Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Goodbye hamburger menu! Celebratory hamburgers all round.

good, the burger menu was shithouse. the new one seems to be rolling out slowly, nothing here as yet.

Actually it was the six, seven, or eight presses on the back button before unlocking the hamburger menu that really rankled. I think, I'm already suppressing the horror. Either way three cheers for the new bottom menu bar.

yeah, just toggling mobile downloads or changing equaliser takes aaaaages with this bloody burger thing, and dragging from the left only triggers some of the time (on ios at least). won't miss it.

This is the way the navigation was back in the iOS 4 days. Happy to see it return !

Hey Glenn - is there any way to pull up older auto-generated playlists? I think we were on one of the Fresh Finds playlists, but we're not any more.

No, but I can probably track it down. Which "we"?

Society of Rockets. I was looking at the stats, and it looked like being on one of the fresh finds playlists sent our listener count way up. Wonder if that will last at all. Pretty cool to get all of these real-time statistics.

How long until promoters get savvy and start getting you Nets tickets in exchange for algorithm tweaks?

Yes, looks like "Country Dealer" was on SIX STRINGS 3 weeks ago.

Thanks!

Goodbye hamburger menu! Celebratory hamburgers all round.

― I've had Eno, ugh (ledge), Wednesday, 4 May 2016 23:08 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i still bloody don't have this

I get this thing a lot on the Spotify desktop client where it thinks I'm offline when I'm not. Always have to reboot the app. Does anyone else get that? Kind of annoying.

always, need to close and relaunch

Yeah, same here, and same solution - close and relaunch. Pain in the hole.

Decent interview with Ben Ratliff here on the impact of algorythms on the way we discover music -

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-algorithms-ruining-how-we-discover-music/

The interviewer (FiveThirtyEight's Jody Avirgan) seems fairly happy with the situation on the whole, which is interesting to hear as there are most likely many people who enjoy never being taken out of their comfort zone, but theirs is a perspective you wouldn't normally hear i something like this (it's certainly not the way I see it.)

It seems like it'd be useful to understand how these algorithms work when evaluating their use in music. For example, I'm not sure that the algorithms that Spotify uses for Discovery are designed to make a playlist that reflects your current music listening state exactly or that keeps you in your comfort zone. What's worth more to Spotify: That you keep listening because you are comfortable? That you discover a new favorite kind of music and go on a listening binge? Or that you pay your $10 next month and maybe convince a friend to pay $10 because you liked a bit of their software?

Either way, it's definitely not the algorithms' fault because an algorithm can be tuned to take you out of your comfort zone even more than you would on your own.

Eventually, the service may grow from a custom algorithm-generated playlist delivered weekly to a simple interface to algorithms for discovering new music.

"Algorithms" have no inherent agenda. We have things that are trying to keep you in your comfort zone, and things that are trying to push you out of it, and things (like Discover Weekly) that behave different ways for different people. And yes, Discover Weekly is the first of many things...

"behave different ways for different people"

maybe you can't explain how this works but i'm def interested

Oh, in the DW case I only meant that the same system produces very mainstream results for some people and very obscure results for other people.

'"Algorithms" have no inherent agenda'

not true. they're created, selected among, tuned and deployed by people who, whether they realize it or not, have cultural biases and an agenda.

Any individual algorithm probably has an agenda, explicit or implicit. But "algorithms", as a class of thing, do not.

It's like saying that things made with "tools" are "impersonal".

Does Spotify deploy "algorithms" as a class of thing, or does it use individual ones? Do I have to pay extra for the plan that includes the former?

i love Spotify and i'm not leaving.

Love, Bee OK

I left it for Tidal, once I found out about the student discount. The algorithms tried to stop me, but I ducked around a corner and lost them.

hmm, Spotify has a student discount?

plus Spotify is ILM as this point. i can't give up our playlists.

yeap, they do have a student discount. it is half off.

OTM in the biggest way possible (Spotify is ILM).

dlp9001, perhaps you can focus your anonymous discussion energies on the Tidal thread now, too.

Spotify has a student discount but I've never been able to get it to actually apply to the amount billed on my account, despite the system deeming me A-OK for such something like two years ago. YMMV.

Tidal seems to be talking about Chris Forsyth, and I don't know who that is.

I was somewhat shocked by how easily Tidal allowed my student discount, as I don't use a college email address. They must have great algorithms.

lol

College is mysterious. And Tidal doesn’t want robots completely in control of verifying who is in college.

Any individual algorithm probably has an agenda, explicit or implicit. But "algorithms", as a class of thing, do not.

― glenn mcdonald, Wednesday, May 18, 2016 9:33 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's an implicit agenda in deciding a problem is vulnerable to an algorithmic approach

Easy to be pedantic and just talk about the title, which is as tabloidised as headlines generally are, and easy not to think this is an issue as Spotify is used on ILM by actual humans to share playlists, which is not the case for everyone. Have a listen to the podcast, the text just has a summary, and the interesting bits come up in the detail.

speaking of algorithms

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/opinion/the-real-bias-built-in-at-facebook.html

also https://socialmediacollective.org/2016/05/18/facebook-trends/

so as of today i am seeing specific recommendations at the bottom of each playlist based on the makeup of that playlist... not a bad idea! For the ILX lists in particular it's kind of interesting to see what's being recommended.

it also comes with a "refresh" button so you can get more recommendations beyond the first six

I've found those very 'safe' so far. I've got a fairly eclectic jazz 'best of' playlist and it keeps recommending me Kind of Blue and Dave Brubeck.

agreed; it appears to also be drawing from other playlists you have... Yemi Alade's "Koffi Anan" showed up as recommended in the R&B playlist which can't be a total coincidence.
Regardless, it's a good idea; dunno about how good that algorithm is.

Yeah it's neat and got me listening to one thing I had otherwise missed (the Kedr Livanskiy album). I'd really prefer to have notifications back though.

That thing draws from all the playlists across Spotify, not just yours. In its initial incarnation it's not necessarily trying to be surprising, so the Davis/Brubeck thing doesn't surprise me too much. Classical lists will probably have similarly "safe" suggestions. The results will tend to be more eclectic in genres where the listeners listen more eclectically in general.

What I didn't notice till recently was that Spotify will also give you recommendations just based on the playlist's title if you don't have anything on it.

It's missing an "n" and screws up the capitals, but to hell with minor quibbles. New header for this thread:

http://assets.bwbx.io/images/iMrIEsj1N9f8/v1/-1x-1.jpg

it's awesome that glenn owns and directs a multi billion dollar company and still has time to post here, good on him

He just needs to stop destroying small villages in his quest for power.