Spotify Premium: A Highly Critical Exit

Spotify the service is brilliant. There's tonnes of music on there now, and being able to import your own library and OTA sync with mobile devices is brilliant. The purchase-able MP3 bundles are a bargain (if you're bright enough to spend £50 at a time). They're doing really great things for music consumers when the recording industry seems to be working on triple-jointing its elbows so it can simultaneously scratch its own back and steal your wallet (or put you in jail). Kudos to you, Spotify.

My problem with Spotify, and the reason I'll probably cancel my subscription (again), is that the player is broken. It's a horrific abortion of an application. A worthless, frustrating, horribly-designed, fundamentally loathsome piece of garbage.

I come from a media library school of music-listening. That is to say that I have all of my music available to me all the time in iTunes. I can browse by artist, album, genre, I can arbitrarily create playlists, all the nice things that Spotify pretends to be able to do, but doesn't. Say you're in the mood to listen to something you know you've got in your library. Here's a worst-case, oft-realised scenario of how that situation could end up causing you to want to kerb stomp a puppy:

• I'd like to listen to this album today
• I search for the album
• I'm presented with a visually cacophonous assault of things that are likely irrelevant to what I was looking for
• I realise what I was looking for was in my library, not Spotify's and Spotify's search only searches their catalogue
• I drop back to "Local Files" and I have to Command[Control]-F a string precise enough to match the album I want to listen to (I suppose I could create playlists in this instance, but by now I've illustrated that Spotify's search is worthless, and the app doesn't allow you to browse by artist or album unless they have the artist/album in their library. Suck it up, pansy)

Say I find my albums, and I want to queue them in a playlist, in the order I choose. I sort by "Added", foolishly assuming that this will be able to emulate iTunes' behaviour, whereby adding music to a playlist results in a playlist automatically sorted in the same fashion that I added it. If I add an album in Spotify, and sort by the earliest added, it seems to flip the track listing order, so that if I choose tracks 1-12 and add them, the order that they appear in the playlist is 12-1. I can't even trick Spotify into doing what iTunes does perfectly and intuitively.

Assuming I've actually managed to find something to listen to, things go well from there. The controls are way more responsive than iTunes, which is nice. I don't have to hit pause then wait for three seconds for music to stop before I can answer a phone call. Sound quality seems good, although if you're doing something CPU-intensive, playback gets noticeably jittery (I say "noticeably" because I do a lot of CPU-hungry stuff, and have never noticed iTunes stutter).

Spoonful of sugar notwithstanding, the final (small-to-some) gripe I have with Spotify is their library tagging and how they force it on you. My #musicmonday posts are calculated programmatically by gathering all the songs I listened to in the last week, querying a few web services to get song lengths, then calculating the amount of time I've spent listening to artists individually that week. Naturally, as I started using Spotify as my main music player, I decided that I would implement Spotify's music metadata API search, as I noticed that musicbrainz wasn't getting a lot of the tracks that I was submitting. Having done this, I noticed that when using the Spotify music metadata search, submitting strings that it had obviously sent to last.fm as scrobbles, it couldn't find this music from its own database! How is that even right? Is it not working from the same data? To make matters slightly worse, it seems to have inferred tags from my library. I have a beautifully-tagged iTunes library, which Spotify has taken it upon itself to apply its own shitty metadata to!

So there you have it. Spotify's player all but completely ruins the whole experience of finding music to listen to, and my own esoteric obsession with collating data on said music. I guess Spotify's plan is to piss me off so much when I'm looking for music to listen to that there's no data to collate. Problem solved.