[...] Many users are complaining of hallucinated artists' stats, songs they've never heard appearing in most listened lists, and more. Some users aren't happy with the way that Spotify Wrapped looked this year, complaining that it was boring, and not as creative as previous years. [...]
One of the most common complaints seems to be that Spotify Wrapped has misreported on the stats in claims to represent. Now, while this has happened in previous years, this year it seems to be a whole lot more prevalent — as you can see in this Spotify support thread. It's filled with users complaining about top artists they've never listened to, songs appearing in at the top of their lists that they didn't even know existed, or a mixture of the two.
Just anecdotally talking with people outside the internet-o-sphere and you'll quickly find people with iffy Spotify Wrapped statistics. I have friends who listen exclusively to bizarre, underground punk acts, and their Wrappeds were topped by the likes of The Weeknd and Taylor Swift. Even on the Tom's Guide team, we've seen strangeness — our own Millie Fender discovered Swift among her top artists, yet her songs didn't appear in her top 100.
Just read people's reactions online, especially in the trending topic on X or even the announcement thread on Reddit. Many are blaming Spotify's pivot to AI this year for the lack of personality, and some even hold it responsible for their weird Spotify statistics. I have reached out to Spotify for comment, but I am yet to hear a response.
What can we do?
First off, there are other streaming platforms with year-end roundups. Deezer, for example, has unleashed My Deezer Year, and like everything the French streamer does, it's filled with creativity and personality. That's a streaming service with better sound quality too. Apple Music has its Replay feature, which similarly takes you through your year. There are options.
If you're duty-bound to Spotify, then there is a way to really check your most-listened-to artists, songs, and genres — Track your listening with Last.FM, for example, which gives you breakdowns over the course of the year. Whatever happens, I (and many others) are hoping that Spotify Wrapped is a whole lot better next year.
Switched to Qobuz earlier this year. It has a few issues, but at least it doesn't have all this absolutely dumb shit that Spotify has. What an improvement.
And they let you buy the music outright, too!
Recently quit youtube premium due to the price hike finally hitting my country. I've been using yt music for my listening.
Since that went away along with yt premium, I dusted off my old music file collection (mix of itunes and bandcamp purchases, cd rips, and soundcloud downloads).
Discovered Qobus looking for places to buy my favorite music to update my collection.
I used to keep my entire collection on my phone, but I opted to start using ytm since I had it and my collection got too big...
But now, I have to say I am blown away with how nice Symfonium+Jellyfin (or another music server) is to use!
Last time I looked into it, nothing handled dynamically keeping a portion of your music on-device for offline play this well!
Features can't be beat for sure. They skip all the extra BS and just have a quality streaming service. Whodathunk that's all people want? 🤣
They seem to be what Tidal pretends to be.
Apparently Tidal finally ditched MQA and went back to flac. How they ever went in for it with how shit it it turned out to be with some basic investigation, I have no idea.
I like Qobuz and am winding down my Spotify usage. Although it doesn't have as many automatic playlists as Spotify, Qobuz does better at recommending music that's unfamiliar and interesting, whereas Spotify seems to have been circling me around the same drain of 10 songs for months. Qobuz sounds noticably better than Spotify too, on my good headphones. And it has so much information about each album, including CD booklets for many of them. In particular for classical music Qobuz gives you the composer, the players, the conductor, the piece and the movement, whereas Spotify doesn't know what to do.
The format sent to clients is better. I would disagree with the recommendations point, but that's subjective.
It just frustrates me how nobody is even close to Spotify Connect nor do they seem to be trying to compete with it. Tidal only half does what I need but I have had a number of major issues with it that are making me go back to Spotify.
That's your problem? What does it provide that nothing else does?
Primarily, remote control from one PC to another. I've got a desktop connected to my speakers but when working from home I want to use my work laptop to control the speakers. Tidal has a version of it that can control media streamer devices, but it is unreliable.
Seamlessly switching between music players. I can have a song playing on my computer, then switch to my phone when I get in the car.
I tried Tidal earlier this year and that was one of the main complaints I had. Their version only works on specific devices that Tidal is partnered with.
You're talking about your PIT (place in time) of a file, and not the speakers following you around which I'm positive Spotify doesn't do.
This is a simple feature that every platform offers, even the FOSS options. It's not a "feature" of Spotify, it's just something that every streaming platform does anymore.
Correct, I have to manually select which device to play from, but Spotify also remembers the current playlist when switching. Tidal doesn't, device sessions are separate.
Spotify doesn't remember the queue though, so shuffled playlists get reshuffled when switching devices. It causes repeats and it's really annoying. Deezer has the best session management I've used. It remembers the whole queue.