We've had several Echo Dots, Amazon's smart speaker, in our home for years now. Aside from allowing voice control of our our lights and heat, one feature I've always enjoyed is that they play music. You can ask Alexa to play a song, a playlist, an album or even a genre of music, and if it's available, she'll play it. When I'm working somewhere in the house, I often ask for a single song at a time, choosing whatever I want in the moment.
Until last November.
For some reason, Amazon changed how playing music works. Now, if I ask it to play a song, say, Mr. Blue Sky, Alexa will reply, "Shuffling Mr. Blue Sky and similar songs," which is NOT what I asked it to do. At that point, it might play Mr. Blue Sky immediately, but it might not. I might have to sit through other songs, or skip until I get to the only song I wanted to hear. This is true even if I own the song, having paid for the single on Amazon Music.
In short, this is bullshit and I hate it.
I guess the idea of this change is that Amazon hopes you will be too lazy to tell Alexa to skip to the next song and you'll hear a song you like and buy it. Kinda like the other songs are commercials for the song you asked for. It's clearly one of those stupid corporate decisions that puts the financial bottom line way above what consumers of the product actually want, turning something great into another cash grab.
All it's really doing is irritating the hell out of me and making me not want to listen to music on the devices. It also makes it abundantly clear that although you may find the Alexa home infrastructure incredibly useful, you're not in control.
Amazon, change it the hell back.
3 comments:
It's part of a process that Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification". First the platform is good to the users, then once they think they have the users locked-in, they abuse the users to serve their business customers, and then when the business customers are locked-in, they abuse them, too, to try and get all the profits for themselves.
"This is why we can't have nice things" is a feature of end-stage capitalism.
Accurate term. Sucky business practice.
What comes after end-stage capitalism?
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