So Spotify recently changed from a green heart and a block song button to and + and a - for liking and disliking. What is your opinion?
My personal preference would be to bring back the green heart and make a deep red broken heart.
And I know spotify is proprietary yada yada I don’t care for music streaming. So pls don’t let it be a part of the discussion.
To reference this is an old screenshot I found on the internet.
I pay for Spotify and do not like the pop ups for podcasts and now audiobooks. I really do not like how they ruined the shuffle button and now the ugly check mark instead of the heart. I am not fond of the ui at all and will start looking at other alternatives. Imo, Spotify has gone downhill. I miss the old time Spotify.
Yes! The shuffle button! Every time I want to shuffle/unshuffle a playlist, it seemingly has to toggle through the smart shuffle bullshit first, which disables the button and shows a loading icon (which can be 5+ seconds on a mobile connection) while it finds awful songs to inject into my playlist.
Oh how I wish there was a way to disable it
Turn off autoplay similar content in settings.
I still have issues with it even though autoplay is disasbled. It does not want to shuffle my songs, just add others to shuffle in. I prefer the seperate shuffle and enhance buttons.
Just toggled that setting and it didn’t seem to change anything
For me it let me get past the 80 song limit in lists, guess it’s pretty limited in what that does. Sorry
Eh, not your fault, just Spotify not being able to figure out how to make a customizable product.
I HATE the shuffle button on Spotify. It used to be better. I have a Playlist that I used to listen to with the ‘enhanced’ shuffle. Spotify would add similar songs into the queue. It was nice. Now Spotify just plays the same 20 songs or so, over and over again. My Playlist has over 200 songs without even adding the variety into the queue. I’ve started actively removing songs because they are all I hear. This isn’t how listening to music should work.
Oh, I noticed that too. I have over 800 songs in my playlist and Spotify would play about 10 of them in a specific order even though shuffle was enabled. I found an app to fix that for me https://shuffle.virock.org
I switched to TIDAL. Same price, and they pay the artists better per stream.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will look into Tidal.
My shuffle button is still a shuffle button, and the heart is still a heart. I also never get popups, but I also pay for it, so if you don’t maybe that’s why?
I pay for premium. Unfortunately, I get full screen pop ups Spotify refers to as “sponsered suggestions”. Ranging from a survey, podcasts, audiobooks, family plans, new artists they want me to like, etc.
To me, they are irritating and as a monthly subscriber, I should not have them. I am happy they do not plauge you. I consider you very lucky.
Hmm, I consider myself lucky as well then. Maybe it’s because I’m on a family plan? Idk, I’m just spitballing here.
I dislike all the algorithms being pushed on Spotify. I just want to listen to albums and that’s it.
The radio function is nice in theory, but it tries too hard to guess what I want to listen to to the point where it felt like any radio I played ended up being variations of the same thing. It is just not a good way to discover new music in my experience.
These days I have cancelled my subscription in favour of actual radio. Fip.fr is brilliant.
I would really appreciate a configurable Radio playlist. Just a slider from “very similar” to “here be dragons” would do.
Actually, I noticed exactly what you’re describing too. There are like 3-4 clusters of artists that Spotify thinks I love, and that’s it. Unless I’m actively searching for something else.
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I know what you mean with the radio function I would also love if it would give me something similar to the song i was listening to not the stuff I usually listen to
clicking “go to song radio” does that… ?
I see the plus, but where is the minus button you mentioned?
If you press the 3 dots in top right you’ll get a bunch more buttons including the " - hide this song" one.
Sorry it was a bad screenshot I changed it to a better one
For context the old one was that one
Ouu, fairphone earbuds? Slayy
Im guessing the button changes to a minus when clicked.
The button likes the song when clicked, it just fills in. You have to go to the menu to get to the minus button
oh that’s just silly
If you press the check again it pulls up the playlist menu so you can add the king to playlists. Which, I actually appreciate.
I completely hate the new “+” symbol, the heart was so easy to understand
My app only has the plus currently. I think it’s a dumb change. The type of change you make because you need to change something. Nobody that is competent enough to use a smart phone app would see any benefit from it being changed to a plus and as others have pointed out… it’s a music app, plus and minus are usually associated with volume.
Don’t use Spotify and it took me a while to even find the mentioned buttons in the screenshot. Looks like either volume controls or add/remove from playlist. Better would be thumbs up/down.
I don’t use spotify, and I thought those are volume buttons, and did not understand where are the like and dislike buttons until I read the post. I think this is just a dumb design choice.
It’s pretty misleading if your not familiar with the interface, isn’t it?
The plus to me signifies that the song will be added to a playlist and personally, I’d be pretty confused if it doesn’t bring up a prompt to choose said playlist. The minus is even more confusing in that context.
It is some kind of what you said. If you press the + button again you get a menu to add the song to a playlist. Another point that I missed is that the “like” button also adds the song to your favorite list.
That’s kinda like double-mapping a button on a controller, yeah you get used to it but it just makes it more complicated IMO.
Tidal still has the heart and hides away the option to add to playlist in a hamburger menu, which adds one tap but personally, I use the heart function way more often so I don’t really mind.
YT Music does it best:
yea I also used yt music for over 2 years but it doesn’t work on a de-googled phone. So I switch to spotify because they doesn’t require google play services. One of the things I miss are the in the client integrated music videos on my secondary display
Have you tried MicroG?
If I install something and it just plain doesn’t work without google play services - it gets immediately uninstalled and I find an alternative.
Wouldn’t install on my grapheneos phone
What’s wrong with just a thumbs up and thumbs down?
Press it once to add to Liked. Press it again to add to another playlist. Not great, not terrible.
I just read through all the top-level replies to this post, and you’re the only one that actually understands this change. They didn’t just change the icon, they added new functionality.
Your description isn’t quite complete, though. Pressing it once adds to the playlist you most recently added to. Basically, it remembers which playlist you last added a song to, so if you’re listening to a radio station that matches one of your playlists vibes, it makes it really easy to add the songs as they play.
This new functionality perfectly matches my “flow” of music collection, since I add to separate playlists instead of to Liked. This feature changes nothing if you only ever add to Liked.
So basically, everyone in this post is complaining about a feature Spotify added that genuinely enhances my experience and is only a minor visual change for everyone else.
Looks worse, does the same thing however so whatever. Spotify once again focusing on the wrong things. Prime enshittification There are songs uploaded with the wrong name that I’ve reported 8-ish years ago that have still not been fixed. Every now and then I’ll get a notification for a new release from an artist that I’ve never listened to because they share a name with an artist that I’m following. That thing doesn’t need fixing, nah…changing the heart button, that’s real stuff
songs uploaded with the wrong name…
Also lyrics showing for music without lyrics…smh
Prime enshittification
Enshittification does not mean a service getting worse in your opinion, it has a narrower definition - the practice of luring in users with an unusually good deal, many times subsidized by VC money, and then when you’ve got enough users hooked, you improve your bottom line at the expense of the quality of the service.
If you can show that this is something that is improving the bottom line at the expense of the service, then it would be enshittification, but I really don’t think you can.
They’ve made the free version worse and worse and have added more and more useless features to the paid version. Maybe it’s not enshittification in the strictest of terms, but it’s not far.(also lol, we’re talking about a 1 year old term as if it’s super established)
Don’t use Spotify much and I never would have guessed those were like and dislike.
They aren’t. The plus adds the song to a playlist, by default the liked songs-list (a second tap on the plus lets you change which list it goes to). The minus is a “don’t recommend this”-button.
Fairphone 🤝
My experience has been that the “-” was exactly the same as a skip. Spotify still plays those songs and even if I’ve gone to the artist or group and selected “don’t play this artist” they’ll still come up. So this redesign seems more honest, in that you don’t like the song but they’ll still play it.
