. Now, Rogan has shifted rightward personally, but has abandoned giving due time and thought to much of the left side of the bell curve. He's more narrow minded and quick to criticize what were previously ideas and arguments that deserved to be taken seriously (and still do).
If a supermarket sells products that you like, alongside products you don't like, do you stop shopping there?
I eat a plant based diet but I still shop at a grocery store that has a butcher counter, for example.
It's not that I go around worrying about what's said in every song and podcast on Spotify, it's rather whether I agree with Spotify's business practices or not. I wish Spotify told Rogan to stop having conspiracy theorists on his show (unless they are critically exposed), but I don't consider Alex Jones as being a part of Spotify's business model because he is a guest in one of their pods.
Your analogy is intellectually dishonest and uninspired.
There's a bit of difference between "my grocery store sells seaweed snacks and I don't like them" and "this company gave $100M to someone problematic".
hahahaha this BS again. God forbid someone has an opinion different from you or, even more indirectly, hosts someone with an opinion different from you.
My opinion is that Rogan is problematic.
You needn't share it, but you appear to endorse my right to hold that opinion, while simultaneously telling me to "get the fuck out"? I'm somewhat confused.
I dislike his interviewing style, in that I think he reliably lets guests just make assertions that go unchallenged. (https://www.vice.com/en/article/9kv9qd/the-joe-rogan-experie...)
I find this particularly problematic when he's having "provocative" folks on; it gives them an enormous platform, and one that allows them to get Rogan to nod along where another interviewer might push back on readily debunkable things. We've substantial research indicating deplatforming folks like Alex Jones is effective at reducing the impact of their misinformation. (https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-bans-...)
There is zero "substantial research" in there.
There are actual studies on the impact of Reddit deplatforming, specifically around the /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown bans. http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
As to the paper, I think you can poke a lot of holes in it. For example, AFAICT they found that hate speech went down, measured via the frequency of words commonly used within these subreddits. Certainly much of the decline is then attributable to the subreddit's subculture getting killed, and taking with it their slang words. It might just be that other words are in fashion now. And it's not a given that this even generalizes from deplatforming subreddits to deplatforming individuals.
So I still think it's a stretch to call it substantial research, but without getting hung up in any more details, I think the fundamental effectiveness issue with deplatforming is that by taking away the platform, you don't change people's opinions. You just won't see them talk about it anymore, and that's you as in you, the one who banned them, and no one else. They'll still be out there. It's just that now, you're sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalala (this is also mentioned in the paper). See the democrats losing to Trump in 2016 even though basically the whole mainstream media demonized him and his supporters.
We can barely agree on 2+2=4 sort of stuff; it should be quite clear that "so and so is problematic" is a matter of opinion likely to be disputed by some.
Spotify hosting Joe Rogan is free speech. People choosing NOT to support spotify is ALSO free speech.
God forbid we have a single standard.
If a supermarket were out there promoting… I dunno, their range of confederate flags or something, I’d probably choose not to shop there.
What about a company that's the largest plastic polluter in the world, that also lobbies to kill regulation to reduce plastic pollution? It's hard to know the full extent of the harm microplastics cause the ecosystem, but it's unlikely to be small.
How far do you have to drive to find a supermarket that doesn't sell Coca-Cola? Or is that not worth the same level of condemnation as interviewing the wrong person?
Sounds like you've identified the key difference on your own?
Spotify can be avoided. Groceries largely cannot.
(There's also a difference in revenue model. You can't subscribe to Spotify without part of that money going to Rogan. You can skip Coca-Cola products at the grocery store and ensure the companies you don't like see $0 from you.)
Can't you? Rogan's compensation isn't based on Spotify's total profits, and if you don't listen to him, you won't be contributing to his audience size either, and Spotify will be able to see that in their metrics. If tomorrow Spotify gains 100 million new users, that then never listen to a single Rogan episode, how would that increase Rogan's compensation?
If I buy a Coke at my grocery store, Coke's getting some of that money. If I buy a Pepsi, Coke gets none of that. I can boycott specific companies while still buying groceries, and again, opting out of food is an issue.
If Rogan were an optional premium paid add-on channel on Spotify, the two would be far more comparable.
And if you subscribe to Spotify but don't listen to Rogan, Rogan also gets none of that. If you believe otherwise, please explain how.
Rogan's not being paid per stream like song artists are.
If I pay for Spotify, my $10/month revenue goes to pay their expenses. One of those expenses is Rogan's $100M contract.
The mere act of shopping at the grocery store doesn't send money to Coca-Cola. I have to specifically buy one of their products.
You have to explain how Rogan would get more money if you subscribe to Spotify, than if you didn't subscribe.
Everybody gets to choose what they are and are not willing to support with their money. Some things I am willing to compromise to avoid; other things I am not. Extremely strange to me how many of you want to perform these weird mental gymnastics to suggest that people should be ashamed of not handing their money over to people or causes they disagree with.
Any scenario where critical context is left out, like "some vaccines contain mercury, a deadly neurotoxin!" memes.
> Reading "Mein Kampf" won't turn me into a Nazi, but it might make me understand Nazism better.
There are substantially better ways to understand Nazism than reading Mein Kampf.
Fair rebuttal, although in a population that has been taught how to think critically (not ours, unfortunately), this might be far less of an issue
As OP points out, the best defense against customers leaving is to actually listen to them and please them. In this area, while Spotify might have a giant catalog, they are blatantly tormenting users by removing obvious, simple, features demanded by the thousands of votes on their forum.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2019/09/10/linke...
Edit: still waiting, but found an example here:
https://observablehq.com/@a-lexwein/what-i-got-when-i-reques...
Seems quite usable data.
It widens the spectrum of keywords that they can be found with a lot and thereby increases traffic to their main page and product.
I like your approach to getting your playlists out. I just used https://exportify.net/ and it gave me all my playlists in a CSV format with lots of information on each track such as things like genre. I feel like maybe this option may be a bit more useful to you if you want that kind of extra information.
I believe for a year or so the Watch OS has supported the APIs Spotify would need to do offline playback, but they have not yet used them for whatever reason.
Spotifys accusation: https://timetoplayfair.com/the-case/
Response from Apple: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/addressing-spotifys-c...
HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19377322
I'm surprised to hear about the lack of usage though - Apple Watch support is the only reason I'm using Overcast.
Since, watchOS 6 - that's pretty much not true
https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/29/pandora-shows-spotify-how-to-...
https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/09/watchos-6-spotify/
> especially in terms of their coverage?
If you are a typical user with typical tastes, they are all more or less the same. If there's something in particular you want - like lossless compression or being able to upload your own music or Grateful Dead concerts - mention it and people may be able to guide you better.
You've mentioned the big three services, but you might want to also consider Google/YouTube Music, Pandora, Deezer, and Tidal and I'm sure there are more.
So although Spotify could technically implement a standalone Apple Watch App since at least WatchOS 6 (released over a year ago now), they haven’t, which means you always need to carry your Phone with you. Their support Forum is full of complaints about this, with no proper reaction or explanation from their side.
The Apple TV app also does not work properly, requiring to re-login often and can‘t be controlled properly by iPhone.
I did it yesterday, works great! Offline downloading and playback of Spotify playlists on the Apple Watch, without being tethered to an iPhone.
[1] https://github.com/rafaelmaeuer/open-apollo
[2] https://github.com/lgruen/open-apollo-server
Spotify is BTW developing a proper watch app, it's in beta now:
https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/17/spotify-finally-testing-apple...
My workaround for this is to go out of my way to make sure the iOS app is closed before I resume playback on my desktop.
AirPlay 2 has been out for years.
And, a year ago, when I was subscribed to 1300 artists on Youtube Music, it killed my Youtube subscriptions feed graph -- meaning, it took more than 60 seconds for it to refresh when first starting up or switching back to Subscriptions to see if any new content was available.
Soundiiz is an interesting way to evaluate music services, in terms of which services allow/support "transfers" of artists, albums, playlists.
Apple Music doesn't really allow for it.
I was able to transfer my Spotify albums to Youtube Music, which lets me "follow" artists via [albums in library] without subscribing.
I did like Spotify because it was supported on Roku & Alexa, but I can also live with streaming stations there if I needed.
Pandora might be interesting, have to try it and may have to try transferring music to it.
Slacker LiveXLive seems to have a lot of apps on platforms...
With iOS 12.0, you can only install WatchOS 5.0 on your Apple Watch. You have to upgrade iOS to install a newer WatchOS.
Spotify iOS app requires iOS 12.0, but the Watch Complication requires WatchOS 5.2. I have no choice to install an older version of the Complication, and I cannot install an older version of the Spotify app, so I simply no longer have the Spotify Complication on my watch.
The only way for me to resolve this problem is to update to a newer version of iOS. And because Apple only "signs" certain versions of iOS, I'm forced to "upgrade" all the way to iOS 14. This will mean losing access to iOS apps that are no longer supported by the developer, including ones I enjoy and don't want to lose access to.
I mean, all Spotify had to do was align their app requirements and it wouldn't be a problem. I've never had this issue with any other iOS app thus far.
https://pastebin.com/KG5huAnn
https://freeyourmusic.com/en/blog/best-music-streaming-platf...
Then you can save it and upload it to wherever you like.
You probably would have to write a second little script to convert the csv into the format of the service you want to upload it to.
Worst case I use OCR/mechanical turks in the future because I took screenshots.
I'm not sure you could actually do it worse, mine was a folder for every playlist, with a CSV for each song.
Trivial for me as a programmer to reformat, but useless for the general public.
This data would be more interesting over time. What new artists have been added to the playlists and have any new songs from already known artists been missed...
Their response was some random canned response about how you can still export your data. I'm not a fan of lock in, and I'm even less thrilled about not actually responding to my actual questions and instead giving me some canned BS.
I responded back telling them thanks for not even reading my question and responding with a canned response, then asked for instructions on how to delete my account. I haven't heard back. For what it's worth I wasn't rude in any of this, I was straight and to the point, but I was not rude. Now they seem to be simply ignoring me.
I'm definitely not spending my money with this service any more. I used to feel a tiny bit sad for them competing with Apple and their whole complaint against Apple and payment stuff. But after seeing this shitty set of responses from them I just no longer care, it feels like they've brought at least some of this on themselves.
As a sidenote, I'm sort of fed up with customer support in general these days. Snippeted answers are great when they make sense. I.e. a user is asking a simple question, you can take the approach of some personalization sprinkled with snippets to make your life easier and your messaging more consistent. But when you have an unhappy, or upset customer, the last thing you should do is throw in some canned response that doesn't even address their concerns.
Having worked for/with departments like this, they have to heavily optimise for their response rate, and use as many macros to respond as possible, which's probably your case as I'd assume that many customers contacted them with the same question.
By all means, always speak with your wallet, but if you genuinely expect huge corporations to answer each request with a custom response, you will probably be disappointed often.
[1] https://qz.com/1736762/spotify-grows-monthly-active-users-an...
I expect Amazon does far more revenue/customer, though.
Another thing regarding wrong information on their product pages: Reporting wrong product names/descriptions and providing sources via the website was pointless and they never fixed it. After the whole ordeal with the return, I took the opportunity to tell them directly. Was told to provide a source (URL to some official website for instance) since they need it to confirm that there is something wrong there. Gave them all the URLs which included product titles, product pictures etc but they replied that they can't "use" (whatever that means) the URL (despite saying I should link it) and I'm supposed to screenshot it, upload it and then provide a link to the upload (or send it directly I guess). Of course, after everything above and now this, I was already beyond fed up and just stopped bothering since I'm certainly not gonna do their work for them. That, in addition to a website that is just getting worse and worse and worse stopped me from buying there. No point in having a bad buying experience and also knowing that, if you ever have an issue, support is gonna be an experience that will make you want to flip any tables you see for at least a few hours.
It's great that chat is empowered to send $5 or $10, but oftentimes I just want to have my problem solved.
Before I even emailed I had already made the decision to move, but I figured I should at least give them the opportunity to respond, and at the very minimum on my part give them feedback as to why I'm leaving.
I get great customer service at the local record store, where I pay 30 bucks for an LP.
Great customer service used to be a differentiator, but for many services, cost is way more important, and customers are willing to pay.
But their profit/cost ratios are high enough to offer more customer service than they currently are.
And ultimately, it's not the customer's fault that the business is not working from a sustainable business model.
I agree some companies could do much better, Google is a massive example, but you still have to remember the scale. Read somewhere, If 0.1% of your users require customer service per day, and it takes 10 minutes per user, you'd need ~21k people working 8/hours to handle it each day.
They wouldn't offer great customer service, they'll offer what they feel they can get away with. And there were competitors but they were pushed out (remember RDIO?, good times).
wow. I do now. Why did they shut down?
Because Spotify had an ad-supported free service based on selling data and paying the bare minimum it could get away with to artists, while RDIO had a subscription-only service for a long time focused on music recommendations from friends. Spotify squeezed RDIO with its free tier and monetized its user data. After a fruitless trip into online radio, RDIO were bought out by Pandora.
That's Google's problem with their business model, not the customers'.
The customer, who has by definition purchased rights to the service in question (whether with the currency of their attention, their information, or their money), deserves the attention of a human - with the ability to fix problems that arise - when they have a problem with that service that the company's self-service or automated help can not solve.
Without competitors, giving you any customer service is unnecessary if demand for the product is high.
Spend your money on a vpn.
20 min of a fully loaded 50k employee is about 8 dollars to the company. Or about 2% of a $10 subscription. And that's when I've been pretty generous.
Margins may be so tight this isn't possible, sure; but it isn't obvious. Also note is is hugely higher level of service that what is currently offered, surely there is an in between that is affordable?
Or did I miss something with this back-of-envelope?
As another example, 5 years ago, Amazon had excellent and prompt customer service, rivaled by pretty much no one. Although it has gotten worse recently.
I take at least a little pride in being a personable worker who can read the situation and respond appropriately from the beginning.
Acknowledging the problem and the concerns of the customer is at least the bare minimum and they didn't even do that.
Is this really Spotifys decision or something about how Apple handles announcements and development access to their devices?
Or: Does Apple want Spotify in their game and on their devices? Or would they rather sell Apple Music subscriptions?
https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/22/homepod-music-services/
1. Their response was awful
2. They require you contact support to delete your account... which, is yet another anti-consumer policy.
They are open with data, have good API's etc until they get market dominance then they stop supporting many of those same things.
They have dropped their support for Linux Clients, they closed most of their API's, and various other things
It is a repeating pattern with companies that are disrupting a market
https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/
So for all we know they could drop support if an employee or two leave the company.
"and it is currently not a platform that we actively support."
it is a spare project from a few engineers, with no offical support from the company, if the few engineers that support it ever leave it is Dead
and it was dead for several years before the engineer got enough support to be able to do it as an unoffical project.
[1] https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
It should be possible to script that out too.
I already did just to test it out, the results include a 'next' link that you can use :)
I'm a user / minor contributor. It could use some polishing, but it gets the job done (JSON or TSV output). I wonder if it could sidestep Spotify restrictions by not providing an explicit interface for uploading playlists to competing services -- just providing the download portion?
And yes, you can import your songs between accounts on the same platform.
If this sounds interesting feel free to ping me at twitter @bartosz
ANSWER to myself: Seems there is at least a simple drag&drop solution with the select all on desktop app -> LibreOffice https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-export-my-Spotify-playlist-as...
https://github.com/pavel-aicradle/exportify
Think of all the barriers apple music has created (apple watch app for a long time was the only one that supported offline, apple music is preinstalled, when you hit play and no apps are currently playing it will go to apple music, probably much more).
My main thought though is that Spotify is much better anyway, why give people the ability to export their curated playlists and use somewhere else. They’ve built that service that helped you discover all those songs — if you created all those playlists from scratch with no help from Spotify’s algorithm (discover/recommendations) good for you but I doubt that’s most people.
If my Spotify disappeared into the aether tomorrow, it would be a lot of pain. Not completely awful -- I follow a lot of my favorite bands on Youtube, and I buy physical releases occasionally too, but my connection to every artist that I can't name off the top of my head will have been lost.
I've been a spotify customer for years and I plan to continue that, but I also am not planning on letting my playlists go silently into the night.
http://www.rwildaboutbeauty.com/
My playlists tend to be
a) quite short ~30 songs I listen on repeat until the mood changes and / or work requires a different rhythm and
b) are not that many. Only around 10 in active use at any time. I tend to delete older lists to not clutter "my library"
This leads me to the conclusion that a one time (GDPR) data dump would be sufficient to migrate the data over time.
Since Music is quite fungible, the one benefit Spotify offers over other services is their recommendation engine which is arguably better than the competition.
However I have been having a couple issues. Everything was working fine, but then I started using Spotify at the gym almost daily for workout music. The music genres I like to listen to while working out are vastly different from what I listen to at home. To further compound this problem I often listen to podcasts in the car and don't listen to Spotify much at home. So a good chunk of my usage of Spotify is listening to music at the gym. As such my recommendations are complete garbage. I don't care to be suggested music related to gym music as I just pull up random playlists anyway. But what I do want is suggestions for what to listen to when I am at home. Problem is that Spotify has no incognito mode or any way to tell it to "ignore this from recommendations".
That was actually one of the biggest draws for me was using stuff like "Discover Weekly" and the "Made for you" stuff. But now it is essentially useless for me. Now I have been trying to transition to Plexamp as I already use Plex. My problem is that now I have zero suggestions of what new songs to acquire and I feel stuck.
I've been exchanging emails with Spotify to demand that they re-enable the API or allow for some other method to transfer my personal data directly to another controller. So far they've just sent me boilerplate back telling me about their GDPR article 20 subsection 1 process. You can read the full conversation here [2].
I fully intend to file a complaint with the Dutch civil court if they don't allow me to exercise my rights under the law. It would be good to have some precedent here. As they've already shown it to be technically feasible (a requirement of the law), and enabling the process is literally a boolean away, I think such a complaint would have a high chance of success.
Additionally, in my opinion their GDPR article 20 subsection 1 process is currently also in violation, because they take up to 30 days (counting 2 now) before emailing you the ZIP with your personal data. This is arguably "undue delay" (which is prohibited under the GDPR). If it comes to a case, removing this delay will certainly be part of the demands.
[1] https://songshift.com/blog/spotify_transfers
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371
This is the best of the lot.
[1] - https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/How-can-i-change-m...
[2] - https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/I-simply-want-to-c...