Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Jon you should start a separate thread for the Universal watermarks, you have been a great source of info on that

also, yes to a separate Apple Music thread

Apple Music

official streaming versions are marred by universal music group watermarks. E.g. The steely dan catalog

wait what is this? I have never heard of this

― WE WANT FET WAP (Stevie D(eux)), Tuesday, June 30, 2015 11:31 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in a nutshell because I have trouble typing much these days due to repetitive stress injury:

everything supplied to the digital domain (itunes, spotify, emusic, HDTracks, Amazon, etc) by all UMG labels (Decca, ECM, Motown, Arista, Geffen, etc) had this 'watermarking' in it which was supposed to be benign and inaudible but in fact was horribly audible especially on cymbals, acoustic guitars, pianos and backing vocals. Not sure of the exact mechanism but it sounds like a notch on a specific frequency that oscillates on and off. Basically makes certain vulnerable timbres sound underwatery. The tech was supposed to let UMG be able to tell where illegally shared files were originally purchased from. Laughably, the only place you could buy undistorted files was from UMG's own digital store.

Where UMG supplied lossless source files to the digital vendors (some of them work this way, I know emusic would get lossless files from UMG and then encode them), the watermarks were in those lossless files already.

Starting sometime in mid-2013, to my ear anyway, they either stopped this practice or switched to a new setting which really is inaudible. I have not heard the distortion on any UMG stuff added to the digital domain since about june 2013. (This includes new reissue/box set configurations of stuff they'd already put up in the watermark era)

That leaves an immense immense amount of catalog still sounding like shit, though. I have not done a relisten to things like Steely Dan in a while to see if maybe UMG did a mass reup of unwatermarked files. I guess I assumed they have not since it would be such a big task, but I should check.

Anyways, this has never been officially acknowledged by UMG or any digital vendor (I have to think the vendors were really angry), but AFAIC it's a fact. It was driving me crazy just by ear for about a year until I searched around online and found people with better tech skills than me who'd been hearing the same thing who'd figured it out.

just did a relisten to three UMG tracks which were definitely awful last time.

Steely Dan - Countdown to Ecstasy - My Old School - it's still evident on the backing vox and saxes when they have longer notes. Doesn't sound quite as hideous as I remember but it's there. Reminiscent of 128kbps mp3 compression. Unable to stop myself, I compared all the versions of this song on spotify. The ones from the Show Biz Kids and Definitive Steely Dan comps are the same. BUT the Citizen Steely Dan one sounds not watermarked to me...??? Maybe UMG only added the Citizen box set to the digital marketplace in the last 2 years? Moving on to "Your Gold Teeth II" with its exposed piano writing, the Citizen version sounds good, the Katy Lied version sounds horrible, really bad fluttering in the piano decay. I guess Citizen is the way to go for your steely dan needs on spotify!

James Newton Howard - King Kong film score - first track - unbelievably distorted. Sounds like it's being performed through a fan. As bad as I remembered.

Martha Argerich - Schumann: Kinderszenen and Kreisleriana - first track of Kreisleriana - unlistenably fluttery just like before, dear god shut it off please

Conclusion based on tiny sample size: most of the watermarked shit has not been re-upped, maybe none of it (but the Citizen Steely Dan case intrigues -- I need to figure out when it was brought to the digital domain)

it's this kind of confusion that makes me miss the old mp3 days

"Tired of the old green? Try our new shade. Upgrade today."

If you've ever suspected that people in other places know about cool music you've never heard, now you can hear how right you were.

https://insights.spotify.com/us/2015/07/13/musical-map-of-the-world/

Rad!

Discover Weekly

Spotify bites back at Apple Music with weekly ‘mixtape’ playlist for each user
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/20/spotify-apple-music-weekly-mixtape-playlist

Discover Weekly will offer two hours of music based on users’ listening habits and those of similar fans

it's gone live

lol I just noticed that this morning. Saw some objectionable bullshit on there, unfollowed it immediately.

hey music services, stop trying to be me

Johnny Fever, I'm curious what kind of objectionable you mean.

This isn't my personal feature, but the point is not to be you, it's to help you hear stuff that you might not encounter on your own because you're only one of you.

There were several artists on there (Father John Misty, Bon Iver, etc) that I spend time not on Spotify badmouthing at every opportunity, and I can't figure out why they were recommended to me considering a spend a lot of time on Spotify listening to pop/alt pop/80s music/vintage funk and soul.

it's asking a bit much of spotify to know how often you bad-mouth bon iver on the internet, no?

I'm not asking them to. I'm explaining why I unfollowed their playlist.

haha glenn i know. i always bridle at algorithmic recs, no matter how good, i think it's a way of asserting my humanity

johnny fever it sounds like maybe streaming isn't for you but have you considered the curative curating connoisseurship of #VNYL and their #vibesystem?

One of the reasons I stopped using last.fm was because of their dubious recommendations. No, I do not want to listen to fucking Kajagoogoo, thank you very much.

I would do that with no hesitation at all (or a similar job anywhere else), but it's all who you know and I don't know anybody. (Though I did have a twitter exchange with one of the people at VNYL who does that when I called out their service for selling people Goodwill junk records.)

My auto-generated algorithmic playlist is actually very good - mostly acts I've not heard before, spanning a fairly representative range of the sort of current stuff I'm listen to. There are some misfires, but they're of the "I see why you would have thought that" type.

It's also vastly more on-point than Start Playlist Radio has ever managed to be.

it's not so bad! i also appreciate that it works on v 0.8.5

My Discover Weekly is pretty strongly conditioned by the fact that I use Spotify only to listen to ILX best of year playlists

In case you're wondering what Spotify thinks listeners of ILX best of 2014 playlists want to listen to, it's

DJ Dodger Stadium
Eno . Hyde
Future Brown
Hundred Waters
Wildbirds & Peacedrums
Panda Bear
18+
Tennis

If you've ever suspected that people in other places know about cool music you've never heard, now you can hear how right you were.

https://insights.spotify.com/us/2015/07/13/musical-map-of-the-world/

― glenn mcdonald, Thursday, July 16, 2015 10:18 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hi how do I get these links to open in spotify standalone and not my browser?

When they come up in the browser, just hit "Play on Spotify" and they should start playing in the regular Spotify client.

I bet mine has been curated by Glenn himself in an attempt to get me to listen to his fave girly metal. I know your game pal!

Hmmm, my auto-generated playlist just alternates tracks by Big Country and Juliana Hatfield. What the hell!

I actually don't have mine yet so presumably Glenn is working on it ;)

mine is disconcertingly accurate to my tastes, to the point of including several of my favourite songs and making me worry that spotify actually is keeping track of what artists I bad mouth on the internet.

just pulled mine up: a mix of artists I was aware of already and are lukewarm on (iamwhoiamwhoami, little boots, florrie), artists I was aware of via reviewing them (to be fair, this is the most stupidly niche "complaint" anyone can have and I feel bad for having it), a few genuine lolwuts (task: purge my music library of anything that would prompt the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack, quarantine the track on a flash drive, burn it) and, heartening, some great tracks I would probably not have encountered (this Saâda Bonaire track is great, so is this Jaakko Eino Kalevi which is almost eerily the sort of thing I want to hear right now, this Man Without Country track).

verdict: not bad! actually far better than I was expecting! clearly I need to seed it with more of the latter.

Hi Glenn - Any way to have Spotify ignore collaborative playlists in their algorithms? Maybe they already do? I have a collaborative playlist for work that has a fair amount of stuff in it that I don't love. Maybe I just need to not be the guy playing that playlist?

Right, it's the playing that's causing you trouble, not the playlist itself. Make somebody else play it. Or just make sure you play your own stuff more.

(We're also working on better methods than that for the future...)

[And just to be clear: This great Discover Weekly feature is the work of an excellent team at Spotify NYC, not me.]

Ah, so the algorithm only uses what you've listened to, and not what you have in Your Music? Good deal

I would be surprised if it didn't use all information it can obtain - some signals will be given a heavier weight if they are more reliable though.

Will we ever be able to rate songs?

Or a binary rating system, like starring/unstarring?

I got a ton of bad shit but discovered Ryley Walker so it's even i guess. the problem for me is that it's clearly based on a popularity algorithm so your not really getting any deep cuts from artist you like but haven't fully dug into. there was maybe three artist that i actively listen to out of 30. i mean i guess it's called discovery or whatever but the "here's what's popular that vaguely sounds like what you listen to" vibe is a turn off.

my generated playlist isn't bad but "FRESH MUSIC" is kind of an odd one since it has two dead rappers (ODB and Tupac) and a bunch of '70s/early '80s New York rock (Dolls, Sonic Youth, etc.)

plus something called Diarrhea Planet

okay i also got "long distance love" by little feat so prob worth it.

this update is a 1 out of 10. approximately zero things are now improved.

the circle of dots while the program loads seems to last longer and longer after every update.

^

got recommended Selda in my playlist, I'm happy to sort through the chaff for one or two things like that a week

selda is legit the greatest - i was just listening to the self-titled last night

Just saw my Discover Playlist.

http://i.imgur.com/0PMrAxS.png

I'm not 52 years old, but I am listening to the whole thing.

here's mine:

http://i61.tinypic.com/f2prpx.png

I got a Hop Along track as well. It's good. Then I found a couple more, and they're good as well. But my best Discover find is a recent comeback from St Germain, of all people; the added Malian instrumentation works very well indeed.