For years, I was a die-hard Spotify user. I would use it every day, streamed it from my Echo, and had the account tied into everything. When I needed a gift for someone else, I would give them a Spotify gift card so that they could have Premium for a year. Spotify had pretty good curated playlists, but the real draw were the community playlists that users would put together; it was literally possible to find a playlist for everything.
Slowly, though, the service started to go downhill. The curated playlists became a little more lackluster, and the recommendations on what Spotify thought I would like to listen to became steadily worse. Hell, even Spotify Wrapped, the year end metrics Spotify produces and which Apple has tried to emulate with Replay, started to disappoint.
The biggest culprit I can point to are podcasts. Spotify spent a boatload of money bringing podcasts to the platform, and I sincerely believe it made the experience for non-podcast listeners so much worse. Spotify had a vested interest in getting a return on their podcast investment, so they were more than happy to wave podcasts in front of my face at every opportunity, regardless of the fact that I was literally never going to listen to one.
Some friends of mine who are podcast aficionados scoff at the notion that podcasts were a mistake for Spotify, but I know I’m not the only one out there who couldn’t be less interested in podcasts and, as a result, never wants to have my time or screen real-estate wasted with them. Honestly, if Spotify would have at least added a toggle to just opt out of the podcast experience I would’ve been happy, but that wasn’t ever going to happen due to the aforementioned investment.
I recently felt vindicated about this while looking at another website. In a writeup about what the author uses, it said:
Apple Music is my current streaming service. I was a longtime Spotify user, but since they added podcasts the experience went downhill for me.
Luke Harris
This was exactly my experience. So what does any of this have to do with the Unix philosophy? For the uninitiated, the Unix philosophy is a guiding set of principles for software engineering. One of the primary tenants is:
Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
When Spotify did one thing, music, it was the best music platform by far. When they decided to throw podcasts into the mix, things rapidly went downhill. Given that I’m always in the Apple ecosystem, I opted to use Apple Music. That eventually ended up working out for the best because I have an Apple One subscription that includes Apple Music. While Apple Music isn’t perfect — far from it, in fact — I sincerely appreciate the fact that it’s remains a platform just for music. If I wanted to listen to podcasts, that’s a different app.
Instead of learning from this, Spotify appears to have decided to continue going in the wrong direction. Since I stopped using it, they’ve added audio books. Now, there are rumors circulating that they made add… video training courses. I understand that in a world where companies are pressured to always be adding new subscribers, there’s a point where every person who is going to subscribe to a music streaming service will, more or less, have done that already. That puts companies in the position where they either need to convince users of other services to switch to theirs or make their platform appealing to a new set of users who wouldn’t necessarily subscribe just for music but maybe would for music and podcasts. At what point, though, does watering down a platform convince enough people to leave that it’s no longer worthwhile?