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@masnick
Last active August 29, 2015 13:57
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Beats feedback

I switched to Beats because the iPhone app is great, and the Rdio app (my previous music service) did not handle offline music well.

Unfortunately, I listen to most music through my computer, and the Beats web player is terrible. I know you're working on improving it, but some issues, like logging me out every 24 hours, are just bad design decisions. Little progress has been made on the web player since I signed up, and the current buggy player is too annoying to continue using.

Other issues with the web player:

  • Playback randomly cutting out, requiring a refresh to fix
  • Stopping and then resuming playback after more than a few minutes was very unreliable: clicking "play" wouldn't start the track again, and none of the play icons for other tracks would work. Refreshing was the only solution (and sometimes I'd be inexplicably logged out), and the app wasn't smart enough to remember what I was listening to so I'd have to manually navigate back to where I was.
  • Can't view library on web player
  • Requires Flash for no reason (at least give power users an html5 playback option)
  • No last.fm scrobbling
  • Poorly organized support staff (having to repeat myself whenever I got a new agent)

I'm a web developer and I've built websites with web-based audio playback before. Looking at your API (which looks great, BTW), it seems like it would be pretty easy to build a sensible web player using your API. So it's hard to understand why your web player is so terrible (over-designed, under-developed).

I'm trying out Google Play Music, which is a little, well, Googly, but seems to work pretty well so far. There's a great open-source pseudo-native Mac app (http://kbhomes.github.io/google-music-mac/), and I can upload my own music so I can have The Beatles in my library. The search works really well (there's another web player bug: the search works until you type the last character of an artist's name, and then as soon as you type that last character the correct result disappears and a bunch of random, bad results appear). It's stable enough that I don't need to talk to support (which is good, because there probably is none).

I think you guys launched a little too soon/fast. You should have started out with just the iPhone app and waited to launch the web app until the bugs were worked out and it had better feature-parity with the iPhone app.

You've done a great job with the iPhone app and the recommendations/curated content (I'll definitely miss that). I like your philosophy towards music and paying artists more than the other streaming services. But you can't enter an established market with crappy software. Your frustrating web player has turned this early adopter and potential advocate for Beats into a dissatisfied customer.

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