Spotify - anyone heard of it?

FYI according to a thing I read somewhere, it was originally meant to be purely new music but they found 30 tracks of novelty was too daunting, having a few familiar numbers in there made it a more attractive prospect.

Yeah, it's a mix. And yeah, we haven't tried to guess whether you're likely to have heard something out of (or before) Spotify.

I wasn't talking about pre-Spotify.

I don't mind a bunch of familiar songs (most of which are familiar from pre-Spotify) but I think a discovery list shouldn't include songs I stream regularly.

Has 'Notifications' been disabled? Have had nothing for ages (a couple of months at least).

I just got one. Sometimes you need to close and reopen though.

No, but we stopped triggering them when a track is added to a playlist you follow, which was the single biggest source (and the one most frequently ignored).

They're awesome for knowing when artists you follow add a new release, but I still usually don't ever seem them until I open the app fresh.

i really love it when dw drops in the occasional song i know. it keeps me invested and i'm more likely to play the whole thing.

They're awesome for knowing when artists you follow add a new release

^this

still wish you could follow labels too

oh that would be great

Still waiting on smart playlists (auto-updating playlists based on search criteria)!

I depend on notifications for keeping up with new releases from artists I follow, but I don't feel like it's consistent. I'll often check in on an artist's page and find there was a recent single, EP, or album that didn't trigger a notification. That happened most recently with a new Travis single and a recent collaborative EP from Koen Holtkamp.

Podcasts (or whatever generic audio programming name) are available on spotify now. I really like that it marks where you leave off so you can go listen to something else and go back to the podcast and resume immediately. Selection right now is okay but not great, lots of the big ones are available but no serial, no you must remember this, basically none of the ones I listen to. Spotify is making a big deal about how curated their selection is with their "partners" so idk if the plan is to keep it limited? Hopefully not...

Okay so Spotify finally thoroughly won me over today by including a super obscure jab song in my Discover Weekly (as well as some afrobeats stuff I wasn't familiar with but liked). I've played it quite a lot in GPM but never in Spotify. So kudos, Spotify. You're obviously doing something right.

My Discover Weekly Playlist has really been hitting the sweet spot these past few weeks.

My only real complaint about Discover Weekly is that it somehow always manages to choose the best track from albums I haven't heard yet, so when I listen to the rest of said albums they tend to be disappointing

Yeah, or they pick straight-up singles, so there's not much to "discover" other than the track itself. Still, mostly-loving the feature. Need to listen to Spotify more during the day so my lists get a little less sleepy.

there seems a problem with spotify skipping tracks this morning
https://twitter.com/search?q=spotify%20skipping&src=sprv

particularly with new additions to playlists

I've noticed it this morning, too. Switched to Google Play. I've tried to be cynical about Discover Weekly, but it's been mostly fantastic. Great feature.

ha, that skipping problem was driving me nuts on the way to work today

Had it too, although curiously the discover playlist is working fine.

Is there a way of finding playlists that feature a particular song? One track on an album I released last year has c40,000 more plays than everything else.

This is a good question, I would like to know the answer as well. And kudos to you, useless chamber.

If you go to the About page on an artist, there will be a list of playlists that people may have first heard said artist on. It's not the same as being able to find playlists with a specific song, but it might help you in your instance.

Playlists is somewhere Spotify really falls down, I think. Sometimes I just want to have a new ambient/post-rock/whatever playlist to work to and I never seem to be able to find anything. I find the artist radio thing a bit hit and miss and the bog standard playlists are generally pretty shite. It was the one thing Apple Music did really well.

Unless I'm being dumb and missing something very obvious, which is more than possible.

xp Thanks! I wonder if it's maybe been on Discover at some point, though I'm disappointed that Spotify wouldn't think that I'd be interested in it if so (it's our first album so there's no previous plays).

No, that seems about right.
(xp)

i liked rdio's radio station for each user. listening to yr own was kind of like an infinite discover weekly with a bunch of favourites mixed in.

There was a brief playback glitch earlier, but things should be fine now.

Useless chamber, which song is it?

such a shitty company:
https://twitter.com/SomaFmRusty/status/694724117451268097

thanks glenn, it's https://play.spotify.com/track/0NQc20SNfUszEoPyiR6dOB

On the SomaFM thing, the playlists in the screen-shot are user-created. SomaFM publishes their play history, so this seems like a thing that is pretty likely to happen. I'm not sure whether it's illegal or even immoral. But at any rate, I don't think it's a Spotify-official activity in any way I can tell.

useless chamber, the main source of those plays is, in fact, individual people's Discover Weekly lists...

wasn't there a Ministry Of Sound court case that set a legal precedent that playlists themselves are copyrightable IP? i.e. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/27/spotify-ministry-of-sound-lawsuit-settlement

The Ministry of Sound case was about playlists that duplicated published compilations. I don't know if that applies to playlists that mirror other playlists, either in the Spotify sense or the SomaFM/radio sense. But I passed the tweet along to Spotify legal just in case...

yeah and now that I read my own link (lol) I can see that actually it never went to court, it was 'settled' so no actual precedent

The thing that drives me crazy is how I can search and search for a playlist that I know by name but not actually get to it. Had this the other day with the ILM tracks poll results - I had clicked a link in browser, gotten the damned "log in here to listen in browser" page (would it kill them to have a link here that redirects to the application I already have open), so I knew the name of the playlist, but there was absolutely no finding the damn thing. Same thing with a playlist of a friend of mine that she had linked from Facebook. In the end I had to log in to the browser player, which I didn't want to actually use, just so I could favorite the playlist.

On the topic of playlists, is there somewhere I can tell spotify NOT to start playing automatically when I click on a playlist? (I'm only using the browser interface)

The real client is, I think, a better experience...

thanks glenn. I'm sure somebody clicked through to the album from it..

You don't have to tell me btw.

Glenn, is there any reason why a new single will be available in Apple Music but not in Spotify or Google Music Play? I'm trying to stop using Apple Music, lol, but it bothers me a bit that quite a few singles I'd love to put in one of my playlists are available on that platform weeks if not months before the ones I prefer get it. The other releases from the same artist are available - just not the newest single.
I.e. Lil Kesh - Ibile - but the examples are many.

Doctor Casino, you probably already know this, but a fairly painless way to get from a link in your browser to listening in the Spotify app is to right-click/copy the link and paste the whole link into the app's search field.

How the heck is Doppelganger by Curve not on Spotify USA? Not a question for Glenn, more like a rhetorical question.

paul santa cruz, I did not know that! Thank you - will try that next time.

Doppelganger, and a fair slice of the rest of Curve's discog, is available on the band's Bandcamp page.

Availability questions should really be asked of the label or distributor. Once they send us stuff, it goes live on Spotify in a matter of hours. When I publish my own inept music through OneRPM it tends to take 3-4 days to get from them to Spotify's internal systems, and then is available by the following day. Any delays longer than that are the result of human decisions, not system delays...

x-post
I think it's on Spotify UK, just not the USA version.

xpost - and apple music can put everything up since everybody is sending them stuff for itunes anyway? i see...