Spotify - anyone heard of it?

then i guess people will stop using it

i don't get what your point is. spotify is horrible from a bugginess perspective, but it's an amazing value. it's transformed my life, really, as i no longer have to waste time hunting down torrents

the general sluggishness of spotify does annoy me but

a) a lot of this is due to my laptop, which is a piece of shit; spotify honestly isn't THAT much slower than, say, chrome and
b) unlike iTunes, which is equally sluggish, there is not a reasonable substitute that I've liked

i don't get what your point is. spotify is horrible from a bugginess perspective, but it's an amazing value. it's transformed my life, really, as i no longer have to waste time hunting down torrents

I went back to torrenting after some time using Spotify because too much of the stuff I wanted was unavailable. There isn't much hunting to do.

that's probably a fun thing to say, but it's also not true for a large number of people

xp it's much easier to only have to hunt down the unavailable stuff as opposed to everything you want to listen to which is how it used to be

it isn't "easier" as in "less difficult" so much as "less tedious" -- there's enough stuff I listen to that isn't on spotify that I do find myself hunting for downloads/used CDs/etc on an overly regular basis, but spotify has proven immeasurably useful for those times I think "man, I really want to listen to ____" but never bought the CD, or when I think "crap, I need to relisten to ____ for this review, I forgot what it even sounds like"

Speaking as a Spotify (or Rdio) user, the transformational thing for me is being able to listen to playlists full of things I would never even consider taking the time to track down individually, and might not know where to even start. I could go listen to 2 hrs of Finnish hip hop right now. Or I might change my mind after 30 minutes and switch to Eurovision entries or whatever came out on Profound Lore that I haven't heard yet. Or whatever is hot in a Philippine city I've never even heard of. It's like you're saying walking isn't that much slower than skateboarding, but that's not a skateboard, it's a rocket board with landing gear.

you're right glenn but spotify's ux needs to make those journeys apparent

I've never really listened to playlists made by anyone other than me, ILM users, or rl friends but I adore premium Spotify.

but ffs sake why limit yourself to one or the other? Slsk is still a lovely tool, and I am still buying new and old lovely vinyl + cds

you're right glenn but spotify's ux needs to make those journeys apparent

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, April 3, 2015 6:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, this part is very true. Spotify definitely began as a searchable database, and has been slowly embracing the idea that we need to do a lot more for most people than just sit and wait for their queries. Acquiring an editorial team was one big step in this direction. Acquiring the Echo Nest was another. These elements are starting to come together, but there's much more coming, and much much more to do...

I thought I found a way to star songs again. If I play Spotify through my roku, it still has the starred option. But it didn't sync up with the playlist :((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7644/16855841089_bafc1de173_z.jpg

yeah, ever since I got a roku and attempted to refresh my starred list, it got completely out-of-sync and now I can't load the starred list on any device or my computer.

Thanks, Obama.

Thankfully, I don't seem to have broken anything. Losing my starred playlist would be devastating. That's how I listen to music 90% of the time.

Weird bug that's started to happen - when I pull a full album into a playlist, the tracks don't stay in order. (artist/album stays together but the individual tracks within an album get jumbled up.)

If you're that worried about it, Jeff, you should probably make a "backup" playlist and just drag all your starred tracks into it.

Good idea. Better safe than sorry.

better write it all down as well

and post it into an ilx thread bc this place will outlive us all

Been trying for months to buy premium in Western Canada... they won't take my postal code. Even tweeted the CEO about it, the red-headed stepchild that I am. Intentionally annoying ads take on new meaning when you're in this position.

Support is probably a better bet than tweeting Daniel Ek. @SpotifyCares if using Twitter is important.

Latest update just gives me endless spinning dots and no music when I try to open any playlist. Am definitely going back to an older version as of right now.

I can always fix spinning dot issues by closing and reopening

has never not worked

Tried that 4 times, no luck, so fuck it.

:-(

Sorry, didnt mean to be rude to you! Just sick of nu spotify. The old version is so refreshingly qui k.

has anyone WITHOUT facebook integration ever successfully sent a song to a spotify friend?

i.e. you are listening to a song you like, you want to send to one of your spotify friends, you hit the "...", you hit "share", you hit "send to..." you hit "select people" and..... nothing. there is a search box, but no matter what you type it says "no results".

it's been like this for at least two years.

They should probably replace whoever is in charge of UX immediately. They moved the Queue link a while ago and replaced it with a completely non-intuitive icon in a completely different place. Took me ages to find.

i'm trying spotify premium out for a month so i'm using it more often than i usually do. i realize this must have been discussed upthread, but they are really fucking things up with however they're choosing to collect their metadata, specifically the album release dates. example: the psychedelic sounds of the 13th floor elevators - 2012. i'm not a complete fool, i understand they just decided to go with the year of the most recent re-issue of the album as the year, and that these kinds of policies, while hilariously stupid on a small scale, can simplify things considerably when they have to deal with metadata for millions with albums. but it's only going to get more and more difficult to fix this (if they ever try to fix it) as time goes on, right?

i suppose few people care, but i wonder how it might change the experience of getting into and understanding music for the youngest people who maybe have grown up using only spotify and their shitty metadata (complemented with youtube uploads which often lack any context at all). whenever i listen to music, i have to know the year it comes out. it's just essential information. it helps me to make sense of the sound of it, both from within the artist's own output as well as within genres, recording advances, drum sounds, etc etc. maybe terrible spotify metadata leads to decreasing importance of those things? not saying it's a bad thing necessarily, it's just different.

As satisfying as it is to blame Spotify for that, the metadata (and especially the dates) all comes from the labels, for whom release dates have other significances than just discography. We (Spotify) do put a fair amount of effort into trying to clean this stuff up, but it's a very big task, and there's no magic solution.

u should crowdsource the solution. give ppl a button where they can report category errors. i was thinking spotify could really benefit from a tagging system too - like last.fm has - i bet that would tag up the library with countries + genres really quickly

I can also say from Echo Nest experience pre-Spotify that this problem is not only not unique to Spotify, but remains hard even if you have more than one service to compare.

Most of the time it's like you say, old albums with newer dates on them from having been reissued. But there are also plenty of errors in the other direction, like Christina Aguilera songs marked as 1961. Music metadata is a giant quagmire. It's a small wonder anything is ever right, and a large wonder if anything from earlier than 2006 or so is right!

(Crowdsourcing corrections is an idea with potential, but nowhere close to free...)

xpost

so i see that you heard of spotify! ;)

not blaming spotify for the metadata itself - i realize it comes from the labels, and having worked in a position where i had to be the gatekeeper of a small chunk of metadata for a large organization, i understand what a colossal, complicated undertaking it is. my first thought was that perhaps you the metadata template you provide to labels could be modified to add an element covering the first time the music was released ("original release date"), while keeping the current element for when the label released the music. to use 13th floor elevators again, the original release date would be 1966, the reissue release date would be 2012. putting the onus on the label seems more efficient than trying to clean it up afterward. the labels would still occasionally mess up it up and you'd have to correct it before adding the album to spotify, but at least you'd be in the role of doing QA rather than doing the research and data entry.

also if you're a label reissuing an album and you need to spend more than 5 seconds to remember what year the music was originally released, then maybe don't deserve to be on the internet anyway

glenn correct me if i'm wrong but my impression is that a lot of the adding to the spotify library is automatized. i've seen the same album on the sorting hat page like 5 months in a row now (World Music Tour · The Culture of Traditions, Vol. 2). obv they just keep resubmitting it, maybe under different names or whatever, and it automatically gets put into the system again.

so even asking spotify to stop automating any % of that would either mean a) smaller library, b) cost more money

Yes, the field in question is, in fact, already labeled exactly "Original Release Date". And then there are separate fields for copyright and publishing dates/credits, and then also separate on-sale dates for every region. That dreamy future in which the labels "still occasionally mess it up" is the reality you are already living in. Putting the onus on the labels and post-label cleanup are not two different alternatives, they're two unavoidable steps in the same unreliable process.

Which doesn't make it any less annoying, I realize. But we're doing what we can.

xpost

And yes, we get the same albums sent to us many, many times. We try to deal with that, too.

have you considered sending around a crew of bruisers to punch people in the face when the submit bad metadata? i've often dreamed of that!

we could be those bruisers

and will later be portrayed by Jonah Hill

this whole spotify vs. tidal vs. beats streetfight makes me so glad i've stayed within my itunes comfort zone and don't have to worry about which artist's exclusivity deal lands where. i'm just really hoping that when apple x beats is complete the roll-out doesn't simply take the form of an itunes update that doesn't let me add mp3s to my library ever again (the death of the ipood classic was a dark portent)

haha ipood

you paid money for mp3s, though

idk

let's not even get into the inability of seemingly every major music service to disambiguate between artists of the same name

Of course the labels provide unique identifiers for each artist. Which everybody diligently uses when reviewing them or tweeting or whatever.

Sparks is a particularly funny example xp

Have a horrible time trying to get spotify to recognize my mobile when plugged into my computer.

Where can I sign up to be a beta tester of this horrible software? If anything it will be cathartic for me to feel like I'm giving feedback through an official channel. Or hire me as a QA tester. I'll work for cheap.