I Can’t Quit Spotify, But It Needs a Redesign
Spotify’s choice architecture is too complicated and audiobooks are a mess, but that algorithm is still best in class.
I’d describe Spotify as my default music streamer the way Winston Churchill described democracy as the worst form of government except for all the others. Spotify is better than its chief competitors — Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music — but is still kind of a mess.
Spotify has reconciled numerous design approaches by saying yes to (apparently) all of them. The main page of Spotify’s iPhone app has so many entry points and so many kinds of entry points and so many unintuitive entry points that it often paralyzes my selection-making like an eight-page dinner menu.
It’s classic feature creep — an accretion of functions and settings that bloats a digital product into a Swiss army knife with so many blades you can never find the one you need — and it’s time for Spotify to swing back toward a simpler design with more intuitive choices.
Spotify has several things going for it: a growing, global user base; a growing, global advertising business; a willingness to experiment with podcasts and audiobooks; and an unparalleled discovery algorithm. The most important by far is the discovery algorithm because it’s what keeps consumers engaged and why Spotify is in such a great position to succeed with podcasts and audiobooks.
Spotify Needs Fewer, Better Choices
As I look at just the part of the main page that’s visible when you open Spotify’s app for iPhone, I see 17 — yes, 17! — content selection choices:
A bell for new podcast episodes and artist tracks that’s useful but whose function is not super obvious.
A clock for recently played content that’s not particularly useful or obvious.
Three rounded buttons for “Music,” “Podcasts & Shows” and Audiobooks.
Six rectangular buttons in a 2x3 grid of recently played podcasts, albums and playlists.
Three rectangular tiles on a content row.
A ribbon for the current content with a tiny Play button at the right.
A search icon with “Search” below it (unlike the bell and the clock).
A book (I guess?) with “Your Library” below it.
It’s a lot. It’s too much. It’s bad choice architecture because it’s presents you every choice instead of guiding you to the fewer, better choices — the choices you’re likeliest to make most of the time.
What’s the answer? Spotify should gradually simplify the iPhone app to avoid a revolt rather than completely overhaul it. Spotify should also start allowing customization of the interface or — even better — use its machine learning to incrementally conform the interface to individual user habits.
Netflix adapts its interface to individual users by making content rows the dominant organizational scheme and allowing the most useful (or most engagement-promoting) rows to float to the top. Contrast that with Disney+, which shows me Pixar in the main content row in the middle of the screen even though I’ve subscribed to the service since launch and have never watched a second of Pixar anything.
The main page of an app on iPhone is precious real estate, and Spotify should start showing me the choices I make most often instead of showing me every choice imaginable.
Audiobooks: Bad Design, Bad Experience
Spotify launched its Audiobooks section for U.S. users in September and has had a rough go of it:
The section launched with links to each audiobook that made it easy to purchase outside of the app where Spotify elected not to make titles available to purchase on the iPhone app because of the 30% Apple commission. Apple made Spotify remove the links.
The section launched without a subscription option like Audible, which Audible employs largely to avoid the 30% Apple commission. With no single purchase or subscription options from the iPhone app, you’re effectively unable to select and play an audiobook.
The recommendation engine has not started recommending books to me based on the podcasts I listen to. Spotify is great at recommendations, so I suspect that will come.
Even though I purchased an audiobook on Spotify’s website more than a week ago, Spotify has never shown it to me within the app. It’s not on the main page, and it’s not on the Audiobooks tab. It definitely purchased; I got a receipt. I don’t know where the audiobook is.
I’ll give Spotify the benefit of the doubt and say maybe these were deliberate choices made as part of a process of rolling out audiobooks and then rolling out features incrementally, but those incremental features have not started rolling out yet as best I can tell.
Spotify will figure it out. I suspect Spotify will launch an Audible-like one-book-a-month subscription in 2023. Spotify has also hinted it will launch ad-supported books, which would be interesting given how consumers have taken to the ad-supported model for streaming TV.
Spotify’s Music Algorithm Stays Undefeated
I subscribe to Apple Music because of the Apple One bundle and to YouTube Music because it comes with ad-free YouTube Premium, and I use them both sporadically. I use Amazon Music — which I recently wrote about here — more for its ad-free podcasts than its ad-free music.
My default music streamer, though, is Spotify because it has the best playlists, has introduced me to many of my favorite bands, and has a “hide song” option for every track that allows you to turn a near perfect Spotify-curated playlist with three songs you don’t like into one with no songs you don’t like.
Three of the five tracks that I listened to the most in the last year, according to my end-of-year Spotify Wrapped, were from bands I discovered on Spotify within the last year. Spotify’s “Alt NOW” playlists consistently plays more tracks that I like than Apple Music’s “ALT CTRL” playlist.
I pay for Spotify Premium so I can skip ads and transfer songs to my Apple Watch, but the free, ad-supported tier of Spotify is extremely good if you just want to listen to Spotify-curated playlists, build your own playlists, have your music and podcasts on the same app, or can’t live without the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
Its free, ad-supported tier and spectacularly well-tuned recommendation algorithm give Spotify significant advantages over Apple Music and the other music streamers, and I’m optimistic based on how well Spotify had integrated podcasts into the app that it will find its way in audiobooks and streamline the overall user experience.
And, if it doesn’t, I’ll probably still be there for the music.