Page 3 of 3
1. Music discovery sucks on Spotify.
To put it bluntly, it's hard to find new music on Spotify unless you know exactly what you're looking for.
If you want to check out Torches by Foster the People, that's easy -- just search for "Foster the People," and you'll find it. That's great.
But what if, like us, you're looking to expand your musical palette and broaden your horizons? Isn't that one of the most appealing promises of a free music app?
Searching for "electronica," for example, will give you only results that have "electronica" in the album, artist, or song name, which isn't that helpful. There's no way to search by genre, and, as we mentioned above, it's impossible to find those featured playlists that could be a good jumping off point.
The Top Lists page gives you only the music that's most popular in the nation (or world), which isn't really all that helpful if you're trying to find something interesting that isn't Lil Wayne or Bruno Mars. Then there's the Feed page (which seems mostly like an improvised customer support thread between Spotify's feed and random complaining users) and the What's New page (which has only a couple of albums that, frankly, don't appeal to us at the moment).
Spotify itself has even recognized this problem (sort of) with a post last year on third-party sites that help you find playlists. ShareMyPlaylists.com, for example, is an entire website devoted to helping you find Spotify playlists.
Of course, if you've integrated Spotify with Facebook, you can always check out the public playlists your friends have shared -- which strikes us as one of the app's coolest and most promising features. But, alas, most of our friends haven't gotten on Spotify yet, and those who have don't have very many (if any) public playlists. And what happens on the off chance that your friends don't have good taste in music?
Then you're really screwed -- and Spotify's clunkiness is probably the least of your problems.
[Edit: Thanks to lekram for the advanced search tips, but the point stands -- should it really be so hard to figure out how to search by genre?]
----
Follow us on Twitter @SFAllShookDown, follow Dean Schaffer @deans55, and like us at Facebook.com/SFAllShookDown.
Showing 1-4 of 4
