Bye, Spotify!
Unsubscribe from Spotify, support a local radio station instead.
Instead of giving your money to a corporation that does not care about artists nor users, give it to an independent local radio station (or a niche web stream) that is run by real people who care about the music.
Download and install Transistor (for Android 7.1+ devices).
For a sample of independent and (mostly) commercial-free Northeast Ohio and Western New York stations, download this backup and restore it into Transistor (Settings / Restore Stations).
Why though?
There is plenty of information online about why Spotify is an unethical company. Many of those reasons (underpaying artists, laying off workers, allowing misinformation, investments into miltech, AI slop) are sufficient in themselves. However, since "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism", as some might argue, here are my experiences from the user perspective.
Playing specific songs, albums, podcasts, audiobooks work mostly without issues. Some user-made playlists are good.
But podcasts and audiobooks bring in another issue: Once you listen to at least some, your home page turns into a YouTube lookalike with dozens of recommendations, videos (in a music app?), and quite a lot of extra junk. I just wanted to listen to something on a long drive, not be told to follow VSauce on Spotify.
Media player UI could be severely broken depending on the Android and app versions.
But the biggest issue is the Spotify's recommendation "algorithm" that has made its way into everything on the app. Liked Songs now has Smart Shuffle which will add "songs you might like", which, in most cases, are overplayed and the songs I intentionally did not add to favorites. The "made for you" mixes call themselves literally any genre, yet still consist of mostly your liked songs. The numbered "Daily Mix" follow the same concept - your liked songs, but only from a select 2-3 artists. And the same goes for DJ: play a few songs bu the same artist, switch. The most ridiculous result of this suggestion algorithm is that my favorite song of the year (according to Spotify Wrapped) is something I have *never* played intentionally. It simply always ended up on mixes and playlists thanks to the algorithm.
So how do you "discover music" that some praise Spotify for? Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists are generally okay. But they introduce another issue - if I played 8 hours of Lo-Fi, classical, or ambient as background music, I did not suddenly become an aficionado of the genre and really don't want my discover list to be that. I get that this is a difficult distinction to make programming-wise, but Spotify probably isn't lacking money or talent.
Links
Oh, look, an entire Wikipedia article on criticism of Spotify.
Spotify pays artists the lowest rate per 1000 streams (2024 data).
Spotify is happy to accept AI music.
Spotify does not care about fake albums.
Spotify bricks their Car Thing single-purpose devices.