Spotify - anyone heard of it?

you still don't actually have much leverage when you do that unless you are taylor swift and can hold back the single most in demand album of the year. when consumers have a sea of hundreds of thousands of things to choose from, everything is devalued. how many individual books could disappear from the NYPL without anyone noticing?

I kind of dont agree with that, the strength of the library is the library itself not any one book, and priviledging any one book or song or artist is ossifying for me, taking the tree out of the forest and saying look at this one tree. It doesnt devalue a tree that there are other trees.

Anyway for me its not so much about what taylor swift does or doesnt do, thats her own business, its the entitlement of those that feel they are somehow owed the music they want in the format they want

This thing is up now: https://www.spotify-yearinmusic.com/index.html

Top artists: 1) Steely Dan 2) Future Islands 3) Paramore 4) Owen Pallett 5) Beck. Lots of ILX thread influence there...

more like whitify amiwite?

curious what the metric was for the personal top 5 albums - was it number of tracks from an album? times you played the whole thing? the five albums i got suggested there might not have been five albums i played all the way through this year

hey glenn can you tell me how off my numbers are? i.e. 40K albums = 90% of streams?

I think you're overestimating the dominance of the hits. Paul Lamere looked at then-current numbers in some detail last year:

http://musicmachinery.com/2013/11/23/revisiting-the-long-tail/

The top ~200k-ish songs at the time accounted for only 80% of plays, and longitudinal data suggested that listening was getting less concentrated over time, not more.

33K minutes of listening time this year for me. Thought it would be more but I'll trust their numbers.

53.784k for me. I apparently average 5 hrs every Wednesday.

ha, glenn did you create all of the genre playlists?

Yes, in the sense that I wrote the code that produces them.

awesome. does your code generate the "play it forward" list as well? is this the first year for "your year in music"? maybe I just missed it previously. anyway, it's great and better than last.fm in many ways. It'd be cool if even more stats became available in the future.

No, I didn't do the Play It Forward thing, and I don't know how it works. Mine was odd.

They did a less-elaborate thing last year, before we got acquired. And yes, more stats would be cool. Stay tuned.

Haha - according to Spotify my favorite genres are Warm Drone, Drone, Ambient, Glitch... and Freak Folk.

My top two songs of the year are Angel Olsen's "Unfucktheworld"... and "Monster Mash". Thanks to my son on that last one.

where does this info live?

I couldn't get the page to work, assumed it was premium only or some side effect of running Noscript on Firefox

I think that only some of the stats are limited to premium, so it is likely the latter.

googled my way there. 60k minutes listening. my most listened songs weirdly swayed by doing singles jukebox and with the music i listen to when i jog; way more pop and rap represented than what i remember listening to this year.

snootie wild "made me" as #1 song of the year all too accurate tho

I had to turn Ghostery off to load the year in music page, fair to assume it doesn't play well with blockers in general

My top genres are art rock, r-neg-b, experimental, balearic, new wave. Couldn't crack the 40k-minutes barrier, maybe next year!

31% grave wave - don't know what that is exactly, but sounds about right to me

It worked better for me in Safari than in Chrome

my total was just under 25k minutes

Top 5 artists and albums are amusingly inaccurate, unless maybe I've forgotten leaving that Charlie Christian Genius of the Electric Guitar album on repeat for a few days ... almost none of the albums I listened to multiple times show up, while others I played once make the list

The top songs list seems slightly more representative but omits most of the tracks I had in heavy rotation in the last two months, a period during which I increased my use of Spotify quite a bit

not really complaining -- this is a neat feature and I look forward to geeking out on more stats in the future

i want to lodge a protest about corny indie fuxxor not being a genre in this

I had to turn Ghostery off to load the year in music page, fair to assume it doesn't play well with blockers in general

― death in Skegness (seandalai), donderdag 4 december 2014 10:44 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Same here. Could not get it to work. Had to turn off AdBlocker, Ghostery, Disconnect and Privacy Badger for it to work lol

6k listening, mostly pop and hiphop, which indeed is what I use Spotify for most. My listening is scattered over Spotify, iTunes and vinyl.

mine
http://i.imgur.com/Y9mMQc1.png
http://i.imgur.com/9u81R8Q.png

I listen mostly to my vinyl and cd's now but I still get good value from Spotify Premium but sadly Soundrop and all the other apps are getting killed off on dec 31st.

Most of the time I listened to my starred playlist, 2,390 songs on random. I skip a lot, but I never skip a NOFX or Blink 182 song. Judge me if you wish. Also lol @ Sixteen Tons showing up in my most played song.

Artists
1. NOFX
2. Blink 182
3. Chiddy Bang
4. Caribou
5. Kris Menace

Albums
1. Infinity + 1 - A-Trak
2. Idiosyncrasies - Kris Menace
3. War on Errorism - NOFX
4. Boston - Boston
5. Pump Up The Valuum - NOFX

Songs
1. Idiots Are Taking Over - NOFX
2. Do This Thing - Blänk
3. Take Two Placebos And Call Me Lame - NOFX
4. Kaili - Caribou
5. M+M's - Blink 182
6. Backwards Walk - Frightened Rabbit
7. Mattersville - NOFX
8. Sixteen Tons - Tennessee Ernie Ford
9. Dammit - Blink 182
10. Little Girl - MSTRKRFT Edition - Death From Above 1979

Seasons
Winter - Frightened Rabbit
Spring - Kris Menace
Summer - The Who
Autumn - Caribou

89% on mobile
16,520 minutes of listening
Most active day - Friday 2 hours average

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIfu2A0ezq0

huh what now about the apps being killed off? which apps?

all apps afaik

Glenn?

Right, we're turning off the old Apps API for building things inside of the desktop client, mostly because that approach never worked for mobile, which now accounts for a huge percentage of both listeners and listening time. There's a post about it here:

https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/apps/

The new APIs let you build both web and mobile apps.

[I had nothing to do with this decision, I'm just answering the question.]

but...but...but the BLUE NOTE APPP!!!!!!

Jeff I wouldn't have been surprised if that song showed up at my house too. It's a great song! It's on my country playlist that I listen to all the time (though I guess that's on iTunes and not on Spotify.)

75K minutes for me. For some reason it says I listened to Mike Adams at His Honest Weight and Mutual Benefit more than anything else. Sort-of surprised. I did listen to those albums quite a bit, but I'm surprised that those were my top albums.

If anyone cares, here's my Top 100

actually, there were these things called magazines and "industry trades"...
--da croupier

Right, I worked in a library with music magazines and industry trades for seven years. But that information isn't free to anyone.

What I meant is that I can get all sorts of statistical information about who listens to a particular artist or genre - and what they listen to alongside it - just by browsing a site. It's not the sort of information a magazine would publish because it doesn't conform to market stereotypes.

It's important to me because I hope the younger generations will not experience to mean-spiritedness and prejudice and melodrama over music taste that I experienced as a kid.

And if you are trying to gauge effectiveness of some type of marketing campaign, you can do it, even as a small band, which is cool. Ok, definitely not "cool," but useful.

I'm really enjoying my "play it forward" playlist for what it's worth...

I lol'ed when I started mine blindly and pulse demon-era merzbow started blastin my brains

according to spotify i listened to 29% freak folk, 20% pop, 19% reggae, 19% roots reggae, and 16% world - i didn't realize i listened to so much reggae??

my genre breakdown was 100% prefix-rock, which was funny considering more than 50% of my top ten tracks would be qualified as NOT rock (i.e., bruno mars, robin thicke, pitbull, etc)

as cute as the review is i think i still prefer last.fm

it's a bit weird that they don't let you share your year with other spotify users easily. I guess it's better marketing for them if you share on facebook, twitter, etc.

you can no longer drag an album into a playlist
WTF

I still miss starring. MOTHERFUCKERS.

Glenn, do something about this.

Drag failure seems like more of a bug? Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Only works if I pull up a track and drag the album title from that.
Either a bug or trying to push people to the "Add To" buttons

I'd love to hear the rationalization behind the latest UI moves. It's been kind-of driving me crazy.

1. No more drag an album title to create playlist.
2. No more starring.
3. Weird insistence around having to add stuff to "my music."
4. No user playlist discovery in the mobile apps, and even trying to find a user or playlist is hard-to-impossible. And there's not even a simple way to browse the people that you are following (AFAICT, maybe I'm missing something?).

Not sure what is driving this. My FAVORITE part of Spotify is the crowd-sourced playlist element. Much more so than a computer algorithm-generated radio station. I end up having to use the Playlists.net app a lot in the desktop client, but I guess that'll be going away (?) and it was never there in the mobile app.

Other things I'd really like:

1. "Watchlist" or "smart playlist," where I could have an auto-updating playlist based on a search string.
2. A way to sort user's playlists by creation date.
3. A way for people to be able to create mixes with crossfades/beat-matching and share them. This one might be tough in terms of copyright (not sure about this), but man that would be sweet.

the no-drag-album thng really sucks