Spotify - anyone heard of it?

What even is offline listening for? Air travel?

Subway travel. Not using cellular data when you are not on wifi.

ah ok, that's pretty useful then

Yeah and it doesn't eat at your data.

I have only ever starred tracks by accident.

Got the update and it does indeed skip tracks much faster. Still doesn't show any artwork in offline mode, I suspect that won't change.

Starred tracks are pretty important to me because they are the only way for me to play my big master playlist on Roku.

Haven't yet found a way to dump a large amount of songs, like a whole playlist, into Your Music. How would I do this? I don't want to build it from scratch since I already have a favorites list.

dunno about iphone but the ipad interface hasn't really changed, all the "starred" stuff is unchanged.
However, i clicked the 3rd button from the left on a track (window with a plus sign) and it obviously did *something* to the track or put it somewhere but hell if i know what happened.

i wish album covers on desktop were as big as they are on mobile.

They are smaller on my iPod touch than on my wife's iPhone

ah i meant ipad specifically, you get CD sized album covers on the ipad app. i keep forgetting that most people probably use spotify primarily on their phones.

If you click on one track in a playlist, you can select them all with command-A, and then drag them all at once into Your Music...

hmm, I'll need to look into this. Part of my problem was that I didn't see Your Music as a playlist in the menu on my desktop. Maybe I need to first add something to it and then it will show up?

Ok this starred thing is bumming me out. Why take away a popular feature just because you think people should be using the product differently? Your fucking with people's workflow.

I'd guess that the GUI and underlying code are closely intertwined. As spotify scales, they have to decide which features are sustainable. So it was probably more of a painful but necessary decision.

hard to understand why they'd get rid of stars, since that was one of the only things I missed when i switched to Rdio.

they didn't really get rid of it. it's just one more click away.

yeah i made a "Favorites" playlist on Rdio but goddamn that extra click...

they really wanted to emphasize this new feature, i think.

"we can't have a plus sign AND a star"

Having copied the tracks from my starred playlist over to the new "Your Music" section I've gotta say that I really have no problem with this. The "Songs" playlist is identical to my starred playlist but I now have the second option of browsing a pretty-looking rundown of all the artists included. Not sure when exactly I'll take up that option, but it's kind of interesting for the acts where I have no idea what they look like. The albums view is worse than useless because of how much stuff there is, but given that the "Songs" playlist looks and functions exactly like the old starred playlist it's hard to get too annoyed by this. Just another facelift

Can you set that songs playlist to Offline?

Ah yeah, realising that I'm probably not a good bellwether re: is this a good idea or not and I probably should have read the complaints of others more carefully. I gave up on the iPhone app ages ago and have very little interest in making any of this stuff available offline. But upon closer inspection, no you can't and a cursory google reveals that people are fucking pissed about it. Eh, well I'm happy enough with the new set-up anyway

you can keep using the 'starred' playlist for offline. then drag the starred playlist to 'your songs' every once in awhile. it won't add the same song twice.

actually, the better flow for people who miss starring is to use the '+' as the star. then just go to your 'Songs' in 'Your Music', ctrl+A and drag to your starred playlist every once in awhile

but, yeah, that's really easy on the desktop. less easy to do if you use wifi on your phone to do all of this.

ok, this Your Music thing is confusing the hell out of me. On my desktop, I dragged all the songs from a playlist to the Songs list. I thought that would mean that the artists and albums from the Songs list would show up on the Artists and Albums lists, but I guess that's not how it works. To make it more confusing, adding those songs to the Songs list on my desktop did not also cause them to be added to the Songs list on my iPod.

So on my desktop, Artists and Albums are blank. On my iPod, all of my followed artists show up in Artists, but without any songs because I apparently haven't saved anything to Your Music.

WTF?

yeah, it does seem to be a bit broken

I too am confused.

there seems to be a new wrinkle where if I search for a song and then try to drag it into a playlist, I can't do it. But if I click on the name of the album then locate the track in the album track list I can add it from there. Adds an annoying amount of time to playlist-making.

I liked the idea of being able to browse my music by artist or album, but I guess Your Music can't really do this without jumping through lots of hoops, which is weird because that's a pretty basic function in most players.

The way I used to find a particular artist or album was to use the search bar on a playlist. This still kind of works except that now once your music is playing and you maximize the song graphics, it cancels out your search.

Has someone made one of those Spotify pie charts showing how much of their budget goes to software engineers and how much to lawyers.

what's this dragging things from the desktop?? you people are nuts

U gotta triple-click the icons

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/27153101

Spotify has taken down a album of silence by American funk band Vulfpeck from its streaming site.

Their fourth record, Sleepify, is 10 tracks of silence which they encouraged fans to stream on repeat overnight.

The idea was aimed at generating money so that the band could go on tour and not charge admission fees.

On their Facebook page, they announced that they had been asked to remove the album because it broke Spotify's terms of content.

The band's keyboard player and drummer Jack Stratton says he asked his father for advice when he got the request.

"He said, 'Don't mess with these guys, they're huge.'

"But that's the whole narrative. We're just these little guys in their billion dollar scheme.

"So I get pumped up but then it's like, 'Don't mess with them.'"

Spotify has refused to comment.

The company recently said it pays an average of $0.007 per play, according to figures on its website Spotify Artists which is aimed specifically at musicians.

Explaining its business model, Spotify said it had paid more than $1bn (£612m) in royalties since its 2008 launch.

Vulfpeck's response to Spotify's removal of Sleepify also includes a three-track EP, posted on the streaming site, called Official Statement.

The first track, #Hurt, includes a message from Jack Stratton which says: "About 5 minutes ago I received an email from Spotify.

"The gist of it was that, while they enjoy Sleepify and thought it was funny and clever, it violated their terms of content.

"So I don't know what's going to happen with it - it's very uncertain at the moment.

"And in light of that uncertainly I want to take 30 seconds silence to ponder the uncertainty."

The message is then followed by, #Reflect, which is 31 seconds of silence and Parted Sea (Strong Pesach), which is an instrumental keyboard track.

10 tracks of silence which they encouraged fans their friends to stream on repeat overnight.

"We're just the little guys trying to game the system."

these guys got NPR coverage for this thing weeks ago

Not to mention ILX coverage!

which makes it real imo

Just play any album with the speakers off for fucksake

> these guys got NPR coverage for this thing weeks ago

That was for putting the album up, this is for Spotify issuing a takedown. Which counts as news imo

i meant that the npr stories probably brought their scheme to spotify's attention

ha, that'd be ironic.

i can't believe spotify's 'terms of content' covered this.

> Spotify said it had paid more than $1bn (£612m) in royalties since its 2008 launch.

sounds impressive, but out of how much though?

http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#how-we-pay-royalties-overview

There's lots more detail, but the short answer is that about 70% of Spotify revenue is used to pay for music, and 30% to fund running Spotify.

ty glenn

One interesting bit of Spotify conscience/ego is that they (we, but this predates my arrival) aspire to dominate streaming music, in a future where streaming music is most of music, but totally understand that if that happens, it also means that they become primarily responsible for sustaining the music industry itself, so there's something to stream.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D07NsKvi_sU

wow there are a LOT of Velvet Underground bootlegs on Spotify

yeah I just noticed that yesterday!

I think we have ilxor glenn macdonald to thank for that.

Excellent. I will now be credited/blamed here for all changes to Spotify.