Spotify - anyone heard of it?

like the criticism of spotify to date has been, ime, 'spotify is not paying artists enough royalties for their songs.' to switch that to 'spotify is not working hard enough to make sure sony is paying artists enough royalties for their songs' is some weird goal post movement.

mordy you're free to look up spotify's old pr defenses about how they're looking out for artists, indie labels, etc but i'm not going to do it for you because you're clearly determined to argue against cases i'm not making

"Crowdsourcing" and "Spotify algorithms" are really two different ways of talking about the same process, not competing alternatives.

Also, they went past it quickly in the presentation, but there's a running mode where it combines tempo-detection and your own listening to match your personal taste to your running pace. You don't have to listen to Tiesto unless you want to. Although I admit that I thought the tempo-morphing running-soundtrack didn't seem like a thing I would personally use, but then I tried it and thought it was actually pretty compelling.

i use spotify while driving my car that i use so i don't have to run places

This is me too, tbh. The last time I ran for any reason was trying to catch my neighbor's dog who'd gotten out of his yard last year.

thing is, however fast you're running, you should always be trying to keep your footstrike rate around 180bpm. having slower music is just encouraging you to run in a less efficient way (if you slow down your cadence, you lose the natural bounce in your run). maybe have calmer sounds for slower running, but you don't really want less bpm (unless it's 90bpm of course) xp

I just want to be able to star songs while running.

Just kidding, I don't run with music.

i would keep stopping to see what the track was, it would be frustrating

I just want to be able to star songs while running.

― Jeff, Wednesday, May 20, 2015 10:03 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I bike to the clip of maron's whining

@Glenn - I'm thinking more of trying to promote playlist-creators as user-curators than just trying to have Spotify guess what I personally would want to hear. For example, there's a dude named Reggie Prim (no idea who he is) who consistently creates great playlists full of new, semi-obscure stuff. I love listening to his playlists, and it seems like Spotify should try to promote people like that who do the work of sifting through piles of new releases to find the good stuff.

Also, I feel like there should be more work done around being able to create stations from your friends list. I'd like to be able to exclude poor-taste-having friends, or organize friends into groups, or trust their taste for one genre but not another. Obv this is not something everyone wants to do, and maybe some of this is being done behind the scenes with thumbs-up/down, but I feel like Spotify has tried to obscure the social aspects of the program lately, especially in the mobile app. Maybe I'm wrong.

thing is, however fast you're running, you should always be trying to keep your footstrike rate around 180bpm
Tiesto reaching back to his old hardcore days.

I hear you, schwantz, and agree that there's a lot of room to do more with friends and other people's playlists.

all I want is to be able to search by username to find people. since I don't use FB, the only way (that I've figured out) for me to add a friend I know irl is to find a playlist they are following, and click on their profile through that. The same with friends who want to add me - they have to find some ILX playlist on their computer and search through all the users to get to my profile.

That is actually in the mobile app now, which I discovered after getting all huffy about it. Just input the user's name into the search dialog.

I only use the desktop one :(

It might work there too?

well I really don't want to update my version, but I'll check

Yes, you can search for people by username or actual name. In the desktop version, too!

If only every "all I want is..." were this easy...

I downgraded a while back to keep the apps (love the playlists.net app!), so I guess I lose out on this one.

I downgraded so I didn't have an enormous buggy piece of shit anymore, I am now v happy with my spotify experience and I wish them all the best with their innovative running features :-)

friends! friends! friends! what are you doing. this is a fool's errand. give in & upgrade y'all

I'm personally sympathetic to people trying to hold out until Ctrl-F comes back...

nike fit did the whole hiring artist to make music for you to run to iirc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O84WZkbFaLc
de la soul too i think?

that's a pretty shitty audiosurf track

i don't see music that matches your running tempo really setting the world on fire as a music discovery mechanism. dunno i could be wrong. (surely even better would be morphing the beat, a la ableton live, so that whatever vaguely house-tempo dance music you're listening to automagically matches your footsteps?)

in general though the durability of radio (and linear television), and the rise of the subscribable playlist, really reinforces the fact that most people just want something handed to them on a silver platter rather than having to decide each invidivual thing. i wouldn't be surprised if netflix started a set of "channels" that serve up content automatically in an effort to mimic broadcast tv. i can't tell you the number of times i've fired up netflix, searched around for upwards of 15 minutes and then just turned the TV off out of fatigue.

although I just youtubed "audiosurf hardest track" and according to youtube's algorithm it is "thousand" by moby, so, uh

i can't tell you the number of times i've fired up netflix, searched around for upwards of 15 minutes and then just turned the TV off out of fatigue.

pretty much the modern equivalent of just flipping through the channels without actually watching anything.

I also do the same thing with music. Sometimes spend the majority of my time on public transport just trying to figure out what I want to listen to.

http://www.theonion.com/video/netflix-introduces-new-browse-endlessly-plan-35308

spotify needs to curate more music for marathon f-zero sessions

tired of this slow bpm music fucking Captain Falcon's #vibe

algo would probably be limited to something like playing
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/41/Guster_-_Lost_and_Gone_Forever.jpg
when you've selected
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/fzero/images/d/df/GusterX.gif/revision/latest?cb=20080420030948

tbf, antonio guster's theme hasn’t changed in nearly 15 years

i think the reason that's available readily in full on youtube is because it has the fig leaf of audiosurf, so that's why i linked
tbf, i think the "procedurally generated" elements of audiosurf were always very iffy; you can always adjust it to make everything easier or harder.

The point of matching your running pace isn't music discovery, it's enjoying your run.

lol good point

i keep forgetting not everyone is a music nerd

Even music nerds are allowed to just enjoy a run without trying to collect anything during it.

That said, I've discovered quite a bit of music while working on this feature. But whereas "discovery" in other contexts often means "Oh, I am now going to go listen to all this artist's other stuff", with running music it can also be "I will put on the 145bpm reggaeton mix for pure listening pleasure after I get done with this 170bpm run".

for me it's more "are there artists who are not demonstrably horrible people [google moby] who can make the track tilt 180 DEGREES, WHAT" more than that, which probably says I need to get out more

I'm a fast walker/"sprinter" anyway so I'm used to whatever I am listening to being quite a bit mistimed

i can't run to anything under 200bpm

there is something about the utilitarian aspect of music that all the music services are trying to latch onto right now which just entirely rubs me the wrong way, i.e. music to cook dinner to, music to change a baby to, music to do burpees to, etc. i probably should relax and not care. that's how most people have treated music ever since the beginnings of radio.

what rubs me the wrong way is the homogeneity of it...music is functional and this should totally be celebrated but there's this almost authoritarian "THIS is running music, THAT is chilling-out music" about it all. dunno how many of you saw that repulsive "life milestones" infographic going round yesterday - the ages at which Everyone Is Meant to have their first kiss, rent with friends, rent with a partner, buy their first house, become a middle manager - total rat race stuff - but the spotify announcement seemed in much the same line. do this designated activity in this designated way to this designated music and then you'll be a decent member of middle-class western society.

(fwiw, several years ago i did a big project on running music, and interviewed several djs and producers for it, and i was really surprised at the range of answers and justifications i got - no, running music doesn't have to be at a particular bpm, everyone does it differently!)

(fwiw, as a music nerd and a runner, i don't listen to music at all when i run, because that's when i clear my head and get away from music that i spent most of my non-running life listening to) (also i get tangled up in my own headphones)

also i am currently using spotify for once and if you're going to match anything up can you at least advertise music that has some vague resemblance to what i'm listening to? this caterwauling rock dude in the middle of my afropop, fuck off :(

please link that infograph I didn't see it

yeah, running is actually my favorite time to listen to classical music! it's one of the few times i'm able to actually listen in detail and thoroughly get into it

also podcasts. maybe spotify could match the pace of my footfalls with appropriate spoken subject material.

There's something very Compilation Zeitgeist about those playlists, like they're designed to appeal to people who are a bit insecure about picking the appropriate social context for music. There's one called 'Hipster House Party' that surely no real hipster would touch with a bargepole.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/5e/89/d2/5e89d2b0e549f7424783c6b1e20c17a5.jpg

otm

i listen to lots of songs while i jog that i would never listen to otherwise but it don't mean my tastes change completely