Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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.

I suspect part of the problem is Spotify doesn't handle large local file libraries well. The functions more or less normally until I try and access local files then the whole thing becomes an unresponsive piece of shit.

except local file libraries work great in older versions!

yeah I won't pay for spotify or any other service until they get the metadata thing solved---because I am silly I have spent a lot of time cleaning up my itunes library and if I could integrate that into some streaming service then that could work (maybe itunes beats w/e?) but I hate using the spotify client as it is today.

I've got used to working around spotify's shortcomings but while we're complaining about it, another issue is the [un]navigability of artists with big discographies, especially older artists with material which has been reissued in x number of compilations. there's all this effort to curate playlists etc. but there are lots of individual artists with hundreds of hours of recordings which are very difficult to wade through. someone like duke ellington is not well-served by arranging things by album & some sort of organized timeline way of looking through/filtering his recordings would be so much more user-friendly but I suspect we're doomed to have 18 versions of the same recording and an unusable compilations section

crowdsourcing, btw, would also be great for being able to somehow downvote shitty rerecorded versions of things so they fall to the bottom of search results, but I don't see any way to make that happen without it also turning into conservatives downvoting all rap music or whatever.

That's unlikely - look at RYM which is also based on crowdsourcing/voting and def doesn't downvote rap.

Well, maybe not that, but some other possible downsides I guess? I basically would only trust this feature if it was used only by ILM types.

ilm types downvoting all rock and indie?

while i am completely sympathetic to the urge to see crappy re-recordings blasted out of our way, they aren't just an annoyance for nerds like us - they represent independent record companies and artists looking for more income and rights. so even if spotify hadn't given equity to the majors - which would make vamoosing Cleopatra/Purple Pyramid type companies potential grounds for a collusion lawsuit - they're kind of a necessary evil if you actually care about things like artists rights

though again, as someone who's made more than his fair share of oldies playlists, i'd probably pop a beer if k-tel's redone crapola magically disappeared

someone like duke ellington is not well-served by arranging things by album & some sort of organized timeline way of looking through/filtering his recordings would be so much more user-friendly

well, quite, and the death of spotify apps makes me wonder if we've not just taken a huge step backwards

eh i really don't mind that aspect, i'm ok with spotify not being a music encyclopedia. the rest of the internet is pretty good at that.

organizing by dropdown tabs by label for each artist would go a long way towards making navigation easier.

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

a lot of labels list the current year as the original release date for reissues on purpose, for any number of reasons -- chief among them, i have always assumed, being that it forces the album to show up on top of an artist's discography in online services. labels aren't stupid. they know what they're doing.

i've worked at a couple streaming services, and cleaning up labels' metadata mistakes, omissions and white lies could be a full-time job for an army of humans, and they'd still never catch up.

organizing by dropdown tabs by label for each artist would go a long way towards making navigation easier.

that actually sounds like a nightmare to me. if i'm looking for a certain frank sinatra or duke ellington or guided by voices album, i don't want to have to go through five tabs trying to figure out which label put that one out.

but some kind of organizational system would definitely help. some of those long discographies are all but impossible to navigate. but i get that it isn't easy for services to do. that's manual labor. plus it requires making all sorts of subjective decisions that any two random music geeks could spend their lifetime arguing about. if a service could figure out a way to do it with crowdsourcing, yeah, maybe that.