Three Ways to Make Streaming Music More User-Friendly

From annoying song limits to underwhelming search capabilities, here’s what Spotify, Apple, and others should change.
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In discussions about streaming music, a lot of space rightly gets devoted to how little money artists are making from it, or how it’s upending the music industry at large. Amid this din, the everyday experience of being a music lover navigating these platforms can sometimes feel overlooked. Every now and then, though, one of the big streaming services offers a small tweak that smoothes out the listening process, like when Spotify added producer and songwriter credits as well as the capability for users to mute certain artists, or when Apple recently announced plans to break up the bloated iTunes desktop app. In this tinkering spirit, here are a handful of humble suggestions that could make streaming even more enjoyable.

Take Care of the Obvious Fixes

People with huge Spotify libraries have been complaining about the service’s 10,000-song limit for many times longer than it takes to listen to that much music. While 10,000 is also the maximum number of songs that users can download, per device, for offline listening, it shouldn’t be the arbitrary cap on how many songs you can have in your collection. (By comparison, Apple Music users’ libraries max out at 100,000 songs.) Spotify has repeatedly maintained that less than 1 percent of users reach the 10,000 ceiling—but why does it exist at all? Allowing users to amass bigger collections is an easy fix.

Elsewhere, anyone who has spent much time navigating through Apple Music’s phone app has encountered its lack of a straightforward “back” button. That, too, is a no-brainer. What’s more, some SoundCloud users have been begging for a way to stop the website from automatically playing “related” tracks since their “continuous play” feature launched on the platform back in 2012. The option to disable autoplay already exists in the SoundCloud’s phone app, and with some effort you can now deactivate it temporarily in the non-mobile version. But SoundCloud should give all users the option to disable autoplay for as long as they’d like. Sometimes you only want to listen to the song you actually decided to play.

Give Us More Ways to Search for Music

Motown or Atlantic, Salsoul or SST, Death Row or Def Jux—knowing that an album came out on a certain label used to, and often still does, speak volumes about how it might sound. Today’s streaming apps de-emphasize labels, however, perhaps not coincidentally because the services’ playlists are touted as competent curators themselves. Sure, if you search by label name, you might come across a playlist. But websites like Discogs, Bandcamp, and Beatport make it easy to see a label’s releases and make connections that way. There’s a Spotify workaround that does something similar, but that just goes to show that something better is needed. Streaming services should add a straightforward label search function.

Similarly, as streaming services start to offer more and more data about who writes, produces, and performs each track, it would be great to be able to search via the credits. Just as you might scour Discogs for recordings featuring a favorite session player, you ought to be able to search for specific personnel—or at least featured artists—on streaming platforms. Maybe this would even inspire music publishers and streamers to spend more time getting their metadata right.

Let Us Sort Our Streaming Libraries Based on Year or Play Count

Apple’s impending phase-out of the iTunes desktop app was long overdue, but before the media player started trying to do too many things, it was actually pretty good at arranging your music collection. The streaming services that overtook iTunes don’t give listeners the same types of flexibility (at least not without a separate tool). Being able to sort your music library by year or play count was at times extremely helpful. Apple, Spotify, and their peers should bring these features back. It could be applied to the music saved in users’ libraries.