Glad to hear you switched away from listening to podcasts on Spotify. Their attempt to buy up a huge number of podcasts in the last couple of years, which resulted in exclusification of some of those podcasts, is an awful development in the previously free and open podcasting community. I love podcasts and I'd prefer to be able to keep listening to all of my favorite podcasts on whatever app I want.
Indeed, to me, Spotify is devalueing podcasts. The UX is so terrible compared to any other Podcast app that a podcast on Spotify to me is worse than the same podcast on another platform that I can consume with any other podcast client.
I've never listened to a Podcast on Spotify. I never intend to. I wish I could turn off the podcast spam that clutters the homepage of the app, and just focus on music.
I miss Google Play Music (before it too got cluttered with Podcrap) and Grooveshark
What’s funny is that I used to love listening to the Joe Rogan podcast and hate Spotify just as much, because I tried to listen to his podcast and somehow ended up listening to about TEN MINUTES of ads and the podcast NEVER started playing. I finally uninstalled Spotify and haven’t listened to his podcast since, sorry. It’s mind boggling that Spotify could drop the ball so hard, as ostensibly they were trying to funnel people like me into their platform, and whiffed in an absolutely astounding manner while also alienating people like you who already use Spotify.
I’ve been seriously considering going back to owning a big library of mp3s. I love Spotify for its suggestions - well, when it’s not just playing the same 8 songs on repeat. And I love having my music available on all my devices.
But the experience of playing songs feels like it’s taken a big step backwards into some sort of weird corporate happy land. The fact I we still can’t remove podcasts from Spotify is ridiculous. I tried Apple Music but I bounced almost immediately because of the UI.
Sadly, Spotify is both hurting the podcast ecosystem AND a crappy podcast player -- much worse than PocketCasts, OverCast, or even Apple Podcasts if I'm being honest.
It's like the executives decided to force podcasts into a music player. All the podcast value adds like gap trimming, adjustable playback speed, slight rewind on restarts that last longer than a few seconds... they've omitted.
I've been paying for Spotify for 5 years, but I now only use it strictly for music. I find their UI for podcasts to be unintuitive and confusing, hoping they can update it soon.
Spotify is not a particularly nice tool to listen to podcasts in to begin with.
AFAIK they haven't done anything to make podcasts different from music except section them off.
Nothing in it makes it good for podcasts, I am not sure it even has an easy way to track which you have listen to and what is next?
Also it's recommend podcast is hilariously insuitable.
It's definately taken straight from its recommended music feature.
It just recommends basically random things without context.
Since a lot of podcasts are either:
Serials, in which case it will happy suggest listening to epsiode 11 of a 22 epsisode story.
Or current affairs, in which case it will happily suggest something from over 6 months ago.
I wish I could get podcast only Spotify subscription. I don't want to open the app then have to click around to get the podcasts, podcasts should come up by default.
On the flip side, for those who do want to listen to podcasts on Spotify, the experience is horrific. It's all so confusing and they are always trying to mix podcasts with music, almost treating them as same media. For a company that is spending millions on acquiring podcasts to their platform, I feel they really shoot themselves in the foot with such a non-intuitive UI. I used to be an occasional Joe Rogan listener, but ever since Spotify has acquired it I have ultimately stopped listening to it.
Huh? Does Spotify have any exclusive podcasts worth bothering with? Because I haven't seen the death of open podcasts since every podcast is still on Apple Podcasts.
So I've always been pretty against listening to Podcasts via Spotify, so much so that I completely stopped listening to Last Podcast on the Left when they announced they were moving to Spotify.
I was driving recently though and tried to use Spotify to listen to a podcast. I just wanted to queue the whole season from episode 1 to episode N. The listing seemed to mix both seasons, and episodes were in some random order. I had to manually add the episodes to my queue which seemed.. odd.
In similar news, I continue to ignore podcasts on spotify. This mixing of purpose is harmful to the service in the long term. I wish nothing except failure for spotify podcasts.
I think Spotify's podcast UI is so awkward and terrible it has held back their growth.
I started listening to podcasts 3 years ago because how easy Spotify had suddenly made getting into them. But, over those 3 years I've gotten so fed-up with Spotify's issues (which they refuse to fix) that I've recently moved to Pocket Casts (it took so long because of their walled-garden).
I think the main differentiator for Spotify - making podcasts easy to start listening to with a music-and-podcast-app-in-one - is in fact its largest problem. The UI feels like it was designed for music with podcasts clunkily added as an afterthought. When you add the fact that Spotify's UI is already bloated, even for music, it basically becomes unusable. And then the features are different between web/desktop and mobile - there's literally no way to get a list of new episodes on desktop.
Spotify is crap for listening to Podcasts. I can never figure out what I've listened to and what I haven't. Pocket Casts is amazing, but now that Every Little Thing is canceled, I don't know if it matters anyway, as that was the only podcast I listened to.
I never hopped on the Spotify bandwagon. I wrote music streaming off because their players are consistently inferior to foobar2000, and I don't usually spend more than $10-$15 a month on new music anyways. I'm glad their play at capturing the podcast market seems to be failing. As much as people like the unlimited cheap music, I think Spotify has been a net negative for the industry and their plans for podcasts are nothing but bad news for everyone other than their shareholders.
The podcast experience is awful on Spotify, by far the worst fault is progress gets forgotten, which is completely unacceptable.
reply