Spotify is "all about" whatever you use it for. As someone who does not share playlists nor use the sub-par radio feature, it certainly isn't about music discovery for me.
Do you use it for its player, or its cloud library?
Music subscription was on my list. But, if you already have all the songs you'd listen to, and don't care for finding new music, what do you use it for?
Spotify radio is the worst recommendation system I've ever used in any software product ever.It's just that bad and my music tastes are not really esoteric. Do you have any suggestions for music discovery?
The main way I do music discovery on Spotify is looking at the "Appears on" section under artists I like. A lot of these are compilations and mixtapes. They've been curated by a person and actually released, so you can get quality, real variety, and real similarity (of taste).
If you already have all the songs you'd listen to, you won't be using Spotify. My use of Spotify has historically been about listening to music I love without having to purchase/download it myself. That's plenty incentive without any of the social/discovery aspects.
The way I use Spotify is I just use the "saved albums" feature, plus offline caching. This is how I like music: as objects called albums, which I "have" so I can browse and play them easily.
I feel like most music systems, Spotify too, does a kind of violence to the album structure, with all their playlists and shuffling and whatnot. The very idea of "streaming" is vaguely antithetical to the album structure and to the idea of possessing discrete artifacts... If I designed the perfect music player for me, it would almost be a kind of simulator of a record collection with a record player.
Anyway, I am also completely uninterested in Spotify's "social" features. I think their metadata interface is pretty poor and their "Related Artists" is totally haphazard compared to the actual musical knowledge embedded in databases like AllMusicGuide (which I adore).
I also get irrationally upset about Spotify's prominent display of what I call lifestyle propaganda, like their playlists of the day like "Saturday Beach Party Bonanza" or "Yoga Morning Zen Relaxathon" or whatever. (For some reason I never see "Technical Death Metal Tuesday" or "Zappaesque Hell Jazz Extravaganza" or "Lonely Bong Haze Headphone Friday".)
So I dream of a music player with another type of appeal, more album orientation, more facts and knowledge based relational metadata, and better catalogue curation (Spotify's artist pages are overloaded and unorganized and the metadata for classical and jazz especially are messy).
I've started to write this media player a few times, but get distracted.
A digital music manager should be at least as good as a physical shelf of albums that you sort, browse, and select; otherwise what's the point? No digital music player has accomplished even that.
Some enhancements a digital album-centric manager would provide over physical items on shelves are: searching and sorting via metadata, putting albums in multiple "Shelves", and tracking listening statistics (not as an aggregate of track statistics, but at the album-level).
My would-be media manager also supports "Mixtapes" (like playlists, except in set order and ideally with a length limit) which can be placed on Shelves alongside released Albums. Similarly, long "Live Recordings" have first-class status like Albums and Mixtapes and can be put on Shelves (even though they may be a single "track"/file). Finally, dynamic playlists of tracks are replaced by "Dynamic Shelves" of Albums/Mixtapes/Recordings, so you can quickly get to your recent-most-played or highly-played-you-haven't-played-recently, but always as sets of songs that should be listened to together, in order.
You're mostly right, but the streaming service is useful, too, even if you have all the songs you listen to somewhere. That's particularly relevant considering the OP.
