[kaftoy]

I really don't want to change this discussion into a "which is the best music streaming service" debate, but I am really curious, why haven't your considered Google Play Music? Interface? Songs count? Price?

I am subbed to GPM for a few years now. I did it first because Spotify was and still isn't available in my country, but I don't think I would switch if they become available tomorrow.

[shostack]

I used to use GPM and am now a Spotify customer. For starters, I was annoyed that Google removed some of its playlist interface around the activity-based radios. You'd click an activity and there would be several stations/playlists for different styles of music that were great for that general activity. Loved it. Now I can't find it anywhere.

Second is the interface in general. Spotify realizes that especially on mobile, you have limited screen real estate. I really dislike Google's choice to overly emphasize giant thumbnails of album art I'll never care about or recognize, at the expense of not providing a list view for all levels of the hierarchy. This also leads to situations where artist names are truncated beyond recognition because there's only a few characters space for them.

The GPM app on my Pixel XL also takes seemingly forever to load and play, podcasts often lose their place, etc. Spotify just works.

[singingboyo]

The album art bit I'll generally agree with, but for the activity bit... not to sound too harsh, but did you even try to find it after they did a minor redesign a while back?

Menu ("..." on left in web) > Browse stations > Activities

It's right there!

[shostack]

The change occurred ages ago so I might be forgetting details, but what I think was removed was a more curated way of matching stations with the activity, with descriptions for each. Now it is just a ton of radio stations that often seem unrelated, and no upfront description of what it is unless you click through. Just more giant thumbnails I don't need.

[conradfr]

I was using Spotify 3 years ago but it was killing the battery life on my Nexus 4 so I switched to Google Play Music (chose it because of the upload feature).

I like the service but there is many things in the UI that I don't like:

- No desktop app

- Album listing is a mess: . It doesn't differentiate between singles and albums so the album list is sometimes very long for no reasons . You can't mentally filter them yourselves as the number of tracks and the album's length are not displayed for each "album" . It is somehow sorted by release year, but not entirely (you can't chose anyway). . On mobile the year is not even displayed so if you want to quickly see if an artist has a new album or simply listen to the more recent one, you can't really be sure of what is displayed.

- On mobile the search button is not always accessible, you have to navigate / "go back"

- Features disappearing: . You used to be able to filter new releases by genre. Now it's a general category of just popular artists. . Same for popular tracks and albums. For my tastes this entire feature is basically useless.

- Radios: the UI used to suggest auto-generated radios based on artists you listen to, it was my favorite feature that helped me discover many great artists and songs. Somehow it got moved and it took me a long time to find it again (it's now only a link on the artist page I guess ? I never think to do that)

- Bonus nitpick : the upload feature is great, sadly your music is not available to other people on the family plan

[TacticalTable]

I've really enjoyed using https://www.googleplaymusicdesktopplayer.com/ for desktop. Its just an Electron App but it seems to add a few extra features that make it much nicer to use.

[conradfr]

Thanks I'll check it out. I used Nuvola player on Ubuntu at work which is a bit the same concept. Mostly I want access to quick play/stop buttons ...

https://tiliado.eu/nuvolaplayer/

[conradfr]

(sorry about the formatting, couldn't edit it due to the noprocrast setting)

[protonimitate]

hmmm honestly it is just a case of "I used spotify first". If spotify hadn't been my first choice I probably would have gravitated to GPM instead. At this point I don't want to sacrifice any more of my life to Google, so if I had to switch it would probably be to nothing.