Someone's spotted something very wrong with the Spotify pause button

Streaming has totally changed the game in how we listen to music – and Spotify has been leading the pack. We’ve all now become accustomed to discovering new tracks, bingeing on our old-school favourites and seamlessly playing and pausing music.

But… hang on a minute. Is there something a little bit off with that trusty pause button?

That’s the debate that is currently tearing the interwebs in two.

Yesterday, Reddit user sqrtoftwo posted on the /mildlyinfuriating forum: “The pause button icon in Spotify is off-center by 1px”.

This, as you’d imagine, has provoked a tidal wave of debate – and some serious soul-searching from Spotify fans who now can’t unsee this super annoying quirk.

Commenter jews4beer said: “That’s the last straw! Uninstalls Spotify.”

But not everyone agreed. Swangin-N-Bangin argued: “No it isn’t… I just took a screenshot in photoshop and there are exactly 10 px on each side.”

The original poster added: “It looks like the two in the iOS app are both off-center as well. The large play button that is visible when viewing the currently-playing track is off by 2px, while the smaller one that is right-aligned at the bottom of the screen the rest of the time is off by 0.5px. All three are too far left and the extent of the misalignment is roughly proportional to the size of the button. I wonder if it’s intentional.”

Read more: These are all the cool new features coming to your iPhone and iPad

Quite a few others chimed in to agree that it could be a deliberate move by the designers.

CarolWendelson said: “It was probably aligned optically. Graphic designers will usually do this if something looks off when aligned ‘correctly’. I typically have to do this more with text than objects but this is super common.”

And boniqmin added: “These things are usually intentional. Instead of being geometrically precise, they go for what looks most satisfying to the eye. There was a popular post a while ago when the nintendo switch was announced; the logo was asymmetric in all kinds of ways. When someone made a version of the logo that was perfectly measured out, it looked really odd even though its design was more consistent.”

Indeed, the Nintendo Switch logo is a little off, as explained by artist David Hellman who said: “Each side has a different apparent visual weight, so the logo is ‘balanced’ by eye.”

And the misshapen designs don’t end there. The new Google logo is another that isn’t actually symmetrical.

As explained here, the ‘G’ of the Google logo is not a perfect circle.

Google’s designers admitted the design quirk and said: “The Google G’s… circular shape was optically refined to prevent a visual ‘overbite’ at the point where the circular form meets the crossbar.”

We reached out to Spotify but a spokesman said they can’t offer a comment at this time. Mysterious.

So what do you reckon? Does the Spotify pause button look off to you – and will it slowly drive you to the point of despair knowing about this tiny little ‘error’?

(Images: Getty / Reddit)