Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

I guess because they just want you to save it to your music? Makes it hard as hell to find anything.

I'll pass this feedback along to the proper people! Pretty sure any drag-and-drop issues are just temporary glitches, as I'm not aware of any desire to have people not do that. And yes, better ways to find other people's playlists should eventually come. This was kind of problematic in the past when the only way to save an album was to make it into a playlist, so there were a lot of nominal playlists that weren't really playlists. The Your Music stuff is part of the ongoing effort to put all this stuff into better shape.

(None of this is my area, personally...)

My FAVORITE part of Spotify is the crowd-sourced playlist element.

cosign x1000

I know I've moaned about this before, and I know it's totally rockist and ludditisb of me, but a better way to manage albums would be good. Like, being able to at least tag them so i don't have to scroll through my entire massive "my albums" list to find something to listen to. Just some kind of system that allows organizing albums in the same way playlists allow one to organize tracks.

I'm just starting out making playlists and it's kind of hard? I envy Moka's ability to come up with cool thematic shit like "bamboo jazz" or w/e

Cosign for the bit about needing further options in managing the albums list. This thing loses its function completely after reaching some size.

I use it almost exclusively and live in constant fear I might be the only user of this feature because it feels so needlessly underdeveloped and unloved.

exactly!

I blame spotify for me never listening to albums anymore.

Thanks, Glenn. I appreciate your hanging in here on this thread. Having been the "company shill" on the Kindle thread, I feel your pain.

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.

― glenn mcdonald, Thursday, December 4, 2014 2:16 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is really interesting. I'm frustrated by the lack of underlying justification for the metrics he uses, though. The "chartland vs nicheland" charts take the top 100 sellers as the definition of mainstream. What would the chart look like if we took the top 500? Are those extra 400 songs really much more "niche" overall? Here's 200-204 in the current iTunes chart:

200. The Veronicas - If You Love Someone
201. Katy Perry - This Is How We Do
202. Bruno Mars - Locked Out of Heaven
203. George Ezra - Listen to the Man
204. Bruno Mars - When I Was Your Man

There's also the issue of different audiences. Wal-Mart's audience is about as mainstream as it gets. Rhapsody's about as music-nerd as it gets. It stands to reason that any chart you could make comparing activity between the two will show a greater appetite for going farther afield in Rhapsody, which has nothing to do with the size of the catalog.

The UI makes me want to claw somebody's eyes out on a daily basis.

if anyone wants to know what i liked this year, both old and new, it's on this playlist
http://open.spotify.com/user/matthelgeson/playlist/0ah1waMa42AwR8t1sfI9wq
― you say tomato/i say imago (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday,

I can click on this and get the playlist on a web page, and I can hit "Play on Spotify" and the songs will play in the Spotify app, but the playlist will not display in that app. Happened with the above playlist and also with the P-Funk results playlist. "View All On Spotify" at the bottom of the playlist (on the web) does nothing.

Also, multiple windows in the Spotify app would be nice.

Also, multiple windows in the Spotify app would be nice.

oh god yes

last update to the iphone app messed-up all my local files and I'd get an error whenever I tried to play em. uninstalled and installed again, and after re-syncing them all, they're back but all the artwork is gone. again. grr.

fwiw you can cut addresses like http://open.spotify.com/user/matthelgeson/playlist/0ah1waMa42AwR8t1sfI9wq and paste them into the search window and the playlist should come up

This is a good addition: http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/11/spotify-top-tracks/

year in music is neat. apparently the genres I listened to this year were Ambient, Art Rock, Experimental, Electronic, Hauntology. My top album was an old pop ambient that I don't recall listening to much this year at all. 42,497 minutes of listening to spotify in total.

glenn, is there any public API for getting genres for a particular track/artist/album?

was thinking of maybe building genre top 10s from the ILM poll results

i think albums now auto-stay in the recently added sorting which means I can stop making constant playlists everytime a new album to listen to