Spotify - anyone heard of it?

thing is i shouldn't have to keep doing that. hoping it's just a bug and not album covers or something.

a distinctly dancey playlist this week. i approve!

So I'm normally pretty blasé about internet privacy policy shenanigans but this does sound pretty extreme:

“With your permission, we may collect information stored on your mobile device, such as contacts, photos, or media files.

What does that mean, "with your permission"? Have I given permission by accepting this policy? What on earth do they want with my contacts or photos anyway?

on ios you need to give explicit permission. if you're on android i think they can mine everything. really though i think it's just spotify covering off all likelihoods before you do any of the things that might fire off a scrape of your address book etc.

android M will make the permissions more granular.

but yes, why does this synthesizer app need my wifi details and my contacts?

https://news.spotify.com/us/2015/08/21/sorry-2/

Let me be crystal clear here: If you don’t want to share this kind of information, you don’t have to. We will ask for your express permission before accessing any of this data – and we will only use it for specific purposes that will allow you to customize your Spotify experience.

https://twitter.com/SpotifyUSA/status/634125633501556736

Charles Manson is on this week's Discover playlist :/

However many weeks later, the Discover playlist may have led finally to a discovery, I think mostly due to the avalanche of Wilco I'd been playing a couple of weeks ago - Israel Nash, who I've never heard of before. Very Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Not sure if I'll dig a whole album of this or not, but I think this is the first new-to-me artist I've come across via Discover where I actually want to try and hear more.

Happened to me with On An On this week...

Manson showed up on a bunch of people's lists this week. Not a problem we had anticipated, but steps will be taken...

hopefully not by him

lol

i have been enjoying the weekly discovery much to my surprise

This entry has been known to cause some problems at a few music services... not naming names

https://musicbrainz.org/artist/8530d70e-778c-4eba-b08d-831d16783c03

lol:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/41366462-ff3a-45a8-91d9-c40c259b5637

http://everynoise.com/engenremap-oratory.html

what governs the positioning there, glenn? quality of recording?

This week on Discover Weekly: Ten (count 'em) songs I already know, and songs by Dr. Dog and Slightly Stoopid (gag). I'm beginning to think Spotify doesn't think very highly of me.

it's ok, Spotify A) gave me a kate bush song B) made it "deeper understanding"

"you seem like you'd like kate bush, and of all the hundreds of kate bush songs, we feel this will best resonate with your personality"

mine is great this week!

Fizzles: the positioning is atmospheric-vs-bouncy and organic-vs-mechanistic, same as on the big overall genre map, but within a genre like oratory you're basically seeing large magnifications of small differences, so it isn't necessarily telling you much.

Spotify seems desperate to make me listen to Lloyd Cole, every single Discover Weekly playlist I've had so far includes at least one of his songs

(this week's playlist, upon actually listening, is decent, I just thought the particular choice of song was hilarious)

Can't fault Spotify for giving you songs you already know unless you listen to them regularly on Spotify. I got a high number of tracks this week that I already knew, but I took that as a sign that it's getting closer to ID'ing my tastes.

thanks glenn.

still yet to try out my discover playlist. seem to be feeling that same aversion that i have when people I don't entitely trust recommend me things. multplied beyond what i would feel if I encountered the same things without any context.

Well, you can look at the thing without listening to it. Is that less scary?

I live in South Africa, and am considering going through the rigmarole to get Spotify up-and-running on my connection here.

Is there something like a ILM playlist on there?

I would really like to see a list of what's currently on that that. Is someone willing to do me a favour and screengrab a list of what's on the ILM playlist at the moment?

I would like to see if it something that would be worth my effort, as that would be my primary reason for getting Spotify.

Somewhere in this thread may be the Spotify mix you are looking for: Rolling Favorite Tracks + Albums 2015

i like the discover playlists and regularly check them out - any time a track choice offends me i can always tell WHY the robot thought i'd like it. but it has put me in an ironic position of feeling like big brother's not doing a good enough job at watching me sometimes. "an exile on guyville track? I KNOW i've played exile on here before...weren't you paying attention, algorithm?"

Also essential for ILX listening: Listening to ILX Listen - 2015 Spotify Genre Playlists

Oh wow I didn't even know that thread existed!

croup i think it knows you've played just maybe not in a while. that could be useful, i'm sure there's plenty of albums/acts i listened to once cuz they were on aquarius records mailing list or whatever and enjoyed but never got around to listening to again and would enjoy 'rediscovering', the problem is spotify is understandably unable to distinguish between those albums vs albums you've only listened to once in the past decade because you wore them out long ago vs albums you listened to once cuz it was on a list and once was enough thx.

Wish Spotify could import my last.fm history to help with recommendations. I'd pay for that.

I also maintain a playlist of the "Your 11 favourite songs of the moment, fuck" thread: http://open.spotify.com/user/miketd/playlist/01h5cX8jtxgfJoaOBgYN4F

an article on Spotify / The Echo Nest / Listener profile Genre Clusters / Discover Weekly

Spotify is getting unbelievably good at picking music — here’s an inside look at how
http://www.techinsider.io/inside-spotify-and-the-future-of-music-streaming

on Discover Weekly

Spotify's work with The Echo Nest has culminated (so far) in this summer's launch of Discover Weekly, that custom playlist that magically predicts what I and every other Spotify listener wants to hear. Even though the feature is barely a month old, the overall reception in reviews and on social media has been overwhelmingly positive.

“Discovery can feel like work, and we wanted it to feel very human and natural like the selections that are powering it,” Matt Ogle, the guy in charge of Discover Weekly, tells TI.

Ogle previously worked at Last.fm, a startup that pioneered a lot of work on analyzing music data, and a now-shuttered startup called This Is My Jam, which let you choose one song a week to share with your friends. Since joining Spotify earlier this year, Ogle has tried to combine both approaches to blend big data with a human touch.

Ogle gives a simple analogy for how Discover Weekly works: You’ve been playing song A and song C a lot, but it turns out that when other people play those songs together in their playlists there’s a song B that you’ve never heard before.

Discover Weekly gives you song B.

“We look at what you’ve been listening to and what are the songs playing around these songs that you’ve been jamming on,” Ogle tells Tech Insider. “We’re trying to find the missing tracks.”

During internal testing, his team realized that if you don’t recognize a single artist in a playlist, you might question if it’s actually geared for you. That’s why the playlist is intended to have a mix of mostly new tracks with a few songs you’ve heard before.

“Having a little bit of familiarity is key to building trust. It can be exhausting to just listen to stuff you’ve never heard of before,” he says.

Now it's true that the songs on Discover Weekly are chosen by algorithm, not humans, but Ogle insists that this misses the point since the whole thing is built on data created by humans — it's just that algorithms are connecting the dots on a massive scale.

“There’s something compelling about this humans versus robots narrative: a lovingly curated playlist versus an algorithm screwing up your sexy time,” says Ogle. "That whole distinction no longer really describes how we work. Discover Weekly is humans all the way down. Every single track that appears in Discover Weekly is because other humans being have said, ‘Hey this is a good song, and here’s why.’"

As popular as the new feature is, it's just the beginning for Spotify.

“We want to make sure that as mainstream or hipster as you are, Spotify can cater to you,” says Ogle. "That will involve humans and machines, and ideally it involves them skipping down the street hand-in-hand, because practically that’s the only way to get things done.”

“I see Discover Weekly as one of the first products from this new era of personalization, but ultimately we’d love for everything you interact with on Spotify to feel like there’s a bit of you in it.”

collaborative filtering is cool yes

I don't know how you fit it in the Spotify UI but I'd pay more attention to their recommendations if they came with some context. Even an Amazon-style "because you listened to A and C" explanation would be a start.

Spotify insists on giving me a Discover playlist dominated by male-centric indie every other week no matter what i've been listening to & it really makes me question the data fueling this project

glenn, any insights re: whether this issue will be addressed?

it knows you too well

If you give each song a fair hearing, say three plays each, that's 90 songs, which certainly makes up a fair amount of my weekly listening. I wonder if there's a feedback loop going on - a self-reinforcing downward spiral of male-centric indie.

snrk

ha, i skip over the songs i'm not feeling

> I wonder if there's a feedback loop going on

i thought the same thing.

> is this all because it's using your playing of last week's recommended racks in figuring out this week's?
> ― koogs, Monday, 10 August 2015

i imagine it's very easy for this to happen.

and this data ends up in the pool for everybody else too. eventually it'll get to the point where you may as well just listen to steve lamaqc.

i just want a way to give dan deacon the world's biggest thumbs down, on spotify

I get the same thing with Gaz Coombes. Gaz Coombes!

Last few weeks I had some pretty interesting eclectic Discovery playlists, with music spanning a variety of time periods and genres, but this week's playlist was pretty standard Indie/Pitchfork fare. I'm going to blame this on the fact that I decided to listen to a Spoon album earlier in the week, and now it just thinks I like boring music.

my playlists are pretty cool, they resemble one of those CDs that come with Mojo Magazine with some techno randomly thrown in

I think this week is the first time my Discover playlist has had some tracks on it that had already appeared on a previous weeks discover playlist (that I've noticed)

(tracks are 'I'm in Love with a German Film Star' and 'Looking for Clues', both of which were on my first Discover weekly playlist because I remember being impressed/unsettled that it had successfully identified two of my favourite songs)

"We think you would like <unknown artist> just as much as we think you'd like Tame Impala"

Discover Weekly is just the first of many things we're working on, and a bunch of the others have more dimensions. More to come.