Spotify has seen incredible growth since its launch in 2006, taking the music industry from reliance on concrete sales and purchasable downloads into the world of streaming. It has over 400 million subscribers, and for good reason—information technology's an incredibly user-friendly way to eat music, no matter where you are.

That said, Spotify is by no ways perfect. There are plenty of reasons why you might not want to use the service, whether it's hosting questionable content, unfair artist payouts, or missing features.

Hither are all the reasons why y'all shouldn't utilize Spotify.

1. Y'all Don't Own Anything

Though Spotify does offering free membership, information technology exists primarily as a way to encourage people to sign up for a paid membership. But even though you're handing over money, yous don't own any of the content on Spotify.

Essentially, you pay for a right to access the music temporarily. Spotify or its artists can pull the music at any time and at that place's cipher you can practice about it. Same for if the service suffers an outage or ever shuts downward permanently. That's unlike from, say, buying a vinyl, which yous ain indefinitely.

2. Music Missing From the Itemize

Spotify claims to have over 82 million tracks hosted on its platform. That's a lot of music, but it doesn't mean that everything you want is bachelor. Spotify has gaps, especially when it comes to older music, classical pieces, and remixes.

taylor swift on spotify

Plus, music doesn't e'er stay on Spotify. Artists like Joni Mitchell, Republic of india Arie, and Neil Young are all missing from Spotify at the time of writing. In 2014, Taylor Swift famously pulled her music from Spotify for several years, though she eventually reversed the decision.

3. Abrasive Ads for Free Users

If y'all subscribe to Spotify, you get a completely ad-free experience. However, to support the gratis membership, Spotify runs ads betwixt your music. That's perfectly understandable—it tin can't offer the service without limitations.

Notwithstanding, the regularity of these ads, sometimes afterward every two songs, is infuriating. Many users also report that the book of these ads is louder than the music.

The gratis tier also but plays music on shuffle (except for some playlists), which ruins the crafted experience of listening to an album beginning to finish.

4. No Lossless Streaming

In February 2021, Spotify appear it would bring CD-quality audio to the service through a new HiFi tier, but that still hasn't come up to fruition. Currently, the highest audio quality Spotify offers is 320kbit/south for paid subscribers.

The company hasn't talked much about it since then, simply acknowledging in February 2022 that Spotify HiFi has been delayed due to licensing issues. It's an unfortunate situation because that Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited both offering lossless streaming at no additional cost.

5. History of Security Breaches

Spotify has suffered its fair share of security breaches and problems over the years. Some examples include:

  • In December 2020, Spotify notified some users that their personal data (including email, password, and date of nascence) was exposed to some concern partners.
  • In May 2014, Spotify appear it had been hacked, though claimed only 1 user's data was accessed. It pushed an upgrade to its Android app and required everyone to update.
  • In March 2011, a Spotify advertising injected a fake Windows Recovery program to user'south computers, without them needing to click the ad.

half-dozen. Hosting Misinformation

In early on 2022, Spotify courted controversy over supporting Joe Rogan, a podcaster on its platform whose previous episodes contained COVID-19 misinformation. While Spotify removed some of the more troubling episodes, plenty remained.

Spotify'southward handling of misinformation on its platform has been more often than not weak. Spotify added written content warnings to some podcasts, but those are easy to overlook and don't do enough to adjourn the spread.

7. Forcefully Pushing Podcasts

Exercise y'all want to heed to podcasts? No? Spotify isn't interested. In a manner, Spotify cares more than about podcasts than music. If you check out a single podcast on Spotify, episode recommendations immediately flood your feed.

Plus, the dwelling screen of Spotify prominently displays a podcast "Shows yous might similar" section, which you can't delete or remove. It just ways you take to scroll further and search more to actually observe music.

eight. Poor Artist Payout

Every time you lot listen to a song on Spotify, around 30% of the revenue goes to the streaming company. Spotify so pays the rights holder betwixt $0.003 and $0.005 per stream, though that varies per country.

Roughly, an artist can look to make $3,500 per 1 one thousand thousand streams. This means that only the about pop artists make any real money from the platform. It devalues the art and means that most musicians need to turn to other revenue avenues, like tours, concrete sales, and trade.

ix. Arbitrary Feature Removal and Interface Changes

Spotify changes its interface regularly. Some of these are small changes, like tweaked icons. Others are larger, similar when Spotify redesigned all of its apps in 2022 to be in line with its more than basic spider web actor.

Many saw this as a stride back. Now, for example, the Spotify app has no persistent search bar, and albums aren't listed in release date order on artist pages. Information technology means it takes more than clicks to practise things.

ed sheeran albums on spotify

Spotify is notorious for arbitrarily removing features or making interface changes that go against what users want. For case, though Spotify offered real-time lyrics in 2015, the much-loved characteristic was pulled and only returned in late 2021.

ten. Limit to How Many Songs You Tin can Download

At in one case, Spotify only allowed you to add 10,000 songs to your personal library. For music lovers, it was an inconvenient limitation. Thankfully, Spotify removed the limit in 2020.

Withal, that limitation still holds when it comes to how many songs you can download for offline listening on Spotify. The service merely lets you lot download ten,000 songs per device (up to five). If your music collection is larger than that and you lot travel away for long periods of fourth dimension, information technology ways yous need to brand sacrifices.

Are Other Music Streaming Services Superior?

These negatives aren't all unique to Spotify. Some of them, like not owning music or paying musicians a pittance, are bug that plague the music industry equally a whole. But if you're not a fan of Spotify, you might find some other streaming service like Amazon Music or Apple Music is better suited to you.

Amazon Music vs. Spotify vs. Apple Music: Which Is Best for You?

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Joe Keeley (895 Manufactures Published)

Joe was born with a keyboard in his easily and immediately started writing about engineering. He has a BA (Hons) in Business and is now a full-fourth dimension freelance writer who enjoys making tech uncomplicated for everyone.

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