Why the new Spotify UI makes no sense. A rant.

A while back I’ve been whining about the lack of a decent music collection management Spotify. In the past months, Spotify has worked quite a bit on their UI and have changed their interface a lot. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Bottom line however: the music collection management is still freaking useless.

Disclaimer: the following contains a lot of SHOUTING and CURSING. Sorry about that. But I’m really really passionate about my music player, and just hate to see that Spotify, which I otherwise LOVE, can’t seem to get their sh*t together.

So here we go: First, there’s the SONGS tab:

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It shows all your songs in one, big long list. Useful? Hardly. Who on earth would be browsing their music like that? Anyway, it’s there, but you can just ignore it.

Next, there’s ALBUMS.

photo 2

Now that’s a nice thing to have. For the first time, you can easily have your music collection in one place and browse through your all of your albums.

However, once you have a lot of albums, this list quickly becomes too long to handle. Therefore, the next logical step would be to group your albums by artist. Let’s have a look at the tab with the promising title ARTIST.

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Sweet baby Jesus! All my artists in one place! Nice! So let’s click on an artist…

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Now WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS? Why it’s all the artist’s songs. ALL OF THEM. In one. big. list. Why, oh why, would ANYBODY come up with this?! There should be the artist’s ALBUMS here! OBVIOUSLY! Come on Spotify! Get your sh*t together! You can do better than that!

Oh well. I hope that someone at Spotify will eventually try using the app and find out how BLOODY USELESS the current UI is.

Looks like I’ll have to go back to managing my music collection using the good old manual playlists. After all, they are working well enough. Here’s how I manage my Collection:

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Alright, so I’ll continue doing that. But wait! What’s that? Seems like the evil UI person at Spotify decided to mess with that as well: Now you can’t any longer just add an album to a playlist by clicking a button, because this is what you get when you try to add an album to a new playlist:

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What the actual fuck? It used to put the name for the playlist there as <ARTIST> – <ALBUM>, but now it’s just blank and you have to type in the whole thing yourself?! COME ON! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

Apparently Spotify is trying to push people hard to move to the new “Your Music” thing. But then I’d suggest they make that usable FIRST, before messing with the old system. GODDAMNIT.

Just as a reminder: This is how RDIO is doing it, and it works fine:

RdioColl

 (they’re calling the “Collection” now “Favorites”, but it’s essentially the same)

This.