Spotify

I have an on/off relationship with Spotify; I love it, but most of the times I'm too lazy to open the app, and I never found sufficient reason to pull it into the dock bar for years. I've only recently put it into the dock bar and I find the Spotify presentation interesting, because it presented a very different user perspective of the music streaming app. There were multiple instances regarding listening experience that were put forth as bad points and here are my thoughts on them:

First off, Spotify is said to feel like a radio, because of the many ads they insert for free users. 

As a free user, I continue using Spotify despite the cats playing ping pong (one of the newer, horrible ads they have started using), because I agree it's an incredibly clever tactic to convert free users to paying ones. Essentially, I'm too cheap to pay for its services, so I really don't mind sitting through the ads; and pushing Premium ads into my face is a great call to action for that one day when I might actually change my mind. Also, the distinction between free and paid users have been around since I had started using Spotify, so I don't get particularly annoyed by the ads. On the contrary, I listen to music on Youtube as well because I like music videos, and Youtube today is plagued with ads too - yet I hate it, because there's no option to turn the ads off by paying them to shut it off, and they never had this ad feature in the past. Consumers hate change, Youtube. There's a very important difference between dangling a carrot in front of a user and forcing unwanted things onto the user.

I'm not sure if it's because of the platform used by the presenters, but it was also noted that Spotify doesn't have great playlists, with playlists mostly being random listings of songs. 

I couldn't disagree more; you can build your own playlists on Spotify, you can discover playlists of your friends, there are playlists categorized by genres and moods, there's a Discover Weekly playlist that gets updated every Monday to bring you songs related to what you've been listening to lately, and Spotify's Radio is more or less a playlist based on which genre you tune in to. I'm not going to go linguistically maniacal and critically analyse "playlists being random listings of songs", but playlists can be random listings of songs. The listings of songs by popularity (Top 50 and whatnot) certainly not random, but these are charts, not true playlists. Spotify is a beautiful place when you're on the hunt for new tunes or an entire playlist, and there's just so many ways you can go about that.

Something about UI that the Telegram guys felt very strongly about was the calling out of the dark theme as not something everyone likes. 

Unlike them, I'm a very lay user of the app, but I'm still on their side that this is indeed highly subjective. Frankly, it doesn't matter to me what colours the app comes in - I use it for music on playlists, so most of the time the app runs in the background. Even when I do have to use it, I don't think that the theme is particularly irritating. It's actually pretty cool - black is a very sophisticated colour, plus it's very easy on the eyes. Now that I'm noticing: I love the minimalism of colours; it goes in line with the logo and it's a great brand identity and the simplicity is completely intuitive. 

With that said, the Spotify group actually pointed that out because Spotify hasn't been the most responsive to its users' feedback. This is clearly a problem, because your users are what support your business. Yet the conundrum is so: should you prioritize your brand identity, or should you prioritize your users? Just last year, Spotify terminated its App Finder function, killing many cool 3rd party apps - along with my favourite Lazify. It was incredibly heartbreaking, but I agree that the direction of the brand should be based on the company's identity and interests first. While they should definitely still consider the feedback of users, the executive decision lies ultimately with what you want your brand to be. 

Another problem that may arise from giving in to users' feedback is that requests may snowball - if you relent to the users' requests of having a light background, there are going to be even more preferences and requests; it's impossible to cater to everyone's needs. Yet another point we should probably also think about is whether or not a change is relevant for the app - personally I still don't think that the theme is an issue on an app you mostly run on the background, even though just by having another option of a light background is easy as pie and doesn't affect any of its features.