Spotify - anyone heard of it?

On the SomaFM thing, the playlists in the screen-shot are user-created. SomaFM publishes their play history, so this seems like a thing that is pretty likely to happen. I'm not sure whether it's illegal or even immoral. But at any rate, I don't think it's a Spotify-official activity in any way I can tell.

useless chamber, the main source of those plays is, in fact, individual people's Discover Weekly lists...

wasn't there a Ministry Of Sound court case that set a legal precedent that playlists themselves are copyrightable IP? i.e. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/27/spotify-ministry-of-sound-lawsuit-settlement

The Ministry of Sound case was about playlists that duplicated published compilations. I don't know if that applies to playlists that mirror other playlists, either in the Spotify sense or the SomaFM/radio sense. But I passed the tweet along to Spotify legal just in case...

yeah and now that I read my own link (lol) I can see that actually it never went to court, it was 'settled' so no actual precedent

The thing that drives me crazy is how I can search and search for a playlist that I know by name but not actually get to it. Had this the other day with the ILM tracks poll results - I had clicked a link in browser, gotten the damned "log in here to listen in browser" page (would it kill them to have a link here that redirects to the application I already have open), so I knew the name of the playlist, but there was absolutely no finding the damn thing. Same thing with a playlist of a friend of mine that she had linked from Facebook. In the end I had to log in to the browser player, which I didn't want to actually use, just so I could favorite the playlist.

On the topic of playlists, is there somewhere I can tell spotify NOT to start playing automatically when I click on a playlist? (I'm only using the browser interface)

The real client is, I think, a better experience...

thanks glenn. I'm sure somebody clicked through to the album from it..

You don't have to tell me btw.

Glenn, is there any reason why a new single will be available in Apple Music but not in Spotify or Google Music Play? I'm trying to stop using Apple Music, lol, but it bothers me a bit that quite a few singles I'd love to put in one of my playlists are available on that platform weeks if not months before the ones I prefer get it. The other releases from the same artist are available - just not the newest single.
I.e. Lil Kesh - Ibile - but the examples are many.

Doctor Casino, you probably already know this, but a fairly painless way to get from a link in your browser to listening in the Spotify app is to right-click/copy the link and paste the whole link into the app's search field.

How the heck is Doppelganger by Curve not on Spotify USA? Not a question for Glenn, more like a rhetorical question.

paul santa cruz, I did not know that! Thank you - will try that next time.

Doppelganger, and a fair slice of the rest of Curve's discog, is available on the band's Bandcamp page.

Availability questions should really be asked of the label or distributor. Once they send us stuff, it goes live on Spotify in a matter of hours. When I publish my own inept music through OneRPM it tends to take 3-4 days to get from them to Spotify's internal systems, and then is available by the following day. Any delays longer than that are the result of human decisions, not system delays...

x-post
I think it's on Spotify UK, just not the USA version.

xpost - and apple music can put everything up since everybody is sending them stuff for itunes anyway? i see...

or apple has paid for an exclusive, or there are rights issues, or there's a strategy to release in one country on one platform and not another etc etc etc

Personally, I would much rather that all music be available on all platforms. Let the platforms compete on what we do with the music...

Agreed,

times one thousand

also, I think it's really nice that Glenn is here to contribute valuable info to thread

Yeah definitely. Glenn - is there any reason why there is no proper Dancehall section on Spotify? I've found a couple of official playlists but keeping up with new releases is difficult. Only a few select ones show up under reggae, which mostly has... reggae. There's a ton of dancehall singles dropping every day and so far I've only been able to keep up by checking 10-20 artists every day for new releases.

http://everynoise.com/everynoise1d.cgi?scope=all&root=dancehall

Or search this page for dancehall: http://everynoise.com/spotify_new_releases.html

oh perfect! thanks!

Also... Wow!

That's what Glenn does!

And de does it well. Just curious... how would one define Heavy-K or other South African house (i.e. Prince Kaybee or Black Coffee) within these parameters?

Last time I went through the South African stuff the data-coverage wasn't good enough to do much more than kwaito and south african jazz, but it looks like I could now add a separate "kwaito house" hybrid, which would have all three of those. I'll put that on my list for the next round of updates, which should be soonish.

nice

btw - I love the notifications - it's a huge part of what sets spotify apart from its competitors right now. I feel like maybe there could be more of them, though? Not everything seems to register, is there a reason for that? Would also like to see some sort of saved search function so that you're notified once music you've searched for suddenly becomes available - tired of typing in «90s Don Dada Riddim» every single day, lol.

i really hate the notifications but i'm an old-fashioned crank with software.

thing that's driving me nuts lately is that the player will just.... stop. like you just have to walk over and hit the next song to get it to go again. very annoying for, well, anything really, but especially when you have it on shuffle for some hands-free purpose like doing dishes or cleaning the house. i've noticed it most on the android app but i think it's happened to me on the desktop version too.

glenn: did you come up with the "abstractro" genre? because from what I see searching spotify for that genre tag, it seems to be largely based on a couple of my own playlists

I did, yes. It wasn't based on anybody's individual playlists, or on playlists per se at all, but it doesn't surprise me that there are playlists that align with it. I don't "make up" genres, I just give names to listening clusters I find in the world.

Too bad 'I don't "make up" genres, I just give names to listening clusters I find in the world.' is more than 80 characters, or I would have my first new screen name.

okay, i may regret this but i'm updating to the current version. let's see how it works.

I gave up fighting it and just go with the new versions every time now. Still some issues with it on startup and I sometimes get repeat notifications but most things seem fairly reliable recently.

do local files work?

The local file browser isn't the best and you can't select albums to play but it's okay apart from that - the search is finding local files too.

cool i keep wanting to upgrade but nonfunctional local files really is a dealbreaker

this (great) song
https://open.spotify.com/track/6uv4VeWDVal1agJHUYi5iK

should be indexed to this kitten
https://open.spotify.com/artist/4zHX9zUUtxUw898g1GyihC

Will fix.

thanks!

Also: wow.

RIGHT?

And in a kind of similar spirit, spotify:album:2LSBVvjQwteBIMik5P8OqK.

ugh, so i updated to new spotify bc my old version of spotify's search really stopped working. local files load up fine but there's no way to sort them except by name and artist and afaict there's no way to search only your local files. why can't they just put this obvious (preexisting) functionality in???

my guess is they'd rather you use their files instead of your own, but that's kind of dumb if true