I have used spotify for a couple years on my iMac at work (currently on OS X 10.9.5), and for the last couple months I have been wondering why I continue paying for this service. I will not continue doing so much longer, and will cancel both my girlfriend's and my own subscription and move onto google's service, unless someone from spotify addresses this directly.
First of all, the activity feed is now one of the most frustrating features, when it used to be my favorite. Changing it from showing the history of your friends' most recent plays to showing "what is currently playing" is awful for several reasons. It shows that my friends listen to one song per day, all day long. It does not update until I quit and restart spotify. At least when the feed would stop working before, I could still see what they listened to earlier if I felt like looking up something new to listen to. Now it only shows me what my friends were listening to when I log in. TERRIBLE. F Grade.
Second, the play queue is erradic, and will completely vanish at will. I never know when it is going to happen. The other day I set up a 90 song play queue when I got to work. When I returned from my first break the queue was empty, and I had only listened to maybe 10-15 songs. After doing some research, it seems as if my phone is not in offline mode, and anything happens to my phone's network connection- whether that be losing connection or making a new one- would essentially "shock" all my devices currently logged into spotify and wipe their queues. The last month or so my laptop at home has been turned off and my phone has been set to offline mode to prevent this. It worked at first, but not this week. This week my queue was wiped a couple times. Besides the inconvenience of not being able to use spotify accross my other devices for fear of losing my queue at work, it is RICICULOUS to not be able to set up separate queues for each device if that's what I want to do. AFTER ALL, I AM PAYING FOR THIS.
Besides the queue wiping, most of the time when I add a song to my queue it does not show up until I restart spotify. Also, when I attempt to rearrange the queue I often have to restart spotify just to see the changes implemented. Sometimes the changes take affect when I pause, which is still super annoying.
There is also some sort of update or prompt that "flashes" on my screen, it is literally only on my screen for less than a second, which interrupts whatever I may be doing on the machine at the time. For example, I was typing an email, copying some text from a book so I was not looking at the screen. Apparently one of these prompts interrupted my typing, which made my email window "inactive", and I had to click into the email and re-type it all over again. According to my IT dept, it is some sort of spotify prompt. They are unable to stop it from happening.
I use the play queue every day and this is completely unacceptable. The Play queue now gets a grade of D-.
Third, I pay for both my and my girlfriend's spotify accounts. I was paying for both of them using our Sprint bill, which I also pay. For whatever reason, I am no longer able to bill my girlfriend's spotify to our cell bill. So I have been payng one by credit card, the other using the phone bill. Come to find out, you are now offering a family plan, which could be saving me a few bucks each month. Does spotify let me know? Of course not! Have I received any response concerning my billing inquiry, which was made over a month ago? HELL NO! Instead, I pay full price for two subscriptions that both have many issues. My girlfriend is constantly experiencing a different set of issues, as she mostly uses this service on her cell.
Long story short, I am not happy. Spotify, you are losing loyal customers unless these issues are addressed. I used to tell everyone to join, and now I warn people before they do. So disappointing...