Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

You can get genre info for artists from the Echo Nest API. For single artists you can also just type them in the search box on everynoise.com (which does the same API call).

"Recently played" is a tiny fantastic addition.

Oh cool, I'll look into using the Echo Nest API. xp

Just noticing now that I can control the music playing on my iphone using the desktop app. Is this new?

actually, it's not quite so functional as that. nvm.

Be careful controlling Spotify from a second device. AT&T called me to say stop tethering based on that behavior.

this is one of the better developments on spotify, unplug yr headphones from yr laptop and into yr phone & it continues playing

it used to be that you could listen to local files thru spotify even while a different device is playing music from the service itself. this was super convenient bc i use spotify as my main music player and that meant i could just switch to local files when my wife was listening. this is no longer so :(

I think I can still do this?

without pausing the other account?

Ah, I see. No, you're right.

If the one that is playing offline content is actually offline, it still works. There's probably a simple way to block traffic from Spotify while you're doing this, but I don't know how to do it off the top of my head.

One of my fav things about Sonos is being able to play different things on Spotify in 3 different rooms.

god i miss it when i'd get advance auto parts ads and similar bullshit, now spotify is recommending music during the ads which is even worse tbh

INDIE ROCK YOU MUST KNOW ABOUT

GUSTER

i always want to throw a five dollar bill at my computer when i hear someone complain about ads on spotify

that's fair

You can get genre info for artists from the Echo Nest API. For single artists you can also just type them in the search box on everynoise.com (which does the same API call).

― glenn mcdonald, Saturday, December 13, 2014 5:22 PM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hey glenn, just a heads-up that I sent you an email about the logistics of using Echo Nest for the ILM poll. I'm never sure whether people check the email accounts they provide for ILX...

I do.

So, I deactivated my Facebook account yesterday and I logged in to Spotify not with the LOG IN WITH FACEBOOK feature but I did use the same username and p/w and then found this had reactivated my FB account. I changed the p/w on my FB account and then deactivated it again thinking I could use the old p/w with Spotify but I couldnt. Looking at other forums, it looks like a like it or lump scenario and I have to have FB active to use Spotify since I originally set it up thru FB. Any tips? I cant contact the Spotify help team as I cant log in either.

That's why you need an alt fb account

I can still use Spotify Web Player though

What I don't se mentioned here that miffs me (and I'd love to hear why they did this/any hack to change it back) is the UI change they did last month that got rid of the Top Lists in the sidebar. When you clicked on this it would give you a massive list (I wanna say top 200) of the most popular songs on the left, albums on the right, and you could filter it by region etc.

The new Top Lists they have are more varied and genre specific, but they only include 50 songs and none of them really replicate the original features or content of the old format.

The charts section is undergoing a revamp, and there will be more coming, but in the meantime you might enjoy my set of per-country playlists showing the most distinctively popular songs in each country:

http://everynoise.com/countrysounds.html

Unlike the old per-region charts, which were based on raw stream-counts and thus tended to be dominated most or entirely by global hits in slightly different orders, these tend to have a lot more music that's actually unique and representative of the country in question...