Spotify - anyone heard of it?

it's not an argument. it's rhetorical water torture.

glenn works for The Echo Nest, which is owned by Spotify, before we go any farther. He doesn't work for Spotify directly. It seems reasonable to suggest that we know who is posting on threads on ILM when they have a significant relationship with an involved corporate entity, especially if those threads relate to commercial music services. ILM is generally known as a site for discussing and discovering music. Echo Nest describe themselves thusly:

The Echo Nest is the industry’s leading music intelligence company, providing developers with the deepest understanding of music content and music fans.

Leading music services (Clear Channel’s iHeartradio, MOG, Rdio, SiriusXM, Spotify), editorial, video and social media networks (BBC.com, Foursquare, MTV, Twitter, VEVO, Yahoo!), connected device manufacturers (doubleTwist, Nokia) and big brands (Coca Cola, Intel, Microsoft, Reebok) use our platform and solutions to build smarter music experiences that help fans to better discover, share and interact with the music they love. Our customer base reaches over 100 million music fans every month through more than 400 apps and sites powered by The Echo Nest.

Headquartered in Somerville, MA, The Echo Nest was co-founded by two MIT PhDs. Investors include Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and three co-founders of the MIT Media Lab.

ok............?

you brought up glenn's affiliation(s) in response to my point about amazon (and "people who listened to x listened to y" algorithms generally). i still don't understand how any of it is relevant to your beefs with said algorithms.

*sighs*

The algorithms are just not so great. I think that's the only beef. They benefit from a confirmation bias, in the sense that they recommend 99 Bob Mould albums and one Lovely Eggs album, and all I remember is the latter. Otherwise they're generally useless.

Meanwhile, I'm looking for an iTunes/Tidal/YouTube/Pandora/Record Label/Music Equipment etc. thread where a fairly visible employee from the company administers it and responds directly to questions about the service, on ILM, on a regular and current basis, without some sort of notification in the subject. Maybe there are others. There are all sorts of unexplored depths to ILM. Currently the Spotify threads seem like they belong on Reddit, with appropriate headings.

Someone here said at one point, "Spotify is ILM" and while I have other concerns in my life (like I need to buy asparagus for a barbecue tonight) that struck me as a slope of great slipperiness.

If it is actually true that you have any other concerns in your life, please, go attend to them.

I work for Spotify. "The Echo Nest" might still exist in some corporate accounting sense, but not one that affects me.

Spotify has a lot of different "algorithms". Discover Weekly works very differently from "Related Artists", for example. Neither of those will ever "recommend" 99 Bob Mould albums, so I don't know what you're actually complaining about.

I do not "administer" this thread or anything else on ILM.

Guys please dont listen to new music

What is the percentage of posts on the thread "New and Noteworthy Additions to Spotify" in terms of glenn vs. non-glenn?

I mean, the person who works for Tidal and happens to be mentioned 293 times in a one-year-old thread that just randomly happens to be solely related to his company probably isn't administering anything either. He/She is just a big music fan. I get that.

Ok but more importantly what is Glenn's gender and does (s)he like strip clubs?

I believe it's "glenn" and not "Glenn." Male, and I'm going with no. Nice guy. Spotify thread should be marked as "corporate related" or the like.

Let it go. This thread is 8 years old, and it's about a service you don't use any more. It can take care of itself without your anonymous vigilance.

The thread I referenced is one year old. New and Noteworthy Additions to US Spotify.

I'm pretty sure I have a similar ratio of posts on threads about the Dustdevils, but they haven't cut me a check in a long, long time.

Don't you still need that asparagus to go with your beef?

BOTH those threads are about a service you don't use.

I knew this handkerchief and this chloroform would come in handy some day

"dlp9001, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to Spotify... Let us not assassinate this lad further. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

imo the funniest thing about drp901 is that ppl keep assuming he's some kind of nu-new-vicperry until he points out that he's actually some ilm dork that's been posting for a decade without anybody noticing until he started piping up with rape apologism and pissy wounded warrior pronouncements about "ilx"

2nd funniest thing is that ppl keep responding to him

some of the conversation about algorithms here (they're prejudiced and personal) doesn't make much sense to me. aiui algorithms are basically iterative logical or mathematical rules designed to try and derive meaning from complex, "natural" or human data outputs mechanically.

the taxonomies (audience profile and genre) to which they apply have more capacity to imply or contain prejudice as they're hard to define objectively. from what i can see from the furia blogs and glenn's comments everyone involved seems to take an informed and playful interest in categorisation.

the feedback loop of machine learning can probably emphasise skewed input (ie prejudice) too. but algorithms, although they unintelligently process this sort of information with the recommendation results that we see, are not the main thing I'd point my gun at.

that said always struggled with husker du let alone bob mould so ymmv.

wait did i just respond to dlp? I'm drunk.

My job here has always been to ensure that the Colin Lloyd Tucker suites were kept clean. Someone has to mind the corners of ILM.

The Bob Mould thing isn't bullshit. I play Husker Du via flac when I want to hear them. DW has a serious schoolgirl crush on Bob.

I'll report back on my discover playlist after one month of alternating Smiths and Killing Joke. I don't know what will happen, but I expect it will be intersting.

http://scene7.targetimg1.com/is/image/Target/17389082?wid=480&hei=480

The only one who sounds like a shill on this thread is dlp9001; if you were a Tidal employee you couldn't be more obnoxious

oh fuck what if he's becky

with the güd hair

Spotify is recommending a Scruffy the Cat anthology to me. I think it must be confusing me with Skot. Also I preferred the old Discover Weekly logo.

If you like to imagine that my personal tastes are enforced by Spotify recs, I did a short documentary film about Scruffy the Cat when I was in college.

I don't like to imagine that but interesting nonetheless. Were you at that Relativity Records showcase in Times Square with them and Thelonious Monster, among others? It was at an Indian restaurant called Nirvana, I believe.

No! We spent a few weeks following them around Boston, but that was all.

Is Bob Mould the American Gaz Coombs?

the biggest problem w/ discover weekly is that it seems to only really work for a very specific subset of genres. i listen to tons to international music and folk music but my playlist is constantly populated w/ american indie acts. i don't think i've ever seen an african artist on the list, or an israeli artist, or a folk metal band. i guess it can only suggest what a lot of ppl are listening to so the more niche the genre the less results it'll have but it's still pretty disappointing to check it out and it is strongly suggesting that i might dig animal collective.

I'm pretty happy with DW but I agree with this.

I get one or two African artists a week and I don't even listen to that much international music! Hipster faves like William Onyeabor and Ata Kak but also things like Toumani Diabaté (maybe he is a hipster fave too idk).

My own DW suffers from this, too. I never get any metal. I know that some people who listen to metal a little more exclusively do get metal in their DWs, so it's not that it isn't possible, but there's definitely a skew towards the things most actively playlisted. There is work coming to try to address this more directly, and there are also some other personalized things on the way that use different techniques entirely...

lol just opened this week's DW and the first tune is from Fela (feat. Ginger Baker).

What I would love from DW is that I could give it some parameters based on what I feel like listening to. Like, currently DW mostly lists very recent stuff, this is probably normal since I mostly use Spotify for checking out stuff that I want to hear, which will generally skew towards newish stuff for the most part.

I would love it if I could tell spotify something like "based on the stuff I listen to, make me a playlist of tracks from the 70s" or "make me a reggae playlist" or "only play instrumentals" or whatever. Basically specific personalized playlists based on your listening habits.

or at least a way to cull it -- today turned up one instrumental by Julia Kent, which is phenomenal, but alongside the likes of SOPHIE and Panda Bear and something called "hashtag IRL" by something called "Throwing Shade," which I feel worse having read and typed. it's just incoherent, or at least incoherent in a different way than I am

Since I don't get alerts anymore, I'm relying on DW to tell me things like "Sébastien Tellier just released something". Not sure this is the ideal user experience though.

xp hey I got "hashtag IRL" too! Also not listening to it.

(and yes, I realize I am very much not the listener habit that this is designed for, even less considering that I often listen to music for review purposes on Spotify. which results in the outlier of being recommended things I have already reviewed. but again, this is too much of an edge case to really do anything about)

something called "hashtag IRL" by something called "Throwing Shade,

lol

i don't know if the newer versions already have this but a follow artist feature that updates you whenever a new single or album comes out would be fantastic

(sob)

Still waiting for the smart playlist feature that auto-updates a playlist built with search terms.

today turned up one instrumental by Julia Kent

i was turned onto her a while ago by DW; beautiful stuff

https://www.macstories.net/stories/i-made-you-a-mixtape/

oh was at a friends BBQ on sunday and was using the Serato Pyro app to make a beatmatched mix on the fly. It was pretty fun and easy to us.

https://seratopyro.com/

just noticed the (free, PC) spotify app doesn't have the alert icon showing you all the recent additions from followed artists. that sucks.

Discover Weekly has songs I've been thinking about (but not talking or posting about) this week. Spookify!

Q for glenn if he can be bothered "shilling" some more

Do the magic algorithms take note of track skipping? If I skip Morrissey every week will he eventually disappear?