Spotify - anyone heard of it?

But what is a reasonable amount of music to rent for $10 per month?

you can rent as much as you like, it's what's storable offline that's the sticking point here. no competing service limits offline storage afaik.

the point of having a music library in your pocket (and the reason ipod classics existed) is to be able to listen to what you want to listen to, not to plan your day before you leave the house. the discogs of five of my favourite artists constitute about 25% of spotify's offline limit, not including a handful of updated playlists for ~discovery~ (which is at least half the point of having spotify).

Do you have a job/lifestyle that makes it difficult to stream music over wifi/cellular? I have very little of what I listen to saved locally but I have unlimited data so I don't feel restricted in what I have to listen to. The only time I ever sync music is when I'm flying.

only cellular data during the day. i do occasionally d/l some things i wasn't expecting to listen to, but ultimately i want to be able to store enough that i don't need a separate music database. apple music would be The Perfect Solution if it worked.

How much space do you have on your phone is a better question I suppose? Cheapest current iPhone ships with 16GB of space of which maybe half is usable. Costs exponentially more to add GBs (and then only up to 64...) I'm not saying the limit is annoying, I just think your use case is definitely an edge case.

that's not the point though. afaict no other major service imposes a limit on offline storage.

a 200 GB micro sd card is a hundred bucks these days.

apple music would be The Perfect Solution

What about a third party library eg mediamonkey? Can organise things on yr computer and transfer them to the phone to play through the apple music app, without signing up to apple music or suffering with itunes.

that's pretty much what i do now. it's fine but i'd really rather just use one app, especially to combine with newer stuff that i never bought/ripped.

there is basically the same issue with TV - there is not one single box (that i'm aware of) that gracefully allows me to stream OTT services, play local files, and tune in digital free-to-air broadcasts

Is Discover Weekly supposed to be tracks I've never played on Spotify? If so, it's broken.

No

Ok.

I can see it's sort of tailored to my listening (or at least my Spotify listening which is about 10% of it) but it's badly named if I'm supposed to discover something from hearing 'Release the Bats' or 'O Superman' for the thousandth time.

discover weekly SHOULD be tracks you have never listened to before, otherwise it's using a very columbusy interpretation of "discover"

could be that you are supposed to discover how good a song is and not just that the song exists

how would Spotify know what tracks you spent your pre-Spotify years listening to?

algorithms. extrapolation algorithms.

Spotify should really supply me with a playlist of original music that I'll love

maybe you are meant to discover something new about yourself

FYI according to a thing I read somewhere, it was originally meant to be purely new music but they found 30 tracks of novelty was too daunting, having a few familiar numbers in there made it a more attractive prospect.

Yeah, it's a mix. And yeah, we haven't tried to guess whether you're likely to have heard something out of (or before) Spotify.

I wasn't talking about pre-Spotify.

I don't mind a bunch of familiar songs (most of which are familiar from pre-Spotify) but I think a discovery list shouldn't include songs I stream regularly.

Has 'Notifications' been disabled? Have had nothing for ages (a couple of months at least).

I just got one. Sometimes you need to close and reopen though.

No, but we stopped triggering them when a track is added to a playlist you follow, which was the single biggest source (and the one most frequently ignored).

They're awesome for knowing when artists you follow add a new release, but I still usually don't ever seem them until I open the app fresh.

i really love it when dw drops in the occasional song i know. it keeps me invested and i'm more likely to play the whole thing.

They're awesome for knowing when artists you follow add a new release

^this

still wish you could follow labels too

oh that would be great

Still waiting on smart playlists (auto-updating playlists based on search criteria)!

I depend on notifications for keeping up with new releases from artists I follow, but I don't feel like it's consistent. I'll often check in on an artist's page and find there was a recent single, EP, or album that didn't trigger a notification. That happened most recently with a new Travis single and a recent collaborative EP from Koen Holtkamp.

Podcasts (or whatever generic audio programming name) are available on spotify now. I really like that it marks where you leave off so you can go listen to something else and go back to the podcast and resume immediately. Selection right now is okay but not great, lots of the big ones are available but no serial, no you must remember this, basically none of the ones I listen to. Spotify is making a big deal about how curated their selection is with their "partners" so idk if the plan is to keep it limited? Hopefully not...

Okay so Spotify finally thoroughly won me over today by including a super obscure jab song in my Discover Weekly (as well as some afrobeats stuff I wasn't familiar with but liked). I've played it quite a lot in GPM but never in Spotify. So kudos, Spotify. You're obviously doing something right.

My Discover Weekly Playlist has really been hitting the sweet spot these past few weeks.

My only real complaint about Discover Weekly is that it somehow always manages to choose the best track from albums I haven't heard yet, so when I listen to the rest of said albums they tend to be disappointing

Yeah, or they pick straight-up singles, so there's not much to "discover" other than the track itself. Still, mostly-loving the feature. Need to listen to Spotify more during the day so my lists get a little less sleepy.

there seems a problem with spotify skipping tracks this morning
https://twitter.com/search?q=spotify%20skipping&src=sprv

particularly with new additions to playlists

I've noticed it this morning, too. Switched to Google Play. I've tried to be cynical about Discover Weekly, but it's been mostly fantastic. Great feature.

ha, that skipping problem was driving me nuts on the way to work today

Had it too, although curiously the discover playlist is working fine.

Is there a way of finding playlists that feature a particular song? One track on an album I released last year has c40,000 more plays than everything else.

This is a good question, I would like to know the answer as well. And kudos to you, useless chamber.

If you go to the About page on an artist, there will be a list of playlists that people may have first heard said artist on. It's not the same as being able to find playlists with a specific song, but it might help you in your instance.

Playlists is somewhere Spotify really falls down, I think. Sometimes I just want to have a new ambient/post-rock/whatever playlist to work to and I never seem to be able to find anything. I find the artist radio thing a bit hit and miss and the bog standard playlists are generally pretty shite. It was the one thing Apple Music did really well.

Unless I'm being dumb and missing something very obvious, which is more than possible.

xp Thanks! I wonder if it's maybe been on Discover at some point, though I'm disappointed that Spotify wouldn't think that I'd be interested in it if so (it's our first album so there's no previous plays).

No, that seems about right.
(xp)

i liked rdio's radio station for each user. listening to yr own was kind of like an infinite discover weekly with a bunch of favourites mixed in.

There was a brief playback glitch earlier, but things should be fine now.

Useless chamber, which song is it?