Kudos to Spotify for supporting libspotify and its use-cases for so many years. I'm sure it hasn't been easy and that copyright owners haven't been very fond of it.
Any sufficiently advanced act of benevolence is indistinguishable from malevolence. Or, perhaps, and somewhat less grave, they needed this time to build their case / simply hadn't gotten around to this yet.
Spotify has become pretty hostile towards its users, which makes it hard for me to believe there was any good will involved here.
I really don’t get the hostility thing. I’ve been paying Spotify for like a decade — I give them money and then I play music with extremely broad device support, a massive library, and seamless offline with no upcharges.
Spotify has got to be one of the least shady services I use.
I've experienced a massive downgrade of the offline experience in the Android client over the last couple years. It used to behave offline-first, so if I drove out of cell service and played a saved album, it would look locally first. Now I have to force it to offline mode explicitly, which is a pain when on a long rural road trip. If I don't, it'll spin endlessly trying to load album art and tracks I already have saved.
They use some of the darkest and most unobvious manipulative techniques to steer you towards some very nasty content - most of which comes in the form of their podcasts.
Edit: It doesn't seem to me like the content itself is of any particular interest to them beyond the engagement its resulting in. It's that same hateful and harmful content you see on all these platforms where money has become more important than humanity.
Yeah I notice they push the Joe Rogan Experience on me pretty hard even though I’ve clicked the button to stop showing me that rec. Can’t really blame them for trying after spending all that money on him though.
They're quite mean to free users; ie. they can't listen to Spotify in other countries, and they have a song skip limit. But that's at least understandable from a freemium perspective.
The most hostile thing they do to paying users, IMO, is not implementing basic features that people have been crying about for years. One example: you can't just select a bunch of songs and put them into a playlist.
Wait I do that all the time, I multi-select and drag songs into the playlist I want to add them to. It’s great for combining multiple public playlists with a similar vibe.
