Its time for Spotify to stop capping how much music you can save
Despite years of user complaints, song libraries remain limited to 10,000 songs
- By
- on May 26, 2017 4:04 pm
Its a pretty good New Music Friday, everybody. But today, while adding some new releases to my Spotify library, I ran into one of the apps most aggravating restrictions: I crossed the 10,000-song limit. The Your Music section of Spotify is where all of your saved artists, albums, and songs go. Its what makes Spotify feel like your Spotify especially if you spent years using iTunes before music entered the streaming era. Your Music is everything youve plucked from the services vault of over 30 million tracks to encompass your personal collection. But that collection has a hard ceiling of 10,000 songs. Why is there such an arbitrary cap?
Playlists dont work this way. Spotify treats playlists differently from your library. Theyre technically part of it, but they existed before Your Music was introduced and dont count toward any singular library limit; each of your Spotify playlists can have up to 10,000 songs. I love Discover Weekly and Release Radar, and I build out plenty of my own playlists with the best songs from a given month or year. But I cant get by on playlists alone. Something about it feels barbarous. Maybe Im just old.
Either way, Spotify has never offered up a great explanation for why the limit on Your Music is there to begin with. In response to thousands of votes from users asking for a higher limit, the company responded with this:
At the moment we dont have plans to extend the Your Music limit. The reason is because less than 1% of users reach it. The current limit ensures a great experience for 99% of users instead of an "OK" experience for 100%.
Its been using that same excuse for a few years, actually. And the last line is some classic PR nonsense. It basically reads as Sorry, but bowing to these music nerds would mess things up for everybody else. Apple Musics library limit is 100,000 songs and I must be missing the complaints about all the problems thats caused for the service and its user experience. Whats the big hurdle? Wheres the burden?
Everyones pulling from the same giant catalog of songs, here. Were just setting aside the stuff we like to make it easier to find and listen to later on. Its just bookmarking. But inexplicably, Spotify only wants you to bookmark so many things. I get the sense that this isnt so much a technical issue as it is an unfortunate restriction that stems from Spotifys deals with record labels. Spotifys customer service Twitter account has frequently acknowledged a larger library as a popular request. Yet... nothing. Spotify grows and grows, and the cap remains unchanged. Bookmarks cant be that hard.
When it comes time to inform you that your library has grown too large, Spotify tries to lessen the pain by complimenting it. Epic collection, friend. Theres no more room in Your Library. To save more, youll need to remove some songs or albums. But that message essentially translates to Youre using our product too hard, which is bad and untenable for a company aiming to create the one true music service. No collection should be too epic, and a 10,000-song library isnt too epic for any of Spotifys major rivals.
Spotify lets you download up to 3,333 songs per device on up to three devicesI should note that adding music to your library isnt the same as downloading it offline; theres a separate cap for how many songs you can store on your phone or PC. But I find the library structure critical to taking music with me on the go. It makes things easy. Scroll through your list of saved albums, tap on one, toggle the download button, and youre done. When youre offline, Spotify lets you filter what music is shown to only include downloaded content. You can do the same thing with playlists, but again, that feels unruly to me. And the worst part is, assuming an album isnt in some playlist, you must save it to your library in order to download it for offline listening.
Plus, it would seem to me that the people who do hit the 10,000-track library ceiling are customers that Spotify should really care about. Theyre fervent, insatiable music lovers who have trusted the service to be the foundation of their listening. Theyre probably worth a little extra engineering work. And if Spotify wants people to use its app for years and decades to come, is 10,000 songs enough to contain a lifetime of music? Yes for some. Definitely not for others. Theres no good reason for this stumbling block to be there.
A good point was made by Derek Mead at Motherboard last year on why upping the limit would benefit Spotifys business is lock-in factor. Think about how inconvenient it is to switch between these music services. Sure, there are online tools that will transfer your playlists from one to another, but they rarely work perfectly and thats just with a few hundred or a couple thousand songs. If your Spotify library was 20,000 or 50,000 songs deep, it would take an outrageously compelling reason to even consider an export to Apple, Google Play Music, or Amazon Music Unlimited.
Spotifys enforcement of this asinine limit is likely pushing some of those customers toward the competition. If its still less than 1 percent of users hitting the wall, the company probably just doesnt care. That active subscriber count keeps going up and up, after all. All your friends are on Spotify. Can you really afford to leave?
But once you do hit the limit, it becomes a major nuisance unless youre willing to rework the way you use Spotify. No one wants to have to trim their music library every week or two. There are ways to adapt once you get the dreaded epic collection notification. Instead of saving album upon album, you can just follow an artist without adding any songs directly to your library. That still keeps your favorite musicians a few taps away, and youd never need to worry about the limit. Ask Spotify for advice and theyd probably just point you back to playlists as the answer once your library fills up. Just make more and more playlists. Playlists are great and all, but they also require work on the users part.
You know what the worst thing about iTunes is? Using it can often feel like work. Until I saw that message pop up today, Spotify never really did. I guess it will from now on or until I switch to something else. Ive already got plenty of music uploaded to Google, anyway.
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Comments
Similar to their offline restriction limit to x amount of songs. I have playlists i cant sync offline because Ive reached the limit, its ridiculous
By liamdaly on 05.26.17 4:33pm
I assume that the limit is there to limit processing time and dilution of your music taste.
The more you add to your library the greater the complexity graph Spotify has to manage to work out what else you may like. As the average tracks per user goes up, that processing time probably gets exponentially longer. On top of that, the more tracks you add the lower the bar is for how much you "like" the track. A user with 100K tracks in their library has a lower criteria. In theory at least.
By joe.wood on 05.26.17 4:37pm
I was under the assumption the graph was based on what you played, so the saved collection being tighter wouldnt mean much.
By BlatantNinja23 on 05.27.17 9:45pm
Ive actually read in a bunch of different places that adding music to your library impacts your Discover Weekly much more than playing songs. Anyone can listen to a song for more than 30 seconds, but if you add it to your library that lets Spotify know that you intend to keep listening to it.
By sandros77 on 05.31.17 10:39am
Meanwhile, Apple Music has a song limit of 100,000 songs [and adding full albums dont add an extra song to that amount].
By MysteryMii on 05.26.17 4:56pm
Really? A full album doesnt count against the song limit? How does that make any sense?
By OkComputer on 05.26.17 7:52pm
You read it wrong. When you add an album to Spotify, it adds an extra song on top of the tracks in that album. Apple Music dosent count an extra song on top of the tracks in that album.
By CrypticPixel on 05.26.17 8:09pm
Hmm that still doesnt make sense. Why would they add an extra song?
By OkComputer on 05.26.17 8:41pm
Yes, it doesnt make sense. Read the article dude.
By trewtrew on 05.26.17 10:03pm
I did read it hence why I dont think it makes sense on Spotifys part.
By OkComputer on 05.27.17 4:24am
Nobody knows for sure. My theory is that the extra song is needed as a flag for the album so they can track it in case more songs are added to that album over time. It is probably also used as a flag for offline listening of the entire album. Its probably an implementation mistake that they are too deep in to change at this point.
By sandros77 on 05.31.17 10:42am
The just-make-playlists-for-albums-you-like fallback is sort of wonky as those albums dont seem to be visible in ones main library, so you cant just shuffle all and seamlessly listen across those barriers, if Im not mistaken [I took to Apple Music last year; maybe Spotify changed things to remedy that issue], and the Save button on an album page is so inviting. Its likely just social engineering. Fosters use of their own curated playlists, which is where the bulk of their users live, and where most revenue is had for the long tail too. Stories of indie artists supplementing their vanagon budgets with plays of their tracks in Country Coffeehouse or whatever abound. They also might point you to the search function to find what you want fast. The "hey, its allll your music, man, 40 million songs a few taps away, why would you want to limit yourself with self-imposed restrictions, man" defense.
By lennon2017 on 05.26.17 5:11pm
I just realized I may be using Spotify wrong. All I do is Playlists. Saving music never made sense.
Now, though, I think maybe it makes some sense.
By MosquitoControl on 05.26.17 5:25pm
Depends on how you listen to music. If you primarily listen to full albums, saving music to your library is the way to go. If you mainly only listen to a few songs here and there from a bunch of different artists, then playlists make more sense.
By sandros77 on 05.31.17 10:43am
I think they might do it as an agreement with labels to prevent people sharing accounts.
If I could download unlimited songs on unlimited devices, I could share my Spotify account with 10 people and just get them to be offline constantly.
This could also explain why you need to go online after 30 days of being offline.
People are much more willing to give their Spotify account password away to friends than their Apple ID or Google account for obvious reasons
By Abattofueueueisfg on 05.26.17 5:32pm
This is not about the download limit. It is about saving albums and songs in your collection.
By Nioung on 05.27.17 8:35am
This limitation brought me back to iTunes
By disappearhere on 05.26.17 5:52pm
Why do they limit the amount of songs in "Your Music"? What engineering problems do they face? What contractual problems do they have? What technical issues would it create to raise the number? I dont understand why theyre stuck with this.
By Gab_Gagnon on 05.26.17 6:07pm
Personally I love that Apple Music combines my previous 20 year music library [originally Winamp then iTunes] with what u now have from Apple Music. Spotify doesnt let me bring my old collection into it, CDs from buskers etc. So no use to me I dont want my music in different places.
By darwiniandude on 05.26.17 6:24pm
Yup. Apple Music is far superior IMO.
By chadsmo on 05.27.17 2:11am
I started using Spotify before the "Your Music" feature so it never bothered me. I just created playlists for each moment and I updated a "Daily Mix" playlist when new music would come out and music tastes would change.
I came from iTunes so I missed the whole Album/Artist/Songs thing or "Your Music" thing but I got over it. Im back on Apple Music because of the Exclusives so Im in love again with the whole "Your Music" feature that was in iTunes.
By CrypticPixel on 05.26.17 8:12pm
I switched to Google Play Music almost two years ago when I ran into this problem. Finding ways around it is way too much work so I switched services entirely. Google Play Music is great, but Spotify was easily my favorite. Now its not even an option for me.
By tceffErorriM on 05.26.17 8:25pm
The only reason Ive subscribed to Apple Music away from Spotify was down to the 3,333 download cap. It may sound like a lot, however when you subscribe to a few playlists which update weekly. The download cap will be eaten away very quickly.
By Rizzywow91 on 05.27.17 5:47am
This article is not about the download limit.
By Nioung on 05.27.17 8:38am
THIS! This so much!! Ive been using Spotify premium for years and I have ran into every limit they set on music collection, playlist and downloaded songs. Its infuriating for a service that prides itself in giving you access to limitless music to impose so many limits!
Storage in phone increase all the times, but Spotifys limits dont
I havent switched yet but Im considering the options
By Sillik on 05.27.17 6:46am