I have been using Spotify for over 10 years now (my first liked song was Bad Romance by Lady Gaga; liked on September 2, 2013), it's actually kinda insane. Since Spotify has been around for so long, they've reached the point where they just have to keep consistently making thier product worse, for some reason. Everyone hates Spotify, so this isn't really a new perspective, but let me rant anyways.
Note: I didn't have screenshot fever until like 2018, mainly because I wasn't aware of the concept of a screenshot back then, nor did I have the storage, or knew how to backup.
The Redesign
The first small sign that the end was approaching was when they redesigned the desktop app. They switched thier 'not flat but not skewmorphic' design to flat design. This wasn't actually that bad of a visual change, I think they did quite a good job. My only real complaint with the design was that stars were changed to a plus.
This redesign did axe one major feature, plug-ins. There used to be a plug-in store where you could install apps for Spotify, and it was awesome. There were Pandora style radio stations where you couldn't scrub, there were quiz games, cool playlist generators (I still have all the playlists made through these plug-ins). All of these cool apps were just suddenly gone. Well, all but Musixmatch, which sucked at the time anyways, and wasn't well integrated. Eventually, even the Musixmatch button was removed from desktop.
Spotify also allowed you to use the mobile app for free now, although you could only play on shuffle and were limited to 6 skips an hour, as well as ads between songs. Younger me didn't really care about the ads. I liked ads because it made me feel like I was listening to a radio station. A radio station that played songs from Phineas and Ferb off my mom's iPhone 6. For some reason, tablets didn't get this change immediately, and iirc, you can still play any track on them without premium.
Radio Mode
Over time, more features were either axed or neutered. Radio used to have a dedicated fullscreen interface, complete with thumbs up and thumbs down. Eventually this was changed to just showing a list of songs that would play, like a playlist. Not only that, but the stations started to repeat in the same order but slightly different after about 30 songs. The old station interface was awesome, Pandora actually copied it partially when they did their flat desktop redesign, and I'm glad they did, because it's awesome.
Later on, stations would become less and less prominent of a feature on Spotify, until eventually having their dedicated sidebar tab removed. Put stations in your Obsidian vault, or at least in the back of your mind, because I'm going to come back to them later.
The Next Redesign
Spotify decided to change it's brand again, although this time not as drastic. Now, gradients are in, which I actually really like. A lot of my school presentations were inspired by the Spotify design language. This is when Spotify redesigned the mobile app, simplifying it. Due to this, some features had to be axed, like viewing friend activity, and stations on the navbar.
Spotify's Experiments
Spotify also tried a lot of strange experiments. Spotify Canvas was introduced, which are awesome when used correctly, however nobody uses them right. To make the now playing screen more uniform for tracks without canvases, the cover art would be enlarged to fit the whole screen, like Google Play Music did. This is dumb, let me see the whole cover art! This was reverted within a year, I think. I don't proofread these.
Around this time Spotify introduced a single daily mix playlist, which is actually a really popular feature. It was so liked, they added 5 more. I'm not complaining about having choice, but I really wish there was a playlist that combined all the mixes into one, like YouTube Music has. The change of having computer generated Daily Mixes signaled a shift that would take over Spotify in the coming years.
The Worsening
2020 is when Spotify started becoming worse in my opinion. We started off strong with a new library that nobody likes, still. Instead of having separate pages for each type of content, everything was crammed together into one page, requiring filters. This would be nice if most people used the Spotify library for things other than playlists and maybe podcasts.
Realtime lyrics were finally released in the United States. To celebrate, and to make sure you were watching, they added a cool new feature where closing out of the app or turning off your phone would crash the iOS app.
Remember stations? At one point, Spotify launched a separate app called "Spotify Stations" to be a Pandora competitor. The point of the app was to be as simple as possible, and it kinda was. The Spotify app still had stations, but you had to dig around for the option to start one. Once you did, the station would be personalized to have songs it thinks you would like in it, which isn't useful if you like to discover new music. Spotify Stations didn't have this, which was nice. The problem was it wasn't worth having a separate app on your phone for, so nobody used it, and it was eventually discontinued.
Spotify also started hugely pushing podcasts. Everytime you opened the app, usually the first row would be podcast recommendations, and almost every other row in the home feed was podcasts. These would appear even if you didn't listen to podcasts. Because of the nature of podcasts, it wasn't uncommon to open Spotify to see "Male Whimpering Noises" in the "Trending for you" section. So many users were getting annoyed by the podcasts that Spotify added the option to filter your home page music or podcasts.
The main theory of why podcasts were pushed was that it was cheaper. Spotify didn't have to pay royalties on podcasts like they did music. This doesn't make much sense considering how Spotify payouts work.
The next phase of podcasts was getting audiobooks. You need a subscription to access most of them, and you can only listen to them for so long each month.
The biggest flop of Spotify recently, however, was thier new homepage on mobile.
TikTok
For Spotify Wrapped 2022, a discovery feature was added that allowed users to scroll through a 'immersive personalized infinitely scrolling' feed (it wasn't infinitely scrolling, but you know what im talking about). For the sake of simplicity, lets just call it the Spotify TikTok feed. This was actually a well liked feature, as it made discovering new music easier and more fun. Spotify didn't even talk about it much, they just kinda put it there and didn't say a word. That's funny because they wrote an entire paragraph about a Roblox game they created for Wrapped in the blog post, as if the average Roblox player is reading the Spotify blog.
Seeing all the positive feedback, the team decided to turn this into an official feature. They were going to replace the home screen with an experience like this feed. At Stream On 2023, they announced the new home screen:
Almost immediately, people got mad at this.
More Reading
All the official videos uploaded to the Spoitfy YouTube channel about this new homepage were filled with dislikes. Yet, Spotify decided to keep on pushing it. The interface was clearly rushed. There was no mute button until you started scrolling, and it autoplayed video on Data Saver for Android users. People started cancelling subscriptions and moving to competing services.
Eventually, Spotify decided enough was enough, and reverted to the old home screen. They said that it was just an 'experiment'.
A few months later, they added the new home screen back. Now, it appears once you reach the bottom of the old one.
Hearts
When Spotify launched, you could save songs to your library by giving them a star. With the major redesign, this changed to a plus. After that, it changed to a heart. Now, it's a plus again, kinda. Spotify recently removed the heart, except tapping it doesn't add the song to your liked tracks, but instead prompts you to add it to a playlist. This makes the liked songs seem useless, even though its not and has a lot of unique features exclusive to it. The worst part is it shows a check next to any song that is in a playlist in your library, making it hard to tell what songs you've liked. Nobody likes this change.
Conclusion
in conclusion spotify is a poo poo