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by hxugufjfjf 1292 days ago
I genuinly want to stop giving Spotify my money because of the increasingly horrible user experience. But the sheer investment I have there in the form of more than ten year's worth of curated lists and folders makes it damn near impossible to leave without abandoning pretty much my entire "music library" which it has become at this point.
6 comments

I exported all my spotify data by going to Account > Privacy Settings on their website and requesting all the data that I could get.

This included:

    -Playlists
    -Streaming history for the past year (you can request history for the lifetime of your account too)
    -A list of items saved in your library
    -Search queries
    -No. of followers, accounts you follow, and blocked accounts
    -Payment and subscription data
    -User data
    -Family Plan data
    -Inferences
    -Voice input
    -Podcast interactivity
    -Spotify for Artists data
I used this data to buy the music I wanted to keep and make my own collection.
You can also export all of the data about your playlists and library from Spotify's public APIs: developer.spotify.net

Disclaimer: I work for Spotify and specifically on these APIs.

What do you find horrible about it? I'm genuinely curious as, apart from the lack of tab navigation, the UX suits my use cases pretty well.
Pretty much everything about the UX on all platforms I use it on, the constant breaking changes to the UX, which just keeps getting worse. How its still completely geared around lists and recommendations, while 90% of how I listen to music is album or discograpgy based. How its piss poor (I believe that's the technical term) at actually recommending me music I like or could like, or in any way challenging my tastes. Deliberately not fixing bugs and known issues, and never addressing or implementing popular feature requests from the community, even those that are ages old and still requested. Still no lossless alternative, and it keeps getting more and more expensive.
I have the opposite experience both with the interface and the recommendations. I look forward to my Discovery Weekly and often use the "Daily Mix" and "Radio from this track" features.

I usually pick off the songs I like from these recommendation-based features and then I go to listen to at least their album, while adding tracks to mood/subgenre-based playlists for other activities. I dedicate time out of most of my days to just listen to music while walking.

I don't remember ever seeing a bug on the android app. Which's a bit odd now that I think of it.

Really polar opposite experiences from both of us. It seems that they're catering to people with my usage patterns, however it may be that they differ from yours.

When I switched from Google music to Spotify (not entirely by choice), one of the things I really liked about Spotify was the folders. I like the idea of being able to make playlists in a folder and either listen to a specific list, or all at once. Unfortunately it seems like I can't listen to playlist folders in the mobile client, so that benefit quickly evaporated.
There are tools you can use to migrate your playlists to another service.
There are export tools.
But what would I do with it? Yes, the playlist itself is important, but arguably the content is what I pay for. Even if importing to another provider was possible, the alternatives seem to suck equally. Buying all that music and future music I want is simply not feasible from an economical perspective.
Is it possible to export?

Is it possible to make them export it for you - via a GDPR request?

You can export both as GDPR requests on the Account -> Privacy pane of Spotify's settings or through the public APIs here: developer.spotify.net

As I mentioned in a previous comment in this thread, I work for Spotify and specifically on these APIs, we don't block you from extracting your data if you wish.