How Spotify builds products [pdf]

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1018963/Articles/HowSpotifyBuildsProducts.pdf

by bernatfp • 13 years ago

63 44 13 years ago

dl.dropboxusercontent.com

jseban2• 13 years ago

TL;DR: they hire an "agile consultant" to help them...

strictfp• 13 years ago

This particular agile consultant is pretty well-known and really good at what he does, so I don't see what you are getting at.

namelezz• 13 years ago

Look like waterfall.

kosso• 13 years ago

Nice! An image in there bears a startling resemblance to an image I did in 2005 to try and describe what I do as a "createc" : http://www.flickr.com/photos/81073195@N00/2829444578/

Kiro• 13 years ago

Considering the number of talented people at Spotify I'm constantly surprised by the lack of quality in their products. For some reason they are unable to leverage the talent pool.

thenmar• 13 years ago

Can you give some examples? I'm pretty happy with Spotify, and I've found the Discover tool very useful. I still read music blogs and forums, but Discover finds me about 1 really good, yet-unheard group in every 30 I try. In my experience, that's only a little less signal than the music blogs I use which are curated by humans with similar tastes to mine.

jorde• 13 years ago

Absolutely agree with OP, Spotify has a serious problem in product quality. Few examples:

* Totally inconsistent design - I think they are now rolling out a complete redesign to address this

* The current website was absolutely clueless of states when first released (i.e. showing signup buttons for logged in users)

* HTML views in the app shows/loads incorrect data

...and the list goes on. I started using Spotify when it was still invite-only in Northern Europe and converted into paying customer when the Android app came out (2009 fall I think?) but switched to Rdio recently due to all the problems with the service. The underlying streaming tech is rock solid but everything else seemed to go down hill release after a release.

secstate4• 13 years ago

I would also add that, sadly, rdio has not kept up with Spotify's library. It also seems built less around the user's interest and more to get new music in front of people. Probably great for the artist's reps, but when Drake and 7 Days of Funk shows up under Heavy Rotation and I've never listened to anything resembling either, they've already failed.

And while I applaud their attempts at a native wrapper around HTML5, you can hardly claim that Rdio has "nailed it" with regards to their native app. It's a whole different product.

astral303• 13 years ago

IMO, Spotify has some really large gaps in usability.

In general, there is no good concept of a music collection (despite the UI having words "Collection" and "Library" in it). While you don't own albums in Spotify, I still sorely miss that concept. Starring entire albums makes for a fairly useless/unwieldy Starred playlist, so that's a no go. I've resorted to starring single songs, then later selecting a song from the starred list and then switching to playing the whole album (if I starred the first track of the album, I have to select another album track, then back to first track, to make it play the album and not just continue on the Starred playlist).

Basically, where's my damn list of Artists and Albums I've liked? In iTunes (or mp3 folders back in the day), I would scan the list of artists and select an album to play.

No, I do not want to have an all songs/genre playlist and then sort by artist and then page thru pages of tracks.

The mobile app has poor information architecture. Going back to the starred playlist (or any other playlist) takes 6 taps if I'm on the info screen.

Oh, I freaking hate the mobile info screen. To me, it always feels awkward to hit the song name at the bottom to bring up the "now playing" screen, then tapping "i" to show the info screen, just to select the album or the artist of the song I'm listening to. As far as I can tell, the whole point of the "i" button is to allow me to see the album art--but, bizarrely, seeing album art is the default (so always requires an extra tap to do anything related to artist or album).

Basically, it's a damn tapfest. It's frustrating when you want to switch songs or do some navigation quickly--for example, while in the gym on an elliptical or while running.

Also, there is no search history and the app is forgetful. Periodically, at unknown intervals, the mobile app forgets the album/song I was playing, and I have to re-enter a long artist name all over again. Not to mention there is no fuzzy search. Yeah, try spelling "Irresistible Force" correctly, quickly.

There are the things that make Spotify merely a very convenient music discovery service, as opposed to a complete, fulfilling replacement to owning your own music library.

Finally, there is general bugs, like crashing and streaming getting stuck now and again, which can be very frustrating in the middle of an album (the next song streams, this song is stuck).

jseban2• 13 years ago

Discover is absolutely useful, but I think Pandora is light years ahead. Is there no way to play the suggestions as a playlist?

* iPhone app gives way too little feedback when it becomes unresponsive. I'm never sure if I should click again, wait, try another song etc. Why not add some "gathering data, please wait..", "Low bandwidth/reception.." or similar

* iPhone audio cues are hard to differentiate between. Why not make them less similar? When I click the headphone button I'm not sure if that sound meant that I paused, or skipped to the next song. It's like trying to learn morse code

* iPad interface. I don't have anything constructive to say about this, but it's just confusing and hard to use for me, and inconsistent with the iPhone.

dingaling• 13 years ago

On my machines, the 'Spotify' launcher in the app menu is actually a shell script that first pkills the running-but-hung spotify-desktop process...

For me it usually takes two or three attempts for it to realise that it is online ( 'Discover is not available offline' ) and then occasionally it ceases to respond to UI input but keeps playing music.

Another favourite is to load a band's page with their name but no tracks.

But I keep paying them because when the service works it is excellent. It's just infuriating that it takes 10 minutes from making a decision to actually playing music, due to their buggy app.

Dewie3• 13 years ago

I find the Spotify Android app to be a pain. I just opened it and it took literally around 15 seconds to show my playlists. I kind of have a good amount of playlists, but that is basically the only way I've found to keep track of things I want to listen to with the exception of starring (so yay for having an unholy mess of playlists for which there doesn't to be anything like filtering or what have you for actually dealing with a large amount of playlists manageable). And there is no obvious way of having different playlists for mobile and Desktop/browser, although I only want some playlists for mobile so that I can use them offline. Some times it also takes literally 30 seconds to load a playlist that I've selected, and up to 12 seconds from starting a song until it actually plays. There is also no way for me to turn off 3G streaming SPECIFICALLY, so it's either offline mode or I have to be careful not to play a playlist with some offline tracks if I happen to not get WiFi unexpectedly for some reason (and WiFi goes out unexpectedly and without warning because wireless is volatile like that, plus no app ever will tell you that you have no WiFi specifically, it will just say "No Internet"). Also a lot of nuisance with Spotify claiming that I'm "offline" when I know that I clearly am not, though that has gotten a lot better. Desktop Spotify is totally fine, though. But right now I'm really craving going back to a 16 GB iPod Nano when it comes to listening to music wherever I want. Downloading and "undownloading" and the clusterfuck of playlists is just a big hassle for something that is supposed to be a lot more convenient than an mp3 player.

They also used to have a horrific splash webpage with autoplay IIRC, but thankfully they seem to have changed that.

Maybe there is some obvious way to fix all of this such as by reinstalling the Android app (did that about half a year ago I guess) or googling (though I've been mostly dissapointed when googling issues, ending up at the Spotify communit/support forum and basically finding out "yeah that's not possible/you have to do this tedious work-around"), but I mostly wrote this because I saw the opportunity to vent, so...

EDIT: Also, when I first wanted to use the browser version, the actual webpage/URL for the player was so hard to find it was almost as if they tried to make it a secret on purpose. But I'm happy that there even is a browser player in addition to the desktop app. And the Linux version of the Desktop app is very good (on Ubuntu at least) so I don't need to use Wine.

cloverich• 13 years ago

I swapped my Spotify subscription for a Google Music subscription a couple weeks ago for the percieved lack of development. I also seriously miss the album view that they removed (why?) and refuse to re-implement[1] - I frequently make album based playlists, and not having the album covers to group songs by is a pretty big usability issue for me (not just a "nifty trick" as they labeled it...).

Compared to Spotify, what I like better about Google Music:

1. Much better Android client (faster, better UI) 2. Collection and My Albums features 3. Can quickly make a playlist from a radio station based on a song (which can be downloaded to my mobile phone) 4. Can upload music I own that is not in the catalog 5. Lots of top / key albums by Genre and Sub-genre - have found lots of new music since switching. 6. No facebook activity stream

What I miss from Spotify: 1. Having a desktop client (though don't miss as much as I thought I would) 2. Some music missing (only 2 artist so far, and I own the albums so I guess its only kind-of an issue)

[1] http://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/Please-restore...

cantbecool• 13 years ago

The largest issue with Spotify is the max bitrate they use for non-subscribers. Oh, yeah, I'm just going to deal with your ads for variable quality, sure.

nodata• 13 years ago

That's not an issue, that's freemium. You can pay if you want to.

jacobkg• 13 years ago

If you liked this article, you would probably enjoy a previous one about how Spotify scales teams: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1018963/Articles/Spotify...

meritt• 13 years ago

I cancelled my two-year Spotify membership when I finally reached my breaking point with them continually removing key features.

zzzmarcus• 13 years ago

What are they removing? I find that they're constantly adding more and more. They're recommendations particularly just keep improving.

secstate4• 13 years ago

I find it funny how polarized folks seem, especially with regards to what Spotify is doing wrong. But I suppose when you mess with someone's music you're gonna tend to draw the ire when things don't work exactly as they are supposed. We can't all whip the llama's ass, I suppose ;-)

I especially remember the nerds I grew up with at the height of the Ripping Era of music, where we all had our own way to organize everything. I was always flabbergasted at folks like my roommate in college that just had every song in a big "Music" folder and then had the tracks arranged just so in Winamp, hehe.

slimshady• 13 years ago

No intentions to spread FUD but Spotify fails to even remember that I like my playlists to be sorted by recency of addition. I always have to manual click their tab to sort it on mobile app.

kevinchen• 13 years ago

They do have lots of quality issues with their software -- I'm not sure why anyone would want to build products like them.

Once, they had a Flash video of a concert on the first tab of their app that was impossible to stop playing. The best you could do was play your music loudly over it.

jakejake2• 13 years ago

Does anybody know what technology is used for the Spotify desktop apps? I was poking around to see if I could figure it out. It seems like something perhaps written in C with a hybrid of widget toolkit and HTML. I was just curious because I'm always interested to see how other people are doing cross-platform desktop apps.

InternalRun• 13 years ago

Here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/662121/what-language-or-t...

jakejake2• 13 years ago

thanks!

jasey• 13 years ago

On mac it seemed to me like it was built on chromium. But I didn't do much analysis apart from looking at the process names, I could be very wrong...

AndrewKemendo• 13 years ago

I like how almost every stage has a trash bin. Sometimes good ideas don't take off and just need to die and die quickly. A true implementation of lean.

The disconcerting part (which may have just been left out) is that there is no trash bin in the tweak it stage. That seems fairly standard and how you get into a piece of bloated software that just keeps piling on features without making things easier. It could also be that these ideas are also getting rid of features rather than just adding them but that is not how it read to me.

dokem• 13 years ago

Unfortunately the quality of the Spotify products is horrendous. I pay the ~$10 dollars a month because I absolutely love their catalogue of songs and artists but their mobile and desktop apps are the absolute crappiest pieces of software that I use on a daily basis. I know this is sounding snarky but the bugs that plague their products are inexcusable.

cuillevel3• 13 years ago

So what about that Linux client...

brenfrow• 13 years ago

It would be nice if when I clicked (X) it closed the program... that can't be that hard to fix.

rpc_was_taken• 13 years ago

How? Badly. I love the large catalog of classical music, but being unable to browse it in a unified way is a pain in the ass. They blame it on the publisher-provided metadata, but it's not all the publisher's fault.

In the iPhone app you cannot read the whole track name, so Imagine finding a certain piece when all you see is:

  Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...
  Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...
  Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...
  Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...
  Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...
  Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Conc...

On iTunes, pressing and holding over a song shows the complete track label. They seem to be trapped in a featuritis loop, giving no priority to feature polish.

pilooch• 13 years ago

Amazed at the very poor quality of their search! I ve setup a search engine for a service that then links to spotify when the song is available. With use of proper phonetic filters etc... we were able to get excellent relevance. I do not understand how spotify works internally to let this unattended. Other than that, good music ;)

How Spotify builds products [pdf]

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