i use spotify premium (on someone else’s family account). it’s… a close thing really. i definitely wouldn’t pay for it if i weren’t getting it for free

for:

• it’s the best option for music discovery
  • out of
    • youtube music
    • deezer
    • local music
  • i have so many songs in my library i never would have heard without spotify, and when i stopped using it for a while my intake decreased drastically
  • this is due to
    • being able to follow artists, and get notified of new releases
    • their "enhance your playlist feature (and the ai dj i guess, but it’s shit
    • quickly adding songs to a playlist i can listen to later, if i get recommendations off a friend
• handy if using a friends phone, i can just open my playlist and add stuff to a queue
  • it’s also easy for friends to send me links to songs
• quick and easy to add new or remove old songs, if you have a high library turnover
  • (i probably add ~30 songs / month)
• easy to sync library between devices
• very easy to add a song that isn’t in your library to the queue
• most songs have time-synced lyrics, if you’re a karaoke fan
• songs come with correct id3 tags, if you care about that
  • although this means there’s no way to edit them yourself

against:

• the app is really, really bad, and spotify doesn’t allow 3rd party clients
  • it often stops playing when not connected to internet
  • it’s very laggy and slow to load
  • i can’t reorder the queue when listening to their suggestions
  • can’t select multiple songs on mobile (to add to playlists
  • only just got a sleep timer, and doesn’t support “wait until end of track”
  • has unnecessary data wasting, like canvas and “explore your genres”
  • seems to use some weird custom ver. of the android music api, often doesn’t display correct information on speakers with a display, and doesn’t play nicely with klwp
• the desktop client is better, but still worse than any other music player i’ve used
  • it’s an electron app as well (possibly the android one is as well, judging by performance)
• limited library. it has more than one might expect, but not everything
  • songs are often removed from my library, or replaced with inferior versions (e.g. british way of life)
• you can sync your local music to it, but only using the desktop client and it then doesn’t work if you use any spotify features (e.g. playlist blend, spotify connect, remote queue, etc.)

i’ll edit with more if i think of anything else