Spotify News

> Well, actually, they want you to be able to set a photo as the cover of a playlist, and there is no difference between "Allow user to upload 1 photo" and "Have access to all of users photo" in terms of mobile permissions.

There's no way I as a user can prevent other usage of my photos after I give them permission to access them all. I therefore have to trust Spotify that they won't abuse their access to my (and all the other people who install the app)'s photos.

Now I understand you trust them completely, and that's your right, I don't trust them at all especially considering their strong ties with Facebook.

Regarding their public 'Sorry' posted this afternoon: https://news.spotify.com/us/2015/08/21/sorry-2/ it's still vague. They state "Photos: We will never access your photos without explicit permission", but there's no state possible where the user can use the app and _not_ have given permission, as the app is only installable if the user gives access to the photos through the Android access rights at install time. After that the app already has access to the photos, and Spotify can state that they won't access the photos 'without explicit permission' but that's moot: to not give them explicit permission I have just 1 option: not install the app (otherwise I have to, see above). Which is a bit of a shit option, really, if you pay for the service (like I did) and want to listen to music.

Perhaps the reputation you speak of transfers over from the B2C side, where Google makes services for billions and can't offer the human touch as easily.

Have you had bad experiences with Google Cloud platform support specifically?

I can only offer some customer voices:

- Quizlet calls out support as a major reason for choosing GCP over AWS (among other things) [0]

- "Paid Support is top notch" [1]

- Spotify calls out the human side specifically [2]

[0] https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp

[1] https://lugassy.net/why-we-moved-from-amazon-web-services-to-google-cloud-platform-726c412fd667#.7g9z9b1mt

[2] https://news.spotify.com/au/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-infrastructures-googley-future/

They use human curation for many of the pre-built playlists, but those humans are also assisted by some interesting algorithm work on the backend.

For instance, the Fresh Finds playlists - music that's good but very new or undiscovered - are made by curators who sift through songs and artists listened to each week by "tastemaker users". Spotify combs through their listener data and identifies users who have a habit of listening to music that later blows up and becomes much more popular. They tag those users anonymously and use their taste to inform the Fresh Finds playlists, which also feed the rest of the editorial department.

Really cool stuff.

https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/03/02/introducing-fresh-finds/

> Forgive me if I sincerely doubt the claim that the anonymous human actually clicked that Reapeat 1 button 45,000 times in the timeframe listed, which as noted in another comment, is akin to a full-time job - if actually true, it only goes to prove the inherit merit of Spotify's internal controls.

You don't know what you are talking about:

https://news.spotify.com/us/2014/02/07/repeat-once/

The repeat one button will repeat a single song indefinately.

I can't really tell what else you are trying to say here. You might consider re-examining your sentence structure and word choice.

Earlier Spotify desktop client was a state of art. 2 megabytes, every function works seamlessly.

It's developed by the same author of original uTorrent, Ludvig Strigeu.

Nowadays, Spotify kinda bloats with cef and funny feeling HTML5 UI.

Trivia: Ludvig Strigeus also developed Spotiamp http://news.spotify.com/us/2013/12/20/spotiamp-long-live-the-llama/