I previously had a Sony Walkman NWA-105 which I used exclusively as a dedicated music device for stored music on the default app and Spotify. It was getting a bit slow at times as the memory was quite full, and then I dropped it in the bath (doh) so having been broadly happy with it I decided to replace with a newer version, the 306, with more memory.
I'm having nothing but problems. It's brand new out of the box, running Android 13, Spotify freshly installed so there shouldn't be any broken registry issues or whatnot. I've disabled a lot of the non-essential default Android apps (calendar and maps and whatnot) so there's no significant background usage and battery saver is switched off. However whenever it's downloading music (which I've been doing a fair amount of during setup) it's incredibly unresponsive regardless whether I use the side buttons or touchscreen, and has a habit of crashing. It also seems to be struggling even when it's NOT actively downloading. The downloading itself also seems incredibly slow despite my internet connection being good - I do have a significant library, but I was not having this level of issue with my previous device even WITH low memory and water damage! It's especially frustrating when you need to pause or stop something in a hurry and simply can't, or tap the wrong thing and have to wait 10 seconds plus for it to load so you can go back to where you were (waiting another 10 seconds or so and hoping it doesn't stop responding completely in the meantime).
It doesn't seem to be the device itself as I don't have issues using the default music app, so it's either Spotify itself or the interface of Spotify with the device.
Any help (that's not uninstall and reinstall) please?

Plan

Premium

Country
UK

Device

Sony Walkman NW-A306

Operating System

Android 13, System software version 2.03.01