Yes, I would like to see more social features that aren't tied to Facebook. I know it's not their core competency, but it's odd that the Friends feature requires FB even though they support "standard" non-FB user accounts. And a timeline-esque view of who's been listening to what at-a-glance would be neat.
No. No. No. I just want a well running, clean looking, audio player. Im sick of companies trying to make apps social and grow them beyond where they are great trying to incorporate bullshit that ruins the app. Spotify is great for local music, streaming, podcasts, etc. All this bullshit video and social crap they push into it ruins it. Imo IPOs kill almost any decency in a product
A massive reason I prefer spotify is because of the social aspect of it. Being able to look at a friends playlists is a pretty big deal for me. I would agree if they were pushing something like statuses or likes but I think Spotify's implementation of social actually makes the product much better
Maybe this isn't exactly what you were thinking but I wanted to get some social listening features added to Spotify as well so I built JQBX: https://www.jqbx.fm .
this reminds me of Fliptape, a project I built many moons ago. Looks great and is basically what our roadmap was. We went mobile first back in 2011 with the same concept. Would love to have kept it going.
Fingers crossed history doesn't repeat itself w/ 3rd party apps build on Spotify. If you have any feedback or ideas that have been simmering please hit me up (email is at the bottom of the website).
This is my biggest gripe with Spotify since I had to reluctantly switch to them due to rdio shutting down: The lack of social features. We had an excellent community over there, seeing what's popular among like minded enthusiasts, discussing albums and playlists, sharing them, familiar faces everywhere. We went to great lengths to re-connect with those old rdio users on Spotify using slack channels, but due to the lack of pretty much any kind of social features or feeling of community, following anyone on Spotify is meaningless and everyone's listening in a silo.
That and the abysmal queue handling make me wish rdio was still around.
Actually, I think networking is their core product (though maybe not competency...).
Their App is tricky to use (easy to skip, rather than enque a song, or accidentally skip while looking at meta data, or searching for tracks to queue).
They have offline working, half-decent play lists (but still too easy to accidentally make a new list, rather than augment an existing one).
However - "everyone" knows it, and knows favourite songs on it, and have an active account - so it's nice at parties, or for sharing tracks in person or via messages, tweets/statuses etc.
The only other thing I'd like to see was a steam/sdk integration for soundtracks in games. Everyone listens to their own music with any (mmo) game worth playing - but it'd be nice to have Spotify cross-fade to the "scary/dramatic" playlist in a fight, and "moody" when the game calls for quiet mood etc.
