Introducing Messages, A New Way To Share What You Love on Spotify with Friends and Family — Spotify
newsroom.spotify.com
Recommendations have always been at the heart of the Spotify experience. Friends and family share their favorite music, podcasts, audiobooks, and more from Spotify millions of times each month. That’s because word of mouth is one of the most powerful ways for people to discover their next favorite track.  Spotify users have told us they...

I’ve done it. I’ve finally reached my “old man yells at cloud” moment. Why, why, WHY is Spotify adding features straight out of the social media playbook?

Anybody have recommendations for alternatives?

In my head there’s:

YouTube music (google, gross)

Apple music (no way they’re not on a similar trajectory)

Bandcamp (limited, but at least bands see some money from it)

SoundCloud (weird reputation, though haven’t come back around to it in a good 10 years)

Tidal maybe? Would love to hear some recommendations.

Edit: I neglected to mention why I don’t like the messaging feature. I’ve never used it, yet with a few of my friends there are already dozens of song exchanges in the thread. It’s clear that spotify has been using user-specific links for a while now to track who sends what to who. That’s a pretty clear anti-feature for me, and is enough to make me jump ship.

  • sunstoned@lemmus.orgOPEnglish
    2·
    24 days ago

    It’s that Spotify has obviously been tracking the songs I’ve exchanged with friends for a while now. I have never used the messaging feature, yet every album I’ve sent to friends is already in the messages thread. They’ve clearly been using unique links to track who sends music to who – covertly, even outside of the app.

    • beetus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      24 days ago

      Not to support their tracking methods… But if you were building an application that focused on a recommendation engine, you’d probably benefit greatly by tracking what users share with each other to tune the engine better.

      The chat feature isnt really changing much for you except for showing you, slightly, how the sausage is made.