1. Can’t turn off album art or colorized elements changing bright colors while driving. (I just want simple buttons to press to change tracks or pause music without distracting album art). This one is legitimately dangerous

1a. The last straw for me was when they deprecated car mode entirely and insisted on even more flashy moving elements in the standard player. It became a safety hazard to use.

2. Can’t combine your own music with cloud music anymore (when Spotify started, you could combine their libraries with your own music if you had something that they didn’t)

3. No normalization adjustments for songs that are too loud or too quiet

4. No per-device (or at all iirc?) Equalization

5. Periodic check-in required every (30d last time I used the service) for offline content, meaning if you download stuff to your laptop, don’t touch it for a month, and then go on a plane you don’t have access to your music.

6. Constant background app openings. App opens itself constantly to track your location, and broadcast to other devices whether or not you’re playing music. Integrated with lots of ad/tracker networks

7. Quality is terrible. I dunno what it is because apparently I’m not even one of the people that can tell the difference between 128 and 256, but the same song in Plexamp at 320 vs Spotify whatever is night and day, especially on bad car speakers.

I haven’t used the service in years and that’s just off the top of my head why Spotify is terrible.