I'm contemplating switching over to Spotify for all my music needs, so I can cancel my Zune^H^H^H^H Xbox Music subscription (end of an era! pouring out a 40! Zune RIP!). The thing is that, as far as I can tell, Spotify really doesn't offer me a meaningful way to organize all of the music I actually like. With Zune Pass I'm downloading stuff and there's an implicit organizational structure provided along the axes of artist/album, as well as the various metadata that's included therein. With Spotify, it seems my organizational options are either "starred" or adding it to some playlist. Is there something that I'm missing here?
I don't really understand Spotify in general. It never really seems to learn what I like, so it isn't good for exploring. If someone recommends something to me I can check it out, but then what if I'm embarrassed to have it in my feed? Mostly I find myself listening to music I already have, and, well, I have iTunes for that already. I miss the Zune. It was so good even if no one else liked it. The iPod UI is so, so much worse.
You can make any given Spotify session private so stuff doesn't go into your feed; click on your name in the upper right in the desktop version, for mobile I think you have to go into settings somewhere.
I've still got my Zune and I can continue to be a curmudgeon, but the fact is the hardware won't last forever and I'm tired of carrying around two devices. I want my music on my phone and Spotify is SO CLOSE to being what I need! Except that organizationally it's a fucking mess.
On any given day I carry my laptop, Kindle, iPhone, and Sansa. It's the future, you need four devices, deal with it. No but seriously music on the phone is a nice idea in theory but if you want anything more than utterly basic functionality you might as well get a Sansa or something. The fucking Soundcheck bugs on my iPhone made me want to drive out to Cupertino and throttle somebody, as it's clear nobody ever tested the fucking thing.
The final irony is that the GFWL was absorbed by the Zune team. They then did the Xbox games and music stuff for Windows 8.
I've seen this complaint around the webs, about Spotify and it's lack of organization tools, and I guess I don't really get the point. Everything's streamed....the idea of organizing your "collection" in an environment where everything is available all the time doesn't really make sense. What else could you need besides a playlist? If I want, for instance, all of Big Star's albums to be instantly playable without searching, I just make a 'Big Star' playlist and move all of Big Star's albums into it. Same thing for tagging. If I want to tag a bunch of music as "dance music", I make a playlist titled "dance music" and put the songs I want in it. Done and dusted.
Mostly I'd just like to be able to create a collection and then sort it by artist/genre/etc. I can do that with playlists but it's a pain in the ass extra step.
