Spotify still hasn't reached feature parity with Spotify when it first came out. Only recently did something as basic as lyrics return. It's still not extensible like it once was.

There were no lyrics all this time? Either it's really hard to get people to pay attention to alternatives like Deezer and Tidal or there is little demand for lyrics.

Spotify's killer feature at this point is probably that they have an ad-supported tier while none of the other services (that I'm aware of) do... unless you count youtube?

I think lyrics was a bit of legal hurdle so Spotify had to get rid of it. I imagine they brought it back recently as they worked out a legal way to provide them again.

To me, Spotify's killer feature is Spotify connect and official Linux support.

I keep looking at Deezer for its cheap hi-def support (the premium plan now has FLAC, for the same price as Spotify). But integrations with non-officially sanctioned devices seem janky, at best.

Maybe things have improved, but at one point I had a Yamaha receiver, officially supported, which basically replicated the Deezer interface inside the receiver's app. I couldn't control it from my computer. IIRC Tidal was the same. With Spotify, this just works. Bonus points for supporting the use case of "having friends over who can play their music on my stereo".

I also use multiple "devices" to play music: phone, personal laptop, work laptop, personal desktops, media PC. I don't know how Deezer's "three registered device limit" is implemented, but I'd hate to have to log in again every time I change the computer.

You're right, I do think Spotify connect is an absolutely killer feature that I'm surprised it hasn't been replicated by other companies. I'm a fairly happy Apple Music user but that's definitely one of the things I miss about using Spotify. It's truly bizarre for Apple who has fairly good integrations and Music continuity just makes sense.

Spotify Wrapped is also kind of a cultural phenomenon. People enjoy sharing and talking about it and I guess it's the default assumption that you're using Spotify so you can easily share playlists and stuff to other users. Spotify has the network that smaller services don't.

Nonsense. Most of them do. Deezer even offered a bigger music archive in the beginning. Tidal started as sub only but added a US only free tier, instead it pays its artist much better.

Apologies, then, my knowledge of the state of music services is apparently quite outdated. Has Deezer always offered a free tier? They're not really on my radar.

In either case, I do think some of the points the other comment made are prescient. Spotify Connect is definitely a killer feature and I think Spotify Wrapped is one of those cultural phenomenon that you can't reliably predict the impact of. Network effects definitely seem to be quite powerful.

> Only recently did something as basic as lyrics return.

Unfortunately, something as basic as lyrics is rife with legal challenges, and you can't just slap it onto an app.

I don't understand how come you get podcast content pushed to you, and I have to actively search for podcast content and can't find anything outside of the bubbles I listen to without going to external sources.

Also, arguably, shuffle is not broken, it is working as intended, as there is an intended method to shuffle the songs according to popularity, right? Unless they changed that.

> shuffle the songs according to highest streaming royalty for Spotify

FTFY

It also happens with my music player when playing my own library of music, it has actually gotten that bad that even random no longer works as it should.

This is why I kept all of my old CDs, Mp3s, and DVDs... One day we're going to have to boycott everything and it will be painful for those who only had subscriptions on entertainment & productivity apps.

I'll load up windows 98 if I have to! I'll do it again!

If, by painful, you mean “the need to plug in that old HDD with 100k MP3s”, keep up ratio on private trackers, and end up finding tons of amazing music again, all completely free to do anything I want with, then sure :)

Squeezebox Server was awesome, and these days it’s way easier and more accessible to host a media server and playback in ways you want.

The pain, for me at least, was in organizing all that music. I ended up with a mess of files and folders, people didn't use ID3 tags consistently (if at all) and if you need to add them yourself manually then yeah, it's a pain...

I have been saying this for years. I have a HUGE amount of CDs that I have gotten at bargain prices from thrift stores over the years (it’s been an interesting curation method), and I keep them all organized on a plex server. It’s as close to best of both worlds as you can get today imo.

I mean, you only have to open the main Spotify page. I also get podcast content pushed to me (half the main page/search results are always podcasts) and I've never even listened to one.

Again, my main spotify page ask me to continue listening to the podcast I already listen to, plus random daily playlist for music(which I actually really like a lot of the time). I don't get new content showed to be all too often, maybe a new artist a week?

All I want from Spotify is for it to be performant. I hate that it's such a slow and bloated app.

Shuffle is not broken. It is algorithmic and tries to feed you songs you might want to listen to but Spotify doesn’t need to pay for (that much).

Shuffle is very broken as it does nit perform a shuffle. Instead it performs random selection with replacement. It is much worse but the devs do not care and insist their way is "right".

The several community issues with hundreds of thousands of votes would disagree.

Spotify feels like it's got 1 developer working on it in their spare time. Their feature release timeline is awful and has been for years.

I think what makes it worse is that they've got a section of their community site where you can 'vote' for features and bugs to be fixed - why on earth you need a voting system for bugs is beyond me. But overall its pointless, theres feature requests going back nearly a decade with thousands of votes and all they keep saying is "keep voting". How about no, how about you actually update your damn platform.

I use Spotify in my car over Bluetooth and for the past couple months it has this super annoying bug where you get in, start it playing and it finishes off what song you were listening to but then doesn't continue playing the playlist, it just goes silent and when you open the main app screen there is no playlist in sight. Have to manually re-open a playlist and pick a track to keep it going.