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On r/Spotify this week, over a thousand users have gotten behind a post asking for the “old” Spotify to come back, with a few hundred comments discussing the various problems with the update. People have a lot of different thoughts on the update, but the consensus on what went wrong appears to be that Spotify stripped features in Your Library to make room for the new Podcasts tab.
In the process, the Songs tab was removed and the recently played section has been moved and downgraded, showing fewer artists and songs and removing some of its customization features. We’ve linked some of the Reddit users who provided specific complaints about the update below:
u/TehCrag: “Basically they removed the Songs tab and the Recently played section. And the albums tab only shows full albums that you have saved, so if you have 3 songs from the same album, they would be in the ‘liked songs’ playlist instead… which doesn’t have an alphabet scroll bar.
Also there’s a giant podcast tab next to music. They’re pushing them hard.”
u/Skippin101: “There is no alphabetical “scroll bar” on the right side of the liked songs, artists, or albums pages. If I want to play a song that starts with “Z”, I have to manually scroll all the way to the bottom instead of tapping the “Z” letter on the right side like before.
The recently played tab is a huge downgrade. It’s now on the homepage, features far less artists/playlists, isn’t customizable (i.e. you can’t remove an artist or playlist from it or re-arrange it), can’t be used in offline mode, and, worst of all by a country mile, when you click on a recently played artist it takes you to their artist page instead of showing you which songs you’ve saved by that artist.”
Due to these changes, a thread recently began on r/AppleMusic welcoming Spotify users who are moving over to Apple’s streaming service instead, which appears to be quite a lot. Some Spotify users pointed out that they moved from Apple Music to Spotify for features like the recently played section in Your Library, which let them quickly jump back into the albums they had just listened to.
Now that this and other features have been removed, talk of canceling Spotify and moving to Apple Music has increased. Even on Twitter, searches for “Spotify update” lead to numerous tweets about users frustrated with the UI changes and asking Spotify to revert the update.
There have been a handful of controversial app updates over the past few years, including platforms like Snapchat. That app’s November 2017 update, which was aimed at getting users to more clearly see the distinction between friends and celebrities, was so disliked that Snapchat ended up reverting some of the changes. The company still lost millions of users in the process.
Spotify has yet to comment on the reaction to the new update.
