The past few days I’ve woken up with the opening riff of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir in my head. Which is weird, since I’m not a Zeppelin fan. Everyone else was when I was growing up – but I never liked bands just because other people did. Rather, I’ve always gravitated to new music. I don’t even own any Zeppelin in my library. But I wanted to hear Kashmir, so I signed into my new Premium Spotify account this morning and searched. There it was. I clicked. But it didn’t sound like Robert Plant. I looked, and saw that what I was listening to was by a band called Liz Zeppelin. A knock-off. I looked again, there were lots of knock-offs. I sighed and rolled my eyes. It was yet another blow to my experience with Spotify, the new music service that’s sweeping America.
I like music. In fact, it’s our family’s preferred form of art, followed closely by film. So I really wanted Spotify to work for me. Plus, all the cool kids were using it and singing its praises. I mean, just look at the testimonials at the bottom of the Spotify home page. However, after only a week of really trying to make a go of this service, it just feels like a fancier LimeWire. I’m already just about done with it. And it’s not only because of the Zeppelin thing. It’s a few things:
Lists
I hate lists. I don’t have any lists in Twitter, Facebook or Google+. The few lists I have in iTunes are to populate devices with new music I procure. I simply don’t have time to make lists.
Searching
Searching is time consuming. As mentioned previously, I like new music. It’s hard to search for new music when you don’t know where to look. I could spend hours looking backwards at old music on Spotify in order to make lists, but then it’s old. And I’d have to listen to the same songs over and over.
Curation
If I sign up to follow a list, I have to rely on the person who created it, to continue curating it. There’s just no point in listening to the same music over and over. And the only way to avoid that, is to find new lists. Which goes back to the search thing above.
Mobile
The main reason I went ahead and got the Premium service in Spotify was to have access to the music via my mobile devices. However, Spotify’s mobile app is dumb. It doesn’t recognize which songs in a list are not available to me because of copyright issues. So rather than hear the next song in a playlist, I get dead air.
Service
Wow, this is a huge deal. I have tweeted @spotify a few times, but with no answer. If you look at their Twitter stream, it’s really just self-promotion. For the sake of the other users out there who have questions, I hope Spotify fixes this issue soon.
UI
It’s terrible. I recently wanted to learn what all the little icons meant in the User Interface, but couldn’t find a guide anywhere. So I tweeted them – asking for a link. And of course they never got back to me.
Social
Really? We are restricted to the playlists of people we follow on Facebook only? I don’t use Facebook that way. I have maybe 290 people I’m friends with there (and it should be a lot less). Sure, there are a few active Spotify users there, but man – open up this to my Twitter peeps, and I’ve got a ton more content to choose from. And yes, I know you can view lists of others, but it goes back to the search and curation thing that I’m not a huge fan of.
Deception
Each time I sign into my Spotify account now, there’s a bar at the top that says “You’ve been selected to give free Spotify accounts to your friends on Facebook” with a link to spam everyone I’m friends with there. Really? Just because I’m a Premium member I get to promote your brand? Right. Dude, just say what you mean – ‘Invite your Facebook friends to share music together. It’s simple. Here’s how. Oh, and thank you.” Deception is bush.
I like music. But I like it simple. And smart. Until this spring, I was an XM customer – for years. I loved that I had access to a wide-range of music, even though I only listened to a few channels there. But every time my subscription was due, they’d send me an email telling me I had to call their office because my payment wouldn’t process. So once a quarter I’d have to call in and give a CSR my credit card number. The same number I’d always used. And of course the CSR would make me run a gauntlet of upsell. This GoDaddy-like experience was too much for me to take, and so I cancelled my account. Besides, you had to pay extra to access your account via your mobile device instead of one of their proprietary receivers. Which is ridiculous. So then I was left only with Pandora. But the more I listened to Pandora, the more I realized that they have a very limited library. Which left me with regular, commercial radio. And I can’t STAND regular, commercial radio because of the ads (ironic, I know.) First, the ads are terrible. Second, there are too many ads. Third, the music on regular radio is dated and diluted – to satisfy focus groups to satisfy advertisers. It’s a cycle of bullshit.
I recently purchased a Logitech Squeezebox – and it’s pretty brilliant. From the Squeezebox, you can access a wide range of music via wifi. Including your iTunes library (and iTunes doesn’t have to be open on your computer – unlike iTunes home sharing), Pandora, XM and Spotify. I’d tried Spotify when it first came out, and didn’t get it. But I desperately wanted to – especially since all the cool kids were lauding it. So I tried Spotify again, and signed up for the Premium service – and now just don’t like it for all the reasons listed above.
It feels like I’m screwed. I could go back to XM and just deal with the billing and upsell issues, and then I’d have a couple of stations to listen to during the day that plays ‘newer’ type music. Maybe. Because I’m not buying XM’s proprietary hardware again, and they might tell me that using my Squeezebox is akin to a mobile device – and then I’m back to square one. Or maybe I just suck it up and listen to Pandora all day.
I just want new music. And I don’t want to have to dig around for it. Yet, despite the age of the Internet, I can’t seem to get what I want.
Here’s Kashmir, by the way. Now the opening riff is in your head. You’re welcome.
***
Matt McDermott
Sep 16, 2011
Certainly the lack of licensed music is annoying. Heartbroken to find the Beatles tunes are all knock-offs. I’m surprised by your aversion to lists though. Not having the time is precisely why you create them – to sieve through the noise and aggregate the meaningful things. Especially when you’ve got a large network to parse.
Jim Mitchem
Sep 16, 2011
Lists aren’t new. Maybe that’s it. And yes, they take time to create. And I do use them, for upload to specific devices. I guess I just want radio, but better radio.
Mike
Sep 17, 2011
Zune is the best content model for a pay service. Play and take any song with you but must be Zune device. Own 10 songs a month for burning. Drawback is having to have Zune player. We like our player, attach to a any aux jack to play but would be better if App. Used spotify for all of 20 minutes.
Ben Kunz
Sep 17, 2011
Nice analysis. This UX problem is endemic to all music and content services, and you raise a good question: Why?
Why can’t content sites get what we want right?
Amazon’s UI has stunk for decades (it just cleaned up its site design this week) and the personalization remains robotically off kilter. Buy your kid Legos once on Amazon.com and suddenly you’ve got child toys crawling the page, when what you really want is business books with hot sex scenes (or is that just me?). Netflix’s personal recommendations aren’t compelling. Apple’s iTunes is a horrible mishmash of design. I often wonder if these access mazes are failures at an attempt to predict what we want, or instead a deliberate clutter designed to engage us by selling us more stuff, like racks of crowded clothing in a women’s store on sale. Beyond video and tunes, even journalism remains a mess. I write columns for Bloomberg Businessweek occasionally, and yet can’t stand its layout, a cluttered chaos designed more for SEO inbound clicks and to convey “we have more hot news this second” than to guide the user in finding something meaningful.
My own bet is personalization is a Holy Grail, a killer concept, a vision out there that is really hard to find or pull off, and the fragmented nature of trying to serve it up is completely at odds with simple design. (Behold the Apple product, any color you want as long as it’s shiny aluminum. Good design, yes, and screw your personal tastes!) I can’t predict what I’ll want next week, so how can any site serve up the right things? With masses of content pushing out to us, and our desire to pick only a few, the sorting is tough.
Pandora works best for me in music, not because it’s next-in-line customized song is always the right one, but because I’m too lazy to fight a system trying to help figure me out.
Alan Wolk
Sep 18, 2011
The cover bands thing I figure is a way for them to boost he number f songs they cnan legitimacy say they have: the actual song, 4 covers and 4 karaoke version
Annoying. But understandable
What I don’t get is the lack of any instruction guide. What do the different icons mean? Why are some songs in pink and others in grey: what does that mean? You’d think it would take all of an hour to build and put up such a page.
I feel your pain
PS: searching by artist name rather than by song title usually (but not always) let’s you skip the cover bands.
Ben
Sep 24, 2011
Spotify hasn’t impressed me either. Have you tried Grooveshark? Definitely more discoverability, and less dependence on playlists. You can view user’s entire library of music. You can listen to stations, similar to Pandora, and if you click a song to view it’s details, you can find users who are a fan. Or start with a search for a specific artist or song, view playlist matches and see who the authors of those lists are, in order to find likeminded people.
I’m also digging turntable.fm but that is more social, less utility. Find a room to join, then hear what the users in that room are DJ-ing, realtime. Can be fun.
Jim Mitchem
Sep 24, 2011
I just found Grooveshark and am giving that a spin. I also just learned about MOG – possibly worth checking out too.
Stephanie
Oct 5, 2011
I just can’t seem to get into Spotify, either… and I love making lists.
My novel – Minor King
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