Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Search function is working again on the roku app, so I can at least play music on it, but still no playlists.

DW works well more often than it doesn't, but President Keyes is correct - it does sometimes ape Amazon's "Say, you bought a bath mat recently. Here are 1,000 more." algorhythm.

Glenn: it's a Marantz M-CR610. It's not a major pain, though I used to like navigating playlists on the device itself (or through its remote app) rather than relying on my phone/AirPlay. Now DW just shows up as "by" in the playlists and navigation is extremely slow. (It's not the M-CR611, which added Spotify Connect).

I don't expect DW to know that I'm a 48yo guy with way too much physical media, and, while I may not have chosen to play these songs through Spotify, I have played them to death since I was 20-something. But to keep giving me the same "core" songs (Chris Bell, Nancy & Lee, B&S, This Mortal Coil, Scott Walker, Lambchop, Slits, etc) may indicate a bit of a glitch somewhere (I've had Some Velvet Morning maybe four times since late 2015, six if you include covers). And now another friend has told me that their DW was basically a "hits of yr life" this week.

my DW last week was entirely 70's soul/funk/disco because I listened to a few hours of the ILM poll playlist

Yeah, most pre-Spotify-Connect devices can't understand the newer playlist formats that DW, RR and many of the Spotify editorial playlists use.

The thing about all the stuff you play outside Spotify is a subject of constant interest and discussion here, in many contexts. Some of the things that get labeled "recommendations" are really just as much attempts to infer the aspects of your existing taste that you haven't directly demonstrated to us. "You might also like" vs "You probably also already know".

My most recent Discover Weekly had a LOT of stuff I've had before, including one song I had last week!

most artists pages giving me "Sorry, something went wrong."s on Android 7. Having more gos also not helping.

For the second time for me (at least) this year, discover weekly has featured "spill the wine" twice in the same playlist. A song I already have on a playlist I've made, and that I know I've played in the last month.

I play a lot of old top 40s for a project these days, and those songs tend to be uploaded on Spotify in multiple slightly different versions, so I can't blame DW entirely for turning into "you played this grass roots hit, discover it on a different best-of." At least there are no shitty re-recordings this week. But still...wtf.

lol

I am having the same thing with DW: a lot of familiar songs and several that are repeats from earlier DW's (Guided By Voices' Game of pricks most notably). This has been the case since maybe last week. I'm a big fan of DW and I filter out my favs in a separate playlist. In the past year I've discovered so much really good new music thanks to DW.

help every single spotify-curated playlist is just a single fuzzy recording of garry shandling telling me to set my asshole on fire

should i do it glenn

help i'm running out of time

Personalization.

The main problem with RIYL engines is that they always pick the common denominator sonmost of the time it will recommend you something you already know. Oh so you like "Calvin Harris?" Here's songs by Avicii, Galantis and David Guetta which you probably already know.

I've very rarely discovered anything exciting or new through any songs' radio or my personal recommendations.

I've discovered lots through DW but I had become lazy & terrible at discovering things through any other sources.

yeah DW is a great tool and the ease of use makes it pretty serious competition for all other sources :O

Dw has been pretty good at going, "Oh, you like alternate versions and remixes? Here are a few that you wouldn't have even thought to look for."

My Release Radar from last week is sitting right there cheek by jowl next to my Release Radar from this week. Help! I'm caught in a time loop!

Sorry if Glenn has already gone into this upthread, but I'm guessing the repetition that everyone reports with DW (though you can have weeks of genuinely novel stuff) is down to Artist/Song not being a sufficiently unique way of identifying something? So if, song X by artist Y is on the original LP, the deluxe reissue (where it's 10sec longer), some "Back to Mine" comp, an artist best-of comp, a genre best-of comp - that's five unique objects on Spotify, and you may eventually get all of them if they're referenced on public playlists. This is the only way I can explain something like getting the 7" and LP versions of *the same song* in one week's playlist. The metadata is different for those entries.

I think I may have finally had every possible release of "Temporary Secretary", which is why I haven't heard it for a few months ;)

We do attempt to deduplicate recordings, not tracks, so you aren't supposed to get literally the same audio more than once. But stuff doesn't always works right, especially over time...

I had no idea until today that my Spotify library had a maximum capacity but according to the Android app it does and I've just hit it.

― Matt DC, Thursday, April 14, 2016 6:41 AM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's not just an offline limit - even if you don't have a saved album available offline it still counts toward your Your Music 10k limit

well if that's the case it's pretty ridiculous. on ios it doesn't even tell you about any limit, it just stops downloading, and then you leave the house to find half an album/playlist is not there.

― Autumn Almanac, Friday, April 15, 2016 12:37 AM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have an iphone and got the message...tho I got it when i was just saving something (a notification popped up), I wasn't toggling the save offline switch on something I had already saved.

Anyway I can see some reason why they'd decide to cap music saved offline but music that's saved online only is basically a collection of shortcuts, idg why that's capped. Especially since that cap doesn't extend to playlists; so all the functionality did was make me unsave a bunch of albums, then add them back as playlists. Not sure what the point of that is...

― musically, Friday, April 15, 2016 12:56 AM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

caps might have made sense a few years ago when streaming services weren't the centre of the music industry. now that it's ~the way~ so many people use music, the limit is just an archaic pain in the arse, and i'm surprised spotify still has it. i've mentioned this itt before but i'm pretty sure no other major service limits to ~3,300 offline songs.

― Autumn Almanac, Friday, April 15, 2016 1:31 AM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Been a premium (family) Spotify user since the beginning and just reached my 10k max yesterday. Since they got rid of stars I found a way to use the plus sign in a similar fashion. I have no desire to change how I go about using Spotify again and re-organizing all the work I've already put into it. Sure I can delete some songs, maybe even 1,000+ of them, but that wont solve the problem long term as I will fill it up again soon enough. Very frustrated and now I'm looking into alternatives.

Spent a bunch of time on the spotify forums on this topic and this is their response to the uproar:

Updated: 2016-09-17

Hello everyone. Staff here.

At the moment we don’t have plans to extend the Your Music limit. The reason is because less than 1% of users reach it. The current limit ensures a great experience for 99% of users instead of an "OK" experience for 100%.

We are keeping a close eye on the votes and comments. Please continue to post your feedback.

That's maybe the worst response I can imagine, outside of a "lol f u, morons"

hmmm it does make sense that a feature interesting for >1% of users isn't top priority but I wonder how losing the cap would affect general service (perhaps it's that it would require lots of development for the app to handle larger libraries?)

Uhm that's supposed to be a less sign

im sure that number is growing as more and more people will be reaching the max

it would be nice if there were a tier where you could get a higher cap, but I'm not really upset about it since that 10,000 song limit has been pretty clear from the start

was it?

It's definitely something I knew about when I initially signed up, which was when the app first became available in the US.

I had no clue til the above posts a year ago and even then i just figured it was so dumb it would be done away with soon enough.

At the moment we don’t have plans to extend the Your Music limit. The reason is because less than 1% of users reach it. The current limit ensures a great experience for 99% of users instead of an "OK" experience for 100%.

haha wow. that "less than 1% of users" (i.e. half a million people) would be the hardcore ones spotify would rather keep, no?

i defected to apple music because of this idiotic limit and i've since almost forgotten spotify is a thing.

i mean "it's only half a million people" is basically the reason we still don't have marriage equality here. as excuses for arbitrary restrictions go, it's dumb.

spotify presumably would prefer non-hardcore listeners since the 1% listens to the most music (and forces spotify to pay out the most royalties) whereas the casual listener pays the same amount every month and costs significantly less

true, but imposing a limit the user isn't even told about isn't the best way of going about that. currently people are downloading albums/playlists, going out and discovering their songs were never downloaded. the app doesn't tell you the limit was breached or even how close you are to the limit.

Also I'd be willing to pay more and I bet plenty of the hardcores would be willing as well.

even then it seems dumb to ask people to pay more just to do what every other service does. it's not even a cost issue, it's just a local cache. i'm guessing it's a licensing issue they never got sorted.

^^^ ding ding ding

(my guess as well)

Possibly so.

It's not a licensing issue.

glenn! do you know more?

I know just enough more to be frustrated that I'm not allowed to explain the technical details, but not enough that my explanation would be coherent or complete. It's not due to legality or laziness, though, it's really a technical issue.

Fair. But can you say if it's something they are trying to change and/or discussing or should I move on?

It's not going to change any time soon.

That's a bummer.

thx glenn

Is there something glitchy going on for anyone else with the mobile device connections? Spotify will just randomly switch from playing on my desktop to my phone even when I don't have the app up on the phone. It's starting to get really annoying, especially in the office.

that has always been a bit hard to control. Sonos fixed the family plan issue if you want to listen to two different accounts on different speakers, but still does not work if you want to mix sonos, headphones, or car, etc. Still need offline mode for that.

I guess you used to be able to view playlists by album, but no longer?

my favorite thing about spottily currently is the commercial where the lady groans "THE EMAILS"

Getting IA with this more and more. Downloaded a 200 song playlist at home through wifi, so it'd be available for me on the road. Accidentally tapped the 'download' button when on said road, ticking it from green (on) to grey (off). When I ticked it on again it started to try to download the whole bloody playlist again, it had been erased. Sigh

This week's Discover Weekly has five tracks from last week's Discover Weekly. Perhaps I'm listening to too much DW and it's eating its own tail?