Spotify - anyone heard of it?

they've also been, for quite a long time now, very canny and deliberate about how they handle their catalog. every other act just belches their catalog onto compact disc during the 80s, the beatles manage to turn it into an event that stretches out months and gets crazy press. when they eventually remaster them and finally put them on itunes, another event. you want to license one of their songs, good fucking luck and break out the check book. there are other catalogs that have been just as eternal in terms of still yielding ridiculous sales decades after release but i think you have to actually know or care about those things to know that spotify getting ac/dc on board is a huge deal. since michael jackson and nike and probably earlier everyone knows the beatles catalog is valuable.

Xpost I know it's wreaked havoc, a bugaboo of mine, too. That's how it came out on the phone. But can't edit posts ...

ha, OK, glad u understand

Beatles albums should be public fucking domain.

big artists making leverage plays, their may be lip service to 'artists deserve to be rewarded' but really they've meant 'fuck you pay me', the only exception to this has kinda been taylor swift and even then it was just 'dear apple plz pay something anything'.

― balls, Friday, July 31, 2015 2:41 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nah Taylor Swift's thing came across as blatantly cynical marketing to me. Apple just decides to change a giant multi-million dollar deal within days of her tweeting about it give me a break.

Tho who can fault her Apple is historically a place for true artists, after all they had John Lennon in their advertisements /s

it also has something to do w/ them being the second (hell maybe first by this point) highest selling group this century

I know, their fanbase bought them on vinyl, then on CD in the 90s, and now again digitally. They've been in the sweet spot for making oodles of money off recorded music in the historically small window when that was possible. Good for them. Yes, boomers are still a big market to milk but in ten years time their hearing's gone, along with their ability use a touchscreen or mouse. Sinatra and Elvis, similarly worthy and immensely popular artists, are past that point already and are (by and large) irrelevant to the business model of streaming/digital music.

I mean, are these streaming services intended as museums or art galleries?

my name is Noodle Vague and i approve this message

why the Beatles catalogue is brought up in so many articles as some sort of big (psychological?) barrier to success for online music services is baffling to me.

are people really still writing that? i hardly see their name mentioned at all anymore in analyses of the streaming world, except maybe in passing.

(i see the name "taylor swift" a lot. but i don't think she was ever in the beatles, was she? that was james taylor, right?)

http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2015/08/01/why-the-beatles-are-letting-down-a-generation/

haha

the continued absense from Spotify, Apple Music and their ilk is thanks to the same ‘we’re premium and deserve special treatment’ attitude that meant I could never afford their CDs as a kid because they were generally priced way higher than anyone else’s even though they were already three decades old by that point

Uh, what? I distinctly remember buying the catalog as a kid and the CDs all costing the same as other music. Fugazi CDs were cheaper but that's about it.

most CD's by 60s groups were mid-price though except for the beatles & the stones. Pretty sure that is what the writer meant.

Also Beatles cd's were £15 here. Never in a sale

Yeah, what? I have no memory at all of Beatles cds costing more than anything else. And considering they've only reissued a big deal remastered series once it's not even like they're continually trying to gouge people who want to own Beatles cds.

Maybe it's different over there, but in the US them shits have always been priced in line with everything else.

rip off britain strikes again

I mean, I guess they never had explicitly budget releases - definitely no Beatles For Sale/Help! twofer discs out there. So yeah compared to certain other acts they never got steeply marked down, but...

question about the Discover Weekly playlist, apologies if this has already been covered upthread: does anyone know if the choices are based specifically on your previous week's Spotify listening, or does it take your listening over a longer timescale into account? if I listen to nothing but psychobilly one week, will I get an all-psychobilly inspired playlist the following Monday?

only one way to find out

good luck

And how many times can I get away with playing my 2yo daughter's frequent request 'Agadoo' by Black Lace before my Discover Weekly starts being populated with awful 1980s novelty hits?

private listening?

oh btw Apple Music vs Spotify

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/opinion/sunday/open-the-music-industrys-black-box.html?_r=0

Asking the current set of labels to have some transparency seems hopeless. Will Spotify become a label, maybe (a la Amazon with their self-publishing service)? Will some other entity step in and provide a label that promises transparency or fairer distribution of royalties?

there ARE labels that promise transparency and a fairer distribution of royalties. They're just "indies" that can't achieve success on the level of a major, and streaming services are too beholden to the majors to treat them equally.

Are up-and-coming acts still signing on to horrible major-label deals these days? If so, I feel sorry for them, but also - shame on them, to some extent.

Just the fictional singer/songwriters getting millions of streams without any promotion at all.

Is anyone else getting a big black screen when they click on the Local Files folder? Using the latest Mac version.

My local files ceased working completely on the Mac client.

I have to wait a few seconds but it does come up for me (also Mac)

Startup for this program has become glacial on my mac...

Same on iPhone!

startup is glacial on my PC, but to fair everything is glacial on it

since switching to version .8.5 i have had more or less NO issues with Spotify and the only thing i'm missing is the ability to subscribe to artists. Loads fast, works reliable, no bloat!

I'm leaning toward dropping Apple Music and keeping Spotify at the end of the AM free trial, but at least one gripe about Spotify remains: I'm still finding albums where tracks longer than 10 minutes are grayed out. On AM I can listen to the whole thing.

My local files ceased working completely on the Mac client.

What are a couple examples of those albums you saw where the long songs are grayed out? I can investigate.

Noticed it in four Anthony Braxton albums today --
A.B. & Wolf Eyes - Black Vomit
A.B. & Fred Frith - Duo (Victoriaville) 2005
Complete Braxton 1971, vols. 1 and 2

also:
Miles Davis at Newport 1955-1975 - 3 tracks on disc 1, not even the longest tracks on the disc
Miles Davis Quintet - Live in Europe 1967 - 2 tracks on disc 2 and all of disc 3

When it happens, it seems to be in jazz releases. Thanks for checking.

Thanks. I'll see what I can find out.

Those Braxton and Davis unavailable songs are all at the label's requests, in a technical sense. I mean, Spotify didn't take any action of our own to make them unavailable. The Miles Davis ones are unavailable in the same inexplicable patterns on Apple Music, too. We will pursue with the source labels, as it's hard to believe this is an intentional request. Probably some database-field at Sony or wherever got mis-set somewhere once, and then nobody ever noticed or fixed it.

The long-track-unavailable thing seems a holdover from peak a la carte downoading, to force purchase of the entire record. Don't want to let an album of two seventeen minute tracks to go for two bucks. In a Silent Way gets fixed, but not the deeper catalog stuff.

Yeah, I bet that's literally correct, and the labels have a single no-download field in their database that they've been using for streaming, forgetting it was set for downloading.

glen, what about the local files thing? Seems pretty essential to the "Spotify-as-your-single-music-player" experience.

does anyone else not have access to the discover playlist yet? everyone's talking about it and i'm still waiting...

i only got it last weekend. btw it's utterly as good as people say it is.

I've had three weeks' worth of discover playlists. All roughly the same - good enough music that I don't skip many tracks, and the majority are new to me. But nothing so far that has compelled me to dig deeper with any artists or play certain songs over and over. And the playlist refuses to acknowledge that I listen to ambient music. It seem to only recognize that I listen to Wilco.

my first discover weekly list sounded like a string of public domain lounge electronica, but the second one was quite different. maybe the genre will move around from week to week.

discover playlists seem to have diminishing returns for me, maybe I'm just not seeding them well enough

does it depend on what you played the past week?

I don't work on anything remotely related to local-file handling, so I don't have any insight there, I'm sorry. I know people are working on it, but I don't know what the issues are.

Discover Weekly doesn't depend only on what you played in the past week, no, but it's weighted towards recent listening, so it should evolve along with your listening.

Re the lack of ambient music, mine often has no metal. But this is just the beginning.