Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I mean, burger menus are fine if they're always present, or invokable with a simple gesture.

or always present. if spotify's burger menu were at least accessible from all screens, not just the top-level ones, it'd be heaps easier to work with.

really it should go back to tabs tbh.

ahh those graphs are brutal!

for a couple weeks everytime i pulled up the play.spotify.com web player it defaulted to a smoking popes album i'm pretty sure i never listened to in the first place, it was quite distressing as you can imagine

Spotify should deliver burgers

dis burger weekly

"Posted: September 24, 2015 at 5:59:02 PM
Yeah it's pretty terrible. It's like you've driven a car into a dead-end alley and you have to brake, change the gear, look behind you, and reverse around a couple of corners just in order to get to the next place you want to go."

Back on Spotify on Ios5 there was a persistent bottom bar with search, etc. very convenient

I spend way too much time in this thread on entitled complaining, so here's the running playlist of pleasant *actual* discoveries from it:

https://open.spotify.com/user/1239159458/playlist/2b8qsigIW5aigW6lTGjcoI

(this week's entry is Springtime Carnivore. this particular track I like, even though when it starts I keep expecting it to turn into Cathy Davey's "Clean and Neat" and am let down for a few seconds)

Are you guys talking about the Spotify Hipster Boyfriend app?

I love, love, love him. Never change him. He is a source of endless amusement and WTF-ery. Seriously, the idea of having an automated suggest function which acts like your own personal Hipster Boyfriend popping up in the middle of your listening to something to suggest something like "I see you're listening to (let's say New Order). Have you heard this band... They're really obscure... you might not have heard of them... called Joy Division?" He is *so* smarmy and irritating, I love him to bits.

I've followed him since he moved from sending me weekly emails to popping up while I was playing albums, and now he makes me a terrible-brilliant-awful hipster boyfriend mixtape every week. The mixture of so-obvious-it-hurts plus WTF plus every now and then he gets something so absolutely *right* (I'm actually shocked when he introduces me to something genuinely brilliant i hadn't heard before.) that redeems his entire existence - earlier this year he made me listen to a Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith thing which was a synth-prog concept album about Euclid's Axioms? And I was like SHB!!! YOU GET IT! YOU TOTALLY *GET* IT!!!

But then he'll turn around and be all "I see you're listening to tons of Kraftwerk and Cluster. Might I recommend a band... really obscure... you might not have heard of them? Called... Popol Vuh?" and I just laugh myself sick and want to pat him on the head and say "thanks for coming out, love". (Tho someone on Twitter said that it was actually a helpful call, because there used to be no Popol Vuh on Spotify at all, and actually he might just have been calling my attention to the fact that there was music of theirs at all, on Spotify now?)

Whoever invented Spotify Hipster Boyfriend, thank you. You have enriched my life in so many ways! Endless amusement!

I suspect, as with the referenced similar Aloe Blacc complaint, he's actually talking about Pandora, not Spotify. "All About That Bass" has 290m streams on Spotify, which would be worth about $290k in publishing royalties. Dunno what his deal is like, but if his publisher takes half and he splits the rest with Meghan, he'd get $70k+ just from Spotify.

Plus, if he gets any part of the performance royalties, from producing the song, those are 5x the publishing. (From Spotify. Pandora is different...)

― glenn mcdonald, Thursday, September 24, 2015 10:02 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And now Arstechnica fixed the headline (but not the URL) for http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/09/songwriter-tells-us-house-he-made-5679-from-178-million-spotify-streams/ and added this note at the bottom:

This article's headline originally stated that the payments in question were made by Spotify, when they were in fact made by Pandora.

I suspect that if they'd written about Toyota or Ford cheating on diesel emissions tests, the "correction" would be a little more involved.

Looks like Spotify Discovery has decided to give up on recommending me new music. This week it has recommended 5 songs that it already put on past playlists, and 6 other artists that it put other songs on by before.

Did you listen to them on the previous playlists? I've had a couple of duplicates but I figured I maybe skipped over them last time they came up.

Mine is much improved this week - a decent number of keepers.

carpenters
florence + the machine
barbara streisand
jack savoretti

in mine :(

http://i.imgur.com/pG8rCw1.png

Like, this message just shows all the time, every day. Does turning off the computer not count as restarting? I couldn't give a fuck what version I'm on - just let me go a day without this message please.

Neu! Sonic Youth Blur My Bloody Valentine in mine. But if they didn't call it 'discover' I would probably be ok with it, it's good.

Weird thing: I listen to a lot of rap on spotify, but there's never any rap in my discoveries.

I got "Girls Girls Girls" recently but that's it

i kinda love how if i played the Violent Femmes' 3 and Hallowed Ground discover weekly would be like, "hey...you ever heard Blister In The Sun?"

"Weird thing: I listen to a lot of rap on spotify, but there's never any rap in my discoveries."

weird indeed: I never listen to rap but there were like 6 rap songs on my list this week. wtf

one of you needs to discover rap, the other doesn't

point taken

lol

another article on Discover Weekly @ Spotify

TASTEMAKER
How Spotify’s Discover Weekly cracked human curation at internet scale
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify-discover-weekly-online-music-curation-interview

On, Discover Weekly

Spotify has built a taste profile for each user based on what they listen to. It assigns an affinity score to artists, which is the algorithm’s best guess of how central they are to your taste. It also looks at which genres you play the most to decide where you would be willing to explore new music.

The algorithms behind Discover Weekly finds users who have built playlists featuring the songs and artists you love. It then goes through songs that a number of your kindred spirits have added to playlists but you haven’t heard, knowing there is a good chance you might like them, too. Finally, it uses your taste profile to filter those findings by your areas of affinity and exploration. Because the playlist, that explicit act of curation, is both the source of the signal and the final output, the technique can achieve results far more interesting than run of the mill collaborative filtering. ......

In Discover Weekly, each time a user with similar taste playlists a certain song, it’s a vote that the song will sound good to you when paired with other tracks on that playlist.

Ajay Kalia, the product lead for Taste Profiles, says its crucial to keep humans in the loop. There is a camp that believes if you just have enough data, and smarter algorithms, a curation machine will emerge discovers new and innovative ways to predict your taste. That might be true when sorting data on weather, says Kalia, but not for something as emotional as music. "I think we'll always have to start with patterns that map to the way people actually relate to music."
It’s still humans who are doing the song selection and arranging, but instead of outside experts, it’s users like you and me. Generating a human-curated playlist for each of Spotify’s users would be a challenge of mammoth proportion. "We probably can’t hire enough editors to do that," says Ogle. So Spotify uses each of its users as one cog in a company-wide curatorial machine. "The answer was staring us in the face: playlists, since the beginning, have been more or less the basic currency of Spotify. Users have made more than 2 billion of them." In effect, Discover Weekly sidesteps the man versus machine debate and delivers the holy grail of music recommendation: human curation at scale.

also, there is a picture of Spotify's New York offices, is Glenn's desk in view?

I like my Discovery lists for the most part, but there are times during the week when I think, "Oh God, I hope it doesn't think I'm all of a sudden a huge Rick Springfield fan."

but you haven’t heard

LIES

My desk is in Boston, not New York...

should i feel bad that i've never worked on a laptop in front of a desktop, is that the thing to do now

You don't actually win anything by finding something to snip at in every situation.

(External monitors.)

dude i just hadn't seen an office where everyone was doing that before, don't take it personal

i think might be easier for everybody with we had a specific "ask glenn" thread so discussion about everything from office set-up to industry politics wouldn't be assumed to be directed at a company employee

if we had, i mean

think the laptop->dock->external monitor setup is v popular

yeah my boss has that, but he uses the monitor. i didn't think that's what i was looking at since everybody's either looking at the laptop or there are different icons in the windows etc etc. ready to believe i'm ign'nt about it.

well you can do extended desktop, which is great, but nobody is ilx'ing in that office. it'd be impossible in that open design.

prbly ilx'ing on their phones tbh

wait how many people here are spotify employees, if "snarky customer fascinated with industry economics" is the minority maybe i should find MY own thread

i do not work for spotify, if that is the impression you are getting

but I'd guess we are probably the only ones

I don't think anybody needs their own thread. But consider whether this one wouldn't be better if you behaved like your real name were on your posts and sometimes pictures of your workplace appeared in public.

jesus christ, i wrote "should i feel bad that i've never worked on a laptop in front of a desktop, is that the thing to do now" - do you want me to apologize for implying it looked hip

spotify is a huge controversial company dramatically affecting an industry and getting a lot of attention. can you imagine if some uber employee was like "HEY REMEMBER I WORK THERE, BE RESPECTFUL" in the thread about it? seriously, if you're going to etiquette police to the point where somebody noting the desk set-up has you tongue-clucking, maybe these convos shouldn't co-exist with "hey glenn any chance stars are coming back?" so you can feel less attacked

but it's not even a desktop. maybe a picture of a monitor should be in your discover weekly next monday.

^being a dick bc Sufjan Grafton is not my real name tbf

but it's not even a desktop. maybe a picture of a monitor should be in your discover weekly next monday.

next to a picture of a ps2, because i like ps3s and ps4s

lol

I'm not sure that Discover Weekly would be better if it started assuming that you've heard things, even if you haven't played them on spotify. I suppose there could be a way to set your affinity for artists that you don't want to spend time listening to, though. It's probably in the works, if it's a good idea.

it's pretty elegant that all of the DW data is collected passively. I don't want to spend time sorting through artists and rating them 1-10 like this is some horrible Netflix algorithm. The DW algorithm seems to be onto something good.

i'm not sure, either. that's why i've noted it recommends i discover not just artists but songs i've played and playlisted on spotify.