Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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.

discover weekly is designed to work off natural listening habits, rather than react to users trying to force certain results by stacking their play history, yeah? if so, just listening to what we like is probably the best way to get good recommendations.

Not sure I believe "unnatural" listening is a thing. If you think you're gaming Discover Weekly by listening differently, I call that exploration.

Besides, if you want to hear some kind of thing in particular, go to everynoise.com and look it up.

whoa that site is incredible

o wow

that's your baby, right glenn?

Well for me, a lot of my Spotify listening is spent discovering new music that I haven't heard before, often full albums or ILX playlists, rather than listening to stuff that I legitimately love, which affects my Discovery playlist. So I've tried to fix that in the past week by listening to more of my favorite songs and artists, though the fact that I'm also spending time listening to my Discovery playlists is going to reinforce the artists on those as well.

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.

Thanks. I wouldn't be surprised if they've begun to move away from the "one browser" thing given the recent focus on Discovery.

One trend I'm beginning to worry about a bit w Spotify is that artists are starting to cut side deals for "preferred" streaming services, which would ultimately lead to a bunch of services that have 97% the same thing with that last 3% spread across 5 different services, essentially ruining the all-in on demand experience for all but the most exclusive set of subscribers.

Yes, sorry, I didn't mean to be coy, everynoise.com is my thing.

whoa that site is incredible

o wow

I would like to echo these sentiments re: everynoise.com

^^^^^^

finally got a really good Discover Weekly playlist this week

discover weekly is uneven as hell, last two weeks it was like "why do u think i like any of this lol spotify, ur dumb" and then the one i got for this week is pretty damn all right thus far

It certainly seems determined to try and get me into the whiny voiced indie that I haven't listened to for 15 years. Still, about five tracks per week pique my interest, maybe not a great percentage but probably no worse than back when radio was my regular discovery channel.

is this all because it's using your playing of last week's recommended racks in figuring out this week's?

(is it a spotify home-grown thing or does it use a recommendation engine like gracenote / echonest / senzari?)

my weekly discover playlist seems better, too. i am very susceptible to the enthusiasm of others, though.

My Week 1 Discover playlist was excellent, but Weeks 2-4 have been way off the mark. However, all my partner's playlists have been bloody marvellous. He uses Spotify much less than I do, and only to listen to music that he already loves - whereas I'm forever dipping into new music speculatively, with inevitably mixed results.

ugh i still don't have discover weekly yet, thanks obama spotify